"Monstrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... legend, made war against Athens in revenge for the death of his son. This son, Androgeos by name, had shown such strength and skill in the Panathenaic festival that AEgeus, the Athenian king, sent him to fight with the flame-spitting bull of Marathon, a monstrous creature that was ravaging the plains of Attica. The bull killed the valiant youth, and Minos, furious at the death of his son, laid ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... think so deeply and penitently of his past at the beginning of his career, true and deep as his repentance, and valid and genuine as his conversion were. But as he advanced in the love of Jesus Christ, his former active hostility became more monstrous to him, and the higher he rose, the clearer was his vision of the depth from which he had struggled; for growth in Christian holiness deepens the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fine, downy, bright yellow little thing, but it had a monstrous big nose and feet, and such an ungainly walk as she knew no other instance of in her well-bred and high-stepping family. And as to behavior, it was not that it was either quarrelsome or moping, but simply ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are cheap; and she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and getting the corners of his monstrous shirt-collar (Bob's private property, conferred upon his son and heir in honor of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... such a young person could possibly have a morbid vacancy in the heart for anything younger than the plate, or less monotonous than the plate; or that such a young person's thoughts could try to scale the region bounded on the north, south, east, and west, by the plate; was a monstrous imagination which he would on the spot have flourished into space. This perhaps in some sort arose from Mr Podsnap's blushing young person being, so to speak, all cheek; whereas there is a possibility that there may be young persons of a ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... physical appearance of the race. Speaking generally, we may say that it marks a stage of progress as compared with the Piltdown type; though, if the jaw, heavy and relatively chinless as it is, has become less simian, the protruding brow-ridge lends a monstrous look to the face, while the forehead is markedly receding—a feature which turns out, however, to be not incompatible with a weight of brain closely approaching our own average. Whether this type has disappeared altogether from the earth, or survives in certain ...
— Progress and History • Various
... intelligence which he received from the civil and military officers who were intrusted with the defence of the Danube. He was informed, that the North was agitated by a furious tempest; that the irruption of the Huns, an unknown and monstrous race of savages, had subverted the power of the Goths; and that the suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation, whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space of many miles along the banks of the river. With outstretched ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... like decorations I have been adorned in my own country by those same honorable and truthful men, i. e., by the men whose own conscience convicts them of wrong-doing, and who are trying to put their own monstrous doings off on me, and to glorify their own shame by bringing shame to me. But you will deign, blessed Father, to hear the true case from me, though I am but an uncouth ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Joy. How, ravish'd! oh monstrous! was ever such a Rape committed upon an innocent City? lay her Legs open to the wide World, for every Knave to view ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... done, evil instead of good must result from the enlightenment of the people by means of a system which imparts knowledge without inculcating religion. If you extend their information, and still leave them under the political sway of those who induce the more ignorant by the most monstrous promises, and compel the more instructed and better disposed by unchecked intimidation, to follow in their wake, it is clear that you but endow the demagogues with more power, and render the enemies of order more capable of effecting their designs. The memorable expressions of one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... sir. I declare I never said a word about blacks. I went into the kitchen and heard a rustling sound between me and the door, and I thought it was one of the fowls come in to beg for a bit of bread, when I looked round, and there on the floor was a monstrous great serpent, twining and twisting about, and if I hadn't dashed out of the place it ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... risk!" he grumbled and worried. "Oh! yes, of course she would follow Annie or any of the rest of them fast enough if she had the opportunity, though she were to die at the end of it; but she ought never to have had the opportunity, it was preposterous to let her. The whole thing is monstrous. I never heard of such rashness. What can Dr. and Mrs. Millar ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... olfactory nerve. This faithful sentinel, on guard even while Duke slept, signalled that alarums and excursions by parties unknown were taking place, and suggested that attention might well be paid. Duke opened one drowsy eye. What that eye beheld was monstrous. ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... pursuit of this inquiry there had arisen in his mind a monstrous suspicion, which pointed to Mrs. Rook. It impelled him to ascertain the date at which the murder had been committed, and (if the discovery encouraged further investigation) to find out next the manner in ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... undeserved revenge in coldness and neglect. To say in the first flush of affection and enjoyment that 'A Window in Thrums' is as good as Sir Walter, or that 'The Master of Ballantrae' is better, is not to exercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. It is the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural ejaculation of gratitude for a beautiful gift. It is only when the judgment comes to be persisted in that we find any element of danger in it. It is only when gravely and strenuously ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... be, or there is no God. It is monstrous. How can my Gerard be dead? How can I have killed my Gerard? I love him. Oh, God! you know how I love him. He does not. I never told him. If he knew my heart, he would speak to me, he would not be so deaf to his poor Margaret. It is all a trick to make ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Colt's devilish invention, has deluged the West and South with blood. Murder's prime minister hangs in every man's belt. Colonel James Bowie's awful knife is a twin of this monstrous birth. In long years of dark national shame our country will curse the memory of the "two Colonels." They were typical of their different sectional ideas. These men gave us the present coat of arms of San Francisco: the Colt's revolver ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... strangled. Occasionally when a man is sent to beat an offender, he tells him his object, returns, and assures the chief he has nearly killed him. The transgressor then keeps for a while out of sight, and the matter is forgotten. The river here teems with monstrous crocodiles, and women are frequently, while drawing water, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... term of years of the legislative assembly, which has no accounts to render to it and which cannot be questioned or constitutionally overthrown, that authority is so strange, and, if the phrase may pass, so monstrous an anomaly, that it dares not exercise its power, and dreads the scandal which it would raise by acting on its rights, and seems as it were paralysed with terror at the very thought ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... have been led to forswear your word of honor. O Arthur, Arthur! be warned; I swear to you before heaven, that woman, with all her beauty—a beauty that I once deemed angelic—is possessed by devils whose name is legion; her heart is the receptacle of a monstrous, hideous crowd of vices—vices the most opposite, there nestle together: brazen effrontery and cringing cowardice; sordid cupidity and the most lavish, reckless prodigality. With her, every act is the result of deep, cool calculation. No generous impulse ever beat within ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... down with another right bower! Emerson claps his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the first man that draws I'll lay down on him and smother him!' All quiet on ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... within that withered breast Lust blazed up in monstrous wise, And at once this vicious crone Sought to drag ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... "Cato" contained some proper good lines. Our friend was a wide reader in English classics, greatly preferring the literature of the earlier periods to that of the Victorian age. His smiling, tenderly expressed disapprobation of various modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's verses were monstrous pretty, but over-ornamented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry of Shelley might have been composed in the moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning person. If you wanted a sound ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... worship, however ludicrous or revolting, but hath its advocates and supporters; and there is nothing which the proud mind and unsubdued heart of man will not put forth, when that heart is made the hot-bed of unholy and unsanctified feelings—all monstrous and polluted things ripening, even beneath the warm and blessed sun that revives and beautifies ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... through regions of emptiness still as wild as they were before Columbus came; where not only no man lives now nor any mark is found of those forgotten men of the cliffs, but the very surface of the earth itself looks monstrous and extinct. Upon one such region in particular the author of these pages dwells, when he climbs up out of the gulf in whose bottom he has left his boat by the River, to look out upon a world of round gray humps and hollows which seem as if it were made of the backs of huge elephants. ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... that crude Calvinism, as preached in certain parts of the north, is nothing less than monstrous. The good God, beneficent Father of us all, is unrecognizable when eternal reprobation is represented as the inevitable fate of the vast majority of His children. In time, no doubt (and the sooner the better), the results ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... about face. But this time to confront the enemy. There were three of them, as monstrous as those Vye and Hume had fought in the same place. And one of them was wounded, swinging a charred forepaw before it, and giving voice to ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... practitioners neither know nor care anything about the progress of knowledge. I cannot at present see my way to sign any petition, without hearing what physiologists thought would be its effect, and then judging for myself. I certainly could not sign the paper sent me by Miss Cobbe, with its monstrous (as it seems to me) attack on Virchow for experimenting on the Trichinae. I am ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... responsibilities. They are not expected to bear huge navies on their breast or supply a hundred-thousand horse-power to the factories of a monstrous town. Neither do you come to them hoping to draw out Leviathan with a hook. It is enough if they run a harmless, amiable course, and keep the groves and fields green and fresh along their banks, and offer a happy alternation of nimble ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... Combe, I believe; but if he were ever so much there, I do not think Mr. Palmer would visit him, for he is in the opposition, you know, and besides it is such a way off. I know why you inquire about him, very well; your sister is to marry him. I am monstrous glad of it, for then I shall have her for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... presented, is in a very sad imbroglio. After our monstrous errors of policy and the infliction on Ireland of miseries and degradation unparalleled in Europe, to expect to bring things right without humiliation and without risks of what cannot be foreseen, seems to me conceit and ignorance. Evildoers must ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... to meet him, And he spoke the words which follow: 10 "You can find a hundred phrases, And a thousand words discover, Known to Antero Vipunen only, In his monstrous mouth and body. And there is a path which leads there, And a cross-road must be traversed, Not the best among the pathways, Nor the very worst of any. Firstly you must leap along it O'er the points of women's needles, 20 And another stage must traverse O'er the ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... to each Silenus had been consumed, and a well-defined atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" broke forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a surprisingly monstrous object, something that resembled an impossibly large pie. They, placed it carefully in the center of the table. The negro chorus swelled louder and louder—"Four and Twenty Blackbirds ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... influencing public opinion by a kind of drama, in which established manners and customs should be held up to popular derision and the ridicule of the new philosophers. After several years of prosperity the minds of the French had become more generally critical; and when Beaumarchais had finished his monstrous but diverting "Mariage de Figaro," all people of any consequence were eager for the gratification of hearing it read, the censors having decided that it should not be performed. These readings of "Figaro" grew so numerous that people were daily heard to say, "I have been (or I am going to ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... lips. He came forward until he stood confronting Edwardes and as he was about to speak Mary interrupted him. Her voice was vibrant with anger and scorn. "If any one should feel called upon to make explanations and apologies, Hamilton, it is yourself ... after what we have just heard. It was monstrous." She shuddered. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... principle, and develops and afterwards decays, according to some mysterious law. It may resemble the animal species which is, somehow or other, developed and then stamped out in the struggle of existence by the growth of a form more appropriate to the new order. The epic poem, shall we say? is like the 'monstrous efts,' as Tennyson unkindly calls them, which were no doubt very estimable creatures in their day, but have somehow been unable to adapt themselves to recent geological epochs. Why men could build cathedrals ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... turn to the right to pass the hand to the right. By this the right rein is slackened, and the left rein is tightened, across the horse's neck, and the horse is required to turn to the right when the left rein is pulled. It is to correct this common error, this monstrous and perpetual source of bad riding and of bad usage to good animals, that these pages ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... why need it do more in France? By substituting then a more enlarged constituency, for the borough system of England, the idea of Lafayette would be completely fulfilled. The reform in England, itself, is quite likely to demonstrate that his scheme was not as monstrous as has been affirmed. The throne of France should be occupied as Corsica is occupied, not for the affirmative good it does the nation, so much as to prevent harm from ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... one will ever be found guilty again. The two consuls are branded with infamy." Memmius, the popular competitor, at Pompey's instance, exposed in the Senate an arrangement which the consuls had entered into to secure the returns. The names and signatures were produced. The scandal was monstrous, and could not be denied. The better kind of men began to speak of a dictatorship as the only remedy; and although the two conservative candidates were declared elected for 53, and were allowed to enter ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... picture for ourselves of the globe with its hemispheres of light and shadow, from every point of which the telegraph brings us hourly news, and which may already be more real to us than the fields and houses past which we hurry in the train. We can all see it, hanging and turning in the monstrous emptiness of the skies, and obedient to forces whose action we can watch hundreds of light-years away and feel in the beating of our hearts. The sharp new evidence of the camera brings every year nearer to us its surface ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... how modern developments in society run out into such a state of things, and that it is these very crass and monstrous ills in modern development that compel the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... bight, and crag to crag; and above there were sheets of eruptive flame and great rumblings, and mighty arcs of fire spanning the whole heavens, and gripping them as with the glittering jewelled hand of some monstrous keeper of the skies whose mutterings came to us below. Or the scene changed again, and it was as though elves of the zenith had brought their golden caskets above the firmament, and there had burst them open, so that all the jewels of the light ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... by, disclosing briefly a genre picture of Marjorie Jones in pink, supporting a monstrous sheaf of American Beauty roses. Maurice, sitting shining and joyous beside her, saw both boys and waved them a hearty greeting as ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... occasion, towards the close of autumn, when a party of the younger workmen set themselves, in a frolic, to sweep it with torch and spear, they succeeded in capturing, in a dark alder-o'ershaded pool, a monstrous individual, nearly three feet in length, and proportionally bulky, with a snout bent over the lower jaw at its symphysis, like the beak of a hawk, and as deeply tinged (though with more of brown in its complexion) as the blackest coal-fish I ever saw. It must have been a bull-trout, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... it is the weakness of mine eyes, That shapes this monstrous apparition. It comes ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... lands represented a value of two thousand millions of francs,—an immense sum, which, if sold, would relieve, it was supposed, the necessities of the State. Mirabeau, although he was no friend of the clergy, shrank from such a monstrous injustice, and said that such a wound as this would prove the most poisonous which the country had received. But such was the urgent need of money, that the Assembly on the 2d of November, 1789, decreed that the property of the Church should be put at the disposal ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... world, a whole unimagined world. A thousand million things lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit inn of ours, unthought-of possibilities, overlooked considerations, surprises, riddles, incommensurables, a whole monstrous intricate universe of consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. I attempt impossible recapitulations and mingle the weird quality of dream ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... show you the road which I followed to arrive at the certainty and the very reasons of the murder—without which my accusation would seem monstrous to you.—And it is not—no, it is not monstrous at all.—There is one detail which has passed unobserved and which, nevertheless, is of the greatest importance; and that is that Jean Daval, at the moment when he was ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... cheerfulness; but it needs first that he see clearly for what. Show him the divine face of Justice, then the diabolic monster which is eclipsing that: he will fly at the throat of such monster, never so monstrous, and need no bidding to do it. Woolwich grapeshot will sweep clear all streets, blast into invisibility so many thousand men: but if your Woolwich grapeshot be but eclipsing Divine Justice, and the God's-radiance ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... royal philosopher was the author, or compiler, of a 'Book of Hunting'; a treatise on Chess; a system of law, the 'Fuero Castellano' (Spanish Code),—an attempt to check the monstrous irregularities of municipal privilege; 'La Gran Conquista d'Ultramar (The Great Conquest Beyond the Sea), an account of the wars of the Crusades, which is the earliest known specimen of Castilian prose; and several smaller works, now collected under the general title of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... demolished the cathedral, and burned the library of the bishop. How a vast multitude, possessed by the like frenzy, dispersed themselves through Menin, Comines, Verviers, Lille, nowhere encountered opposition; and how, through almost the whole of Flanders, in a single moment, the monstrous conspiracy declared ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... "Ter-il-bas" (Tayr Taus?), is a particular kind of peacock which is introduced with a monstrous amount of nonsense about "Dagon and his son Bil-il-Sanan" and made to determine elections by alighting upon the head of one of the candidates in Chavis and Cazotte, "History of Yamalladdin (Jamal al-Din), Prince ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... spread conviction that the advent of the French king and his army into Italy was one of those events at which marble statues might well be believed to perspire, phantasmal fiery warriors to fight in the air, and quadrupeds to bring forth monstrous births—that it did not belong to the usual order of Providence, but was in a peculiar sense the work of God. It was a conviction that rested less on the necessarily momentous character of a powerful foreign invasion than on certain moral ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... through an almost roadless country, to compete at the Sub-Intendant's auction sales, with every probability of being outbid in the end, and having his long-deposited money returned to him after all his pains. Lieutenant-Governor Des Voeux told the Legislature of Trinidad that the monstrous Excise imposts of the Colony were an incentive to smuggling, and he thought that the duties, licenses, &c., should be lowered in the interest of good and equitable government. Sir Henry Turner Irving, however, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... modern Tragedy in Musick, because the one is reasonable, the other ridiculous; the one is artful, the other absurd; the one beneficial, the other pernicious; in short, the one natural and the other monstrous."] ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... speak, taken Frida Tancred to pieces and put her together again in a phrase—"Dying for love of life." Beside her luminous intuition his own more logical method seemed clumsy and roundabout, a constructive process riddled by dangerous fallacies and undermined by monstrous assumptions. At the same time he persisted in returning to one of these, the most monstrous, perhaps, of all. In spite, perhaps because, of her flat denial, he pictured Frida not only as mysteriously in love with existence, but with a certain humble spectator of existence. According ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... of the storm-king that slew the old pine and made his cones into a crown,—he sung of a thousand things which we might not understand, but which pleased the rose because she understood them. And one day the thrush swooped down from the linden upon a monstrous devil's darning-needle that came spinning along and poised himself to stab the beautiful rose. Yes, like lightning the thrush swooped down on this murderous monster, and he bit him in two, and I am glad of it, and so are you if your ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... he has a distinctly justifiable intention in this matter; namely, to uncover, to search, to verify a theory or displace it, and to cover up again. He means to take away nothing—not a grain of sand. In this he says he sees no such monstrous sin. I inquire if this is really a promise to me? He repeats that it is a promise, and resumes digging. My contribution to the labour is that of directing the light constantly upon the hole. When he has reached something more than a foot deep he digs more cautiously, saying ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... that the Native guard over the gaol had promised to help them. Gough went at once to his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Carmichael Smyth, and reported what he had heard, but the Colonel pooh-poohed the idea as ridiculous, and told Gough he must not give credence to anything so monstrous. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... double-banked oars, nine long blades and a monstrous big one steering—good as another oar that—and all driving for dear life, with Long Steve and a cork-passer standing by the seine and the skipper on top of it, with his eyes fixed on the school ahead—his only motions to open his mouth and to wave with his hands to the steersman ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... hideously ugly, but more pleasant than her English rival novelist, the other pseudonymous George. They had few points in common except that both wrote well and were full of talent of a different kind and were equally monstrous, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... did not smile in the least, though he had every reason to be amused. "Monstrous handsome young man that—as fine a looking soldier as ever I saw," he said ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lewis, however, is introduced, with somewhat less violence to probability, at the beginning of the Third Act, where the women are waiting for the tidings of the battle, and when the intrusion of a ballad from the heroine, though sufficiently unnatural, is not quite so monstrous as in the situation which Sheridan has chosen ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Browning was, our critic thinks, a deliberate artist. The suggestion that Browning cared nothing for form is for Chesterton a monstrous assertion. It is as absurd as saying that Napoleon cared nothing for feminine love or that Nero hated mushrooms. What Browning did was always to fall into a different kind of form, which is a totally different thing to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... off when touched, and cause a peculiar and almost maddening irritation. This is, however, probably owing to their being short and hard, and thus getting into the fine creases of the skin, and not to any poisonous quality residing in the hairs. These monstrous spiders prey on lizards, small birds, and other diminutive vertebrates. Their muscular power is very great. When the creature is about to seize its prey, it fixes its hind-feet firmly in the ground, and lifting up the front ones, darts them forward, and fastens them ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... blue and tranquil. But the north-west wind and the sea were leagued against it. They sent out threatening fingers and long spinning veils of cloud across it—skirmishers that foretold the black and serried lines, the torn and monstrous masses behind. Below these wild tempest shapes, again,—in long spaces resting on the sea—the heaven was at peace, shining in delicate greens and yellows, infinitely translucent and serene, above the dazzling lines of ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of turtle, New birds around him singing, New insects, never stinging, With a million novel data About the articulata, And facts that strip off all husks From the history of mollusks. And when, with loud Te Deum, He returns to his Museum, May he find the monstrous reptile That so long the land has kept ill By Grant and Sherman throttled, And by Father Abraham bottled, (All specked and streaked and mottled With the scars of murderous battles, Where he clashed the iron rattles That gods and men he shook at,) ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... they introduce the story of Ganymede. And so befel it, O king, that men imitated all these things, and became adulterers, and defilers of themselves with mankind, and doers of other monstrous deeds, in imitation of their god. How then can an adulterer, one that defileth himself by unnatural lust, a slayer of his ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... top of a high mountain just sticking up out of the water," said Gard, fascinated by the ceaseless rush of those monstrous waves ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... shelf to shelf, where the rock had been blasted away so as to form a flight of the roughest of rough steps of monstrous size, while, trembling in ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... perfectly easy to have included in a single block all these various members. Such facts, as one observes frequently in Syria, where three or four architectural members are brought out from a single block, would have appeared to the Greeks monstrous, since they are the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... all night long; I was also anxious to exclude all small winged and creeping night-wanderers. But to exclude them entirely proved impossible: through a dozen invisible chinks they would find their way to me; also some entered by day to lie concealed until after nightfall. A monstrous hairy hermit spider found an asylum in a dusky corner of the hut, under the thatch, and day after day he was there, all day long, sitting close and motionless; but at dark he invariably disappeared—who knows on what murderous errand! His hue was ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... eagle's a colossal fowl, Like Sindbad's monstrous Roc, A bird of prey some say, a-prowl Like that Stymphalian flock, With iron claws and brazen beak, Intent to clutch and collar, Fired with devotion strong, yet weak, To ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... call on the Governor only yesterday, and visited the old room. "I never could really bring myself to think that you did it, Mr. Finn," he said. I looked at him and smiled, but I should have liked to fly at his throat. Why did he not know that the charge was a monstrous absurdity? Talking of that, not even you were truer to me than your brother. One expects it from a woman;—both the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... abounds with excellent fish, is less favoured in this respect than the land, for it contains numerous crocodiles and alligators, of such immense size that in a few moments one of them can tear a horse to pieces, and swallow it in its monstrous stomach. The accidents they occasion are frequent and terrible, and I have seen many Indians become their victims, as I shall subsequently relate. I ought, doubtless, to have begun by speaking of the human beings who inhabited ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... would sacrifice her in a moment if she thwarted him. Through cowardly fear she remained his reluctant but abject slave, pricking him with the pins and needles of petty annoyances, when she would have pierced him to the heart had she dared. This monstrous state of affairs could not last forever, and, had not death terminated the unnatural relation, some terrible catastrophe would no doubt have occurred. Having contracted a western fever, she soon became delirious, and passed away in this unconscious ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... this kind is my pruriency of writing to you at large. A page of post is on such a dis-social, narrow-minded scale, that I cannot abide it; and double letters, at least in my miscellaneous reverie manner, are a monstrous tax in a ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... go together. Hence the undeniable unchastity of the mediaeval cloisters. Nor need the manifestations of sex be physical. Erotic imagination and voluptuous revelations are expressions of sex-passion. The monstrous sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perception ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... appears in the attributes of Mars, they are represented simply as examples of Old age, Malady, &c., not as the agents by whom these evils are inflicted upon others. Cerberus and Charon occur in their appropriate offices, but the monstrous forms Gorgon, Chimaera, &c., are judiciously suppressed; and the poet is speedily conducted to the banks ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... scheming to remove her be all in vain or no?" Angelique recollected with a shudder a thought that had leaped in her bosom, like a young Satan, engendered of evil desires. "I dare hardly look in the honest eyes of Le Gardeur after nursing such a monstrous fancy as that," said she; "but my fate is fixed all the same. Le Gardeur will vainly try to undo this knot in my life, but he must leave me to my own devices." To what devices she left him was a thought that sprang not up ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... argument of martyrdom will support any religion; and it has, in fact, been cheerfully undergone by enthusiasts and zealots of all religions, in testimony of the firm belief of the sufferers not only in the absurdities of Popery, and Brachinanism, but of every, even the most monstrous system that ever disgraced the human understanding. There have been martyrs ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... of the world set forth in monstrous type the glorious victory and how the Americans had stolen upon the enemy and cut them off from the rest of their army, wiping ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... forth naked to the waist, a broad belt strapped tightly about him holding his trousers. His muscles now showed out for the first time, and I stood gazing at the enormous bunches on his back and shoulders. He was like some monstrous giant cut off at the waist and stuck upon a pair of absurdly short legs, which, however, ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... to lessen my sufferings, but before I had been there ten minutes I saw a huge crocodile rise up from the mud beside me. I sprang away to the bank horribly afraid, for never before had I beheld so monstrous and evil-looking a brute, to fall again into the clutches of the creatures, winged and crawling, that were waiting for me ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... with the course; and throw my whole soul into it too. You mustn't think the time is lost. It's all culture; it will help me to extend my relations when I get back home; it may fit me for a position on one of the illustrateds; and then I can always turn dealer," he said, uttering the monstrous proposition, which was enough to shake the Latin Quarter to the dust, with entire simplicity. "It's all experience, besides," he continued; "and it seems to me there's a tendency to underrate experience, both as net profit and investment. Never mind. That's done with. But it took courage for you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the nineteenth century the aristocracy in power was as irksome as the Stuarts had been to the Whigs. If, as the Whigs taught, those who paid the taxes were entitled to a voice in the government, then the manufacturing districts ought to send representatives to Parliament. It seemed monstrous that places like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham had no one in the House of Commons to plead for the needs of their inhabitants. The manufacturer wanted Parliamentary representation because he hoped through Parliament ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... soon restored. I am very sorry to hear of your gout, except that it carries off all other complaints. I am very well, thank Heaven; indeed, my health has been much better of late years: Beaufort Court agrees with me so well! The more I reflect, the more I am astonished at the monstrous and wicked impudence of that fellow—to defraud a man out of his own property! You ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... "The sapphires will have to be produced, identified, revalued. How shall I come out of it? Think of the disgrace, the ripping up of old scandals! Even if I were to compound with Lady Carwitchet, the sum she hinted at was too monstrous. She wants more than my money. Help me, Mr. Acton! For the sake of your own family ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors? Troilus and Cressida is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus' version of the Alcibiades; {75a} and yet made the monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war. "That was his fun," as Charles Lamb said in ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... story of his trial, and alluded to "the fresh outbreak of anger on the part of those hornets who accuse me of heresy," said he, "simply because I have translated into the vulgar tongue some of your little works, wherein they pretend that they have discovered the most monstrous pieces of impiety." He transmitted to Erasmus a list of the paragraphs which the pope's delegates had condemned, pressing him to reply, "as you well know how. The king esteems you much, and will esteem you still more when you have heaped confusion ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Papist Duke of York. The extracts from Jesuit letters, however, which he produced, though they showed the bitter disappointment and anger of their writers at the king's withdrawal from his schemes, threw no light on the monstrous charges of a plot for his assassination. Oates would have been dismissed indeed with contempt but for the seizure of Coleman's correspondence. The letters of this intriguer, believed as he was to be in the confidence of the Duke of York, gave ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... of the Government in regard to taxation may be practically described as protection without production. The most monstrous hardships result to consumers, and merchants can scarcely say from day to day where they are. Twice now has the Government entered into competition with traders who have paid their licences and rents and who keep staffs. Recently grain became scarce. ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... That ugly good is scorn'd proves not 'Tis beauty lies, but lack of it. By Heaven's law the Jew might take A slave to wife, if she was fair; So strong a plea does beauty make That, where 'tis seen, discretion's there. If, by a monstrous chance, we learn That this illustrious vaunt's a lie, Our minds, by which the eyes discern, See hideous contrariety. And laugh at Nature's wanton mood, Which, thus a swinish thing to flout, Though haply in its gross way good, Hangs such a jewel ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... to establish himself in Kingsmill! Why had they not taken her into council? She would have faced the man, and have overawed him; he should have been made to understand the gross selfishness of his behaviour. Never had she heard of such a monstrous case— ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... striking texts of Scripture. Mr. Godwin is a mixture of the Stoic and of the Christian philosopher. To break the force of the vulgar objections and outcry that have been raised against the Modern Philosophy, as if it were a new and monstrous birth in morals, it may be worth noticing, that volumes of sermons have been written to excuse the founder of Christianity for not including friendship and private affection among its golden rules, but rather excluding them.[A] Moreover, the answer to the question, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... chance I can find, I will make acquaintance with a beard eraser! So guide me to the monstrous outrage of a barber's weapon. ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... Mrs. Fairbanks. "Would you ask a young lady to go out and bury herself alive in such a country as that, or ask her to wait an indefinite number of years till the young man should return? Why it is simply monstrous." And Mrs. Fairbanks fixed her glasses firmly on her nose and gazed at Brown as ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... to ride right in between two of the bison, single out one of them, and to keep to him till he dropped; and Bart saw nothing but the huge drove on ahead, with the monstrous bull whose acquaintance he had made thundering on between him ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... friend!—to advise that! I never heard of anything so monstrous. You must be out ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... way silently back to the cold room. Mel drew down the cover only far enough to expose the face of Alice. There was no mistake. Somehow he had been hoping that all this would turn out to be some monstrous error. But there ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... of this little volume, the eighteenth century itself, we find little to interest us in French pictorial satire until that monstrous growth of political caricature created by the Revolution. Italy in the same period has but little to offer us, Germany as little or less; and it is to England that we must turn for the pictorial humour, whether social or political, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... from the combined effects of disappointment, humiliation, and grief, poor Ebony stood at the stern of the man-of-war, his arms crossed upon his brawny chest, and his great eyes swimming in irrepressible tears, a monstrous bead of which would every now and then overflow its banks and roll down ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... revisit the glimpses of the moon, and were to be set down in Bishopgate or Southwark to-day, he would not know where to turn, and the metropolis of which we are so proud would be no more to him than "the monstrous fabric of a vision." ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... of the little white manse on the Cairn Water lived not unhappily with her husband for four years, and was then laid with her own people in the monstrous new family vault where her father lay in state. She left two children behind her—a boy of two and an infant girl ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... are, being as long as a man, and quite as thick, which my brother knows is a size that few of his people attain. But, to enable my brother to account for his great size, it is only necessary to tell him that the mother of this great trout was a monstrous flounder. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... from this fire, wedged in tightly above the bridge, is the only gorge at which workmen have labored all this week with dynamite and monstrous cranes. In it and below it are unnumbered hundreds of bodies. How many perished in that frightful fire will never be known. Only a small proportion of the bodies can ever be found. Some were burned so that nothing but a handful of ashes remained, and that was swept away long ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Meat. To vanquish and to kill, to them was pleasure great. Their violence was rule; with rage and fury led, They rusht into the fight, and fought hand over head. Their Bodies were interr'd behind some bush or brake, To bear such monstrous Wights, the earth did grone and quake. These pestred most the Western Tract; more fear made thee agast, O Cornwall, utmost door that art to let ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... open to me thereafter? How could I ever again hold up my head among men, when every finger should be pointed at me in scorn, every tongue speak my blistering shame, and when I should be a monstrous spectacle to all eyes? I was overwhelmed by the remembrance that, according to the dread letter of the law, God holds eunuchs in such abomination that men thus maimed are forbidden to enter a church, even as the unclean and filthy; nay, even ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... the two lieutenants is perhaps the noblest example of the game and fine art of spoof that the world has ever seen, or ever will see ... their wonderful and almost monstrous elaboration ... ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... three centuries of this rebellion against the Most High have produced throughout the world, on the subject the most important that man should possess a clear, firm faith, an anarchy of opinion, throwing out every monstrous and fantastic form, from a caricature of the Greek philosophy ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... she began to cry, sitting there by the stone balustrade of the piazza, to cry convulsively. She remembered her pity for old age, for the monstrous loss it cannot cease from advertising. And now she, in her youth, had passed it on the road to the pit. Lady Cardington was a beautiful woman. She pitied herself bitterly because she was morbid, as many beautiful women are when they approach old age. But she was beautiful. She ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... seen worn by some Turks whom I saw at Sallee; for the Moors did not wear such, though the Turks did: of these mustachios, or whiskers, I will not say they were long enough to hang my hat upon them; but they were of length and shape monstrous enough, and such as in England would ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... Lybian towns, Fame blew the deed; Fame, that outstrips all other ills in speed, That feeds on motion, strengthens as she flies, 225 Weak, timid first, but soon of monstrous size, Her feet on earth, amid the ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... other end of the room, and stood under a Venetian mirror—it shone like a monstrous jewel above her head—looking at him, her hands clenched, her eyes flashing through the tears that ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... can, and never will be a law enacted that prevent men from drinking liquor, especially those in whom there is a dominant appetite for it. The idea of licensing men to sell liquor and punishing men for drinking it is monstrous. To be sure, they are not punished for drinking it in moderation, but no man can be moderate who has such an appetite as I have. Why license men to sell liquor, and then punish others for drinking it? What sort of sense or justice is there ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... the period intervening between birth and baptism. During this period, therefore, children were believed to be particularly liable to abstraction by the Fairies, and mothers chiefly dreaded the substitution of changelings in the place of their own offspring. Various monstrous charms existed in Scotland, for procuring the restoration of a child, which had been thus stolen; but the most efficacious of them was supposed to be, the roasting of the suppositious child upon the live embers, when it was believed it would vanish, and the true child appear ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... disk, feeling Correy's eyes upon me. We stared at each other, neither wishing to speak—hardly daring to speak. There are some things too monstrous to put into words. ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... mistake, some monstrous mistake! She had somehow been brought to the wrong house. It wasn't possible that a gentleman like Mr. Middleton could belong to a household such as this, she was saying incredulously to herself, when a shadow fell athwart the threshold and she looked up to see Mrs. Middleton ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... "he knows better than that too in some things. He has a monstrous fine horse with him here; and that's a good pretty girl that he's going ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... something in what you say, and I will consider your suggestion regarding the trousers, Elizabeth,' I conceded, 'but the suggestion that I should shave is perfectly monstrous and I won't think of it for ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... truth and yet she has deceived you. She said that no man had ever touched her any more than her brother had done, and I feel sure that her brother has begotten this child and now seeks to hide his wickedness by a monstrous deception. We, however, who believe that Jesus Christ has come, can look for none other. Go, therefore, and put the priest in prison; I am sure that he will ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... through wrecking railroads, through pouring vast sums upon the stock market, through causing as vast sums to disappear from public use, stains them blacker with the proof of their horrible inhumanity. Even death does not always end their monstrous rapine, for when they pay what is called the debt of nature they too often fling, in their wills, a posthumous sneer at that still larger debt owed to their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir. Charity may get a few niggardly ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... in the latest French revolution, that of the Commune of 1871, it was federalist. Or take Ireland, the success which is to-day attending the struggles of Ireland for independence is, I am quite sure, owing to the spread of this idea: it no longer seems a monstrous proposition to liberal- minded Englishmen that a country should administer its own affairs: the feeling that it is not only just, but also very convenient to all parties for it to do so, is extinguishing the prejudices ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... them, the monstrous host whose menace mocks at the dawn: and here They that wait at the wild sea's gate, and watch the darkness of doom draw near, How shall they in their evil day sustain the strength ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the High-place, the second noon of the feast; And heat and shameful slumber weighed on people and priest; And the heart drudged slow in bodies heavy with monstrous meals; And the senseless limbs were scattered abroad like spokes of wheels; And crapulous women sat and stared at the stones anigh With a bestial droop of the lip and a swinish rheum in the eye. As about the dome of the bees in the time for the drones to fall, The dead and the maimed are scattered, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of antiquity and that singular veneration which he always paid to the primitive church made him even in his youth look upon the abolition of episcopacy, and of a visible head of the church, as something very monstrous. He went much farther in the sequel; shewing that[576] Melancton himself wanted the Pope to be left in the Church, and that King James of England and several able Protestants acknowledged the utility of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome: adding, "If several ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... fair words could move him. He had trusted many times, and had been many times deceived. It was not easy to entangle him again. It mattered little whether Clement was weak or false; the result was the same—he could not be trusted. To an open English understanding there was something monstrous in the position of a person professing to be a judge, who admitted that a cause which lay before him was so clear that he could bind himself to a sentence upon it, and could yet refuse to pronounce that sentence, except upon conditions. It was scarcely for the interests of justice ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... monstrous odd," commented the ancient cynic, "for lookin' at it from the outside, I'd say He'd used you about as bad as is ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow |
