"Monumental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... solemn sacrifice to his wooden deity, on all important occasions; as, for instance, in passing from one river into another, or in time of tempest, or when the sails flap idly in a calm. The Chinese have likewise a practice of deifying their dead ancestors, and of prostrating themselves before the monumental tablets which are erected to their memory. Yet they appear to have no real veneration for any of their idols; nor do they hesitate to profane the temples, by smoking their pipes, and taking refreshments, and even by gambling, within the consecrated precincts. The priests are shameless impostors. ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... endowed new schools of Oregon would honor history by a monumental recognition of the name of Hall J. Kelley, the old schoolmaster, whose dreams were of the Columbia, and who inspired some of his pupils to become resolute pioneers. Boston was always a friend to Washington and Oregon. Where the old schoolmaster now rests we do ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Beattie's Foard, on the Catawba, consecrated as the last resting-place of some of the earliest settlers of Mecklenburg county, repose the mortal remains of the Rev. John Thompson, one of the first Presbyterian missionaries in this section of the State, and who died in September, 1753. No monumental slab or head-stone is placed at his grave. Tradition says he built a cabin (or study-house) in the northwestern angle of the graveyard, and was buried beneath its floor, being the first subject of interment. John Baker, who lived in the immediate vicinity, ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... known of me in that time? 'So there, is the only good, you see, that comes from making calculations on a slip of paper! It is not and it cannot come to good.' I would rather look at my seventy-five letters—there is room to breathe in them. And this is my idea (ecce!) of monumental brevity—and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... arrived, but Paris was still a city of absentees. The weather was warm and charming, and a certain savour of early autumn in the air was in accord with the somewhat melancholy aspect of the empty streets and closed shutters of this honorable quarter, where the end of the monumental vistas seemed to be curtained with a hazy emanation from the Seine. It was late in the afternoon when Bernard was ushered into Mrs. Vivian's little high-nestling drawing-room, and a patch of sunset tints, faintly red, rested softly upon the gilded ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... of revolution was inaugurated in the study of living things by the discovery of cells and protoplasms. Animals and plants had been studied for centuries and many accurate and painstaking observations had been made upon them. Monumental masses of evidence had been collected bearing upon their shapes, sizes, distribution, and relations. Anatomy had long occupied the attention of naturalists, and the general structure of animals and plants was already well known. But the discoveries starting in the ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... evening a fresh sea-breeze has brought us to Bordeaux. The enormous city heaps its monumental houses along the river like bastions; the red sky is embattled by their coping. They on one hand, the bridge on the other, protect, with a double line, the port where the vessels are crowded together like a flock of gulls; those graceful hulls, those tapering masts, those sails swollen or floating, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... amount of elaboration in the background could disturb the attention of any one looking at the portrait of Julius the Second by Raphael, also in the Tribune, which I cannot help thinking is the finished portrait in the world. A portrait is the most truly historical picture, and this the most monumental and historical of portraits. The longer one looks at it the more it demands attention. A superficial picture is like a superficial character—it may do for an acquaintance, but not for a friend. One never gets ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... bouquet of flowers intermingled with ribbon favors—a bouquet for a really great occasion—stood up like a cupola dressed with flags, and was flanked by four high dishes, one containing a pyramid of splendid peaches; the second, a monumental cake gorged with whipped cream and covered with pinnacles of sugar—a cathedral in confectionery; the third, slices of pine-apple floating in clear syrup; and the fourth unheard-of lavishness—black grapes brought ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of Washington's water supply from the Great Falls of the Potomac to the city. This work, under his direction between 1852 and 1860, involved devising ingenious methods of controlling the flow and distribution of the water and also the design of a monumental bridge across the Cabin John Branch—a bridge that for 50 years was the longest masonry arch in the world. At the same time Meigs was supervising the building of wings and a new dome on the Capitol and an extension on the General ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... elevated region. Fields of tea alternate with tombs: old granite statues which represent Buddha in his lotus, or else old monumental stones on which gleam remains of inscriptions in golden letters. Rocks, brushwood, uncultivated spaces, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... peasantry in particular, and M. Albert Brockhaus, who placed at my disposal the gigantic Russian Encyclopaedia recently published by his firm (Entsiklopeditcheski Slovar, Leipzig and St. Petersburg, 1890-1904). This monumental work, in forty-one volumes, is an inexhaustible storehouse of accurate and well-digested information on all subjects connected with the Russian Empire, and it has often been of great use to me in matters ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Order. Father Zephyrin is a devoted student, and many results of his zeal and kindness are placed before my readers in this volume, owing to his generosity. His completed history of the Missions and Missionaries of California is a monumental work. ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... made a superman," Macker's tones inflected satisfaction. "I wish we were returning this way in a thousand years or so. I'd like to see the monumental ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... feeble in comparison with what he might do. The community must see its way to paying some to eschew plumbing and stick to design, if they mean to have any design. This has been done, indeed, in the matter of monumental-glass, and to a certain extent in wall-decoration by means of painting; but it must be done in what is more vital yet—in architectural sculpture of all sorts and all grades; of vegetable, animal and human subjects; in low ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... human. But personal and human neglect of one another by these two governments over so long a period is an astonishing fact in our history. The wonder is that we haven't had more than two wars. And it is no wonder that the ignorance of Englishmen about America and the American ignorance of England are monumental, stupendous, amazing, passing understanding. I have on my mantelpiece a statuette of Benjamin Franklin, an excellent and unmistakable likeness which was made here during his lifetime; and the inscription burnt on its base is Geo. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... Kaled—Lara—Ezzelin, are gone, Alike without their monumental stone! The first, all efforts vainly strove to wean From lingering where her Chieftain's blood had been: Grief had so tamed a spirit once too proud, Her tears were few, her wailing never loud; But furious would you tear her from the spot Where yet she scarce ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... clamor of the city all about! This is my latest home, and it invites me to a glad new life. The endless ages have indeed throbbed through my blood, but a new rhythm dances in my veins. My spirit is not tied to the monumental past, any more than my feet were bound to my grandfather's house below the hill. The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot hold me, because I am grown too big; just as the little house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of memory, ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... changed. It was now more sedate and purposeful. Rokuzo hardly understood the further course of his experiences. Emerged from the bath he found himself seated before a plentiful repast. The viand contents of the monumental burden together with what sea and hill could provide—these figured. Rokuzo drank first, and plentifully. Never had he tasted such delicious wine. He knew that the Tono Sama drank no better sake; nor did his master occupy a more splendid apartment than this one of the wine feast. The silken ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... good fortune happened to him. A man came from London to set up in a parish church near by a monumental figure, and looked about for a skillful mason to assist him. Charles Summers was mentioned as the best hand in the neighborhood, and upon him the choice fell. Thus he was introduced to the world of art, for this figure had been executed by Henry Weekes, a distinguished London sculptor. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... in the capital, encouraging it to resist. He belonged to the ancient and illustrious house of Caetani. The last head of that family, the father of the Duke of Sermoneta, lately minister of foreign affairs, once showed me an inscription, in monumental Latin, setting forth how he had at last paid off the immense debt incurred by the legate in the defence of Paris. With Caetani was Bellarmin, the most famous controversialist of the sixteenth century, who there imbibed the doctrines which made him one of the masters of revolutionary Catholicism, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... does not meet this first supreme and obvious need, that it should be public and monumental, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... O'Connell's amanuensis. During the day she would go from library to library in New York, verifying data for her father's monumental work. At night he would dictate and she would write. O'Connell took a newer and more vital interest in the book, and it advanced rapidly ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... sheer monumental luck. Peter had opened his eyes and his mouth, and had got as far as 'Allemachtig', when ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... the works of his long life, that was made some few years back to mark the completion of his last great picture for the House of Lords, "The Judgment of Daniel." That exhibition, which most people, who know anything about painting in its highest style of religious and monumental art, thought a most interesting display of a painter's career, is described by this most genial of critics as "acres of pallid purple canvases, with wizened saints and ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... Louis Quatorze, nearing his end, quickly tired of that remote and unproductive colony upon the shores of the gulf, so industriously described in Paris as a "terrestrial paradise"; and the "paternal providence of Versailles" willingly yielded place to the monumental speculation of the great financier Antoine Crozat. In this Paris of prolific promotion and amazed credulity, ripe for the colossal scheme of Law, soon to blow to bursting-point the bubble of the Mississippi, the very songs in the street echoed flamboyant, half-satiric panegyrics upon ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... the First Period.—These are of the same general character for Church history as for general history—on the one hand monumental, on the other hand documentary. Among the monuments are churches, catacombs, tombs and inscriptions of various kinds, few antedating the 3rd century, and none adding greatly to the knowledge gained from documentary sources (see De Rossi, Roma sotteranea, 1864 ff., and its ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... mankind the same feelings invite us to seek for the origin of arts and sciences, the steps of civilization on earth, the rise of nations, states and empires, tracing their cradles, dispersions and migrations by the dim records of traditional tales, or the more certain monumental ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque
... With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties, steeped in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn. The annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently to their ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... no other public service to his State, the name of Douglas was justly entitled to preservation by the erection of that splendid monumental column which, overlooking the blue waters of Lake Michigan, also overlooks for long distance that iron highway which was in no small degree the triumph of his ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... ceremonies. From these we learn or infer that among the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Phoenicians religion was polytheistic, but without so complicated or highly organized a system as prevailed in Egypt. Only about twenty deities are alluded to in the monumental records of either nation, and they are supposed to have represented the sun, the moon, the stars, and various other powers, to which were delegated by the unseen and occult supreme deity the oversight of this world. They presided over cities and the elements of Nature, like ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... of low degree, but often ladies of title in their family carriages, under the care of the august family coachman and footman, or gentlemen driving in their own traps or carts, or fares in the hansoms that steal their swift course through and by these ranks; the omnibuses are always the most monumental fact of the scene. They dominate it in bulk and height; they form the chief impulse of the tremendous movement, and it is they that choke from time to time the channel of the mighty torrent, and helplessly hold it in ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... lantern-beacons; which was first the base of operations against Bunker Hill; and which afterward suffered siege, and served as the outlet for the Tories to Canada, when Howe and his fleet sailed away. Across the river is the battle-road to Lexington, now nobly marked with monumental stones and tablets, and, further on, Lexington itself, with its blood-consecrated green and inscribed boulder, its museum, and its well-marked historic spots. Beyond is Concord, with its bridge, well-site, and bronze minuteman. From the crest of the green mound on Bunker Hill, at Charlestown, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... as loud as possible, 'Evig forbandet vaere, Judas' (For ever may Judas be accursed). There is also the monument of Laurids Ebbesen who had been unfaithful to the king, who, when he visited the Domkirke, cut the nose off the monumental figure with his sword. The ship which is hung up in the Domkirke, is a model which Peter the Great of Russia had made in France, and it was sent by a French vessel from Toulon, which was wrecked ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... Flood, now himself wanting, and highly meriting, an epitaph from his country, to which his transcendent talents did the highest honour, as well as the most important service; it should be observed that these lines were by no means intended as a regular monumental inscription for Dr. Johnson. Had he undertaken to write an appropriated and discriminative epitaph for that excellent and extraordinary man, those who knew Mr. Flood's vigour of mind, will have no doubt that he would have produced one worthy of his illustrious subject. But the fact ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the Sloman cottage, waiting with Mrs. Sloman by the tea-table. Why do I always remember her, sitting monumental ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... passport to his favor. Our parting was necessarily sudden, and, strange as it may seem, some fatal repression sealed my lips, and withheld me from uttering the few words which would have made the future wholly ours, and sculptured my dream of love in monumental permanance. Ah! with what narrow and trembling planks do we bridge the abyss of misery and despair! But be patient while I linger for a moment here. The evening before my departure, I went to take leave of her. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Orient, posterior and posterior, sitting tight, holding fast the culture dumped by them on to primitive America, Atlantic to Pacific, were monumental colophons a disorderly country fellow, vulgar Long Islander. not overfond of the stench choking native respiration, poked down off the shelf with the aid of some mere blades of grass; and deliberately climbing ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... 1843 brought, as Haydon's biographer points out, 'the consummation of what he had so earnestly fought for, a competition of native artists to prove their capability for executing great monumental and decorative works; but with this came his own bitter disappointment at not being among the successful competitors. In all his struggles up to this point, Haydon had the consolation of hope that better times were coming. But now the good time for art ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... been a good man, nor had he been a wise man. But he had been highly respectable, and his memory is embalmed in tons of marble and heaps of monumental urns. Epitaphs, believed to be true, testify to his worth; and deeds, which are sometimes as false as epitaphs, do the same. He is a man of whom the world has agreed to say good things; to whom fame, that rich City fame, which speaks with a cornet-a-piston made of gold, instead of a brazen ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Besides the monumental and artistic features of Rome, the human side of it appealed to me. There was something congenial in the Romans, and, indeed, in the Italians generally, so that I seemed to be renewing my acquaintance with people whom I had partly ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... cried KENRICK, looking on with monumental suavity; "almost sorry he left us. Sometimes, at his best, he equals our JOE." Business done.—A ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... the parish of Fulham was founded in 1628, and opened in 1631. The whole cost was about L2,000, of which Sir Nicholas Crispe gave L700. This church was the last consecrated by Archbishop Laud. The old monumental tablets have been carefully preserved, and hang on the walls of the present building. The most important object in the church is a bronze bust of Charles I. on a pedestal 8 or 9 feet high, of black and white marble. Beneath ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... these, the race of man assumed dignity and authority. It was then no longer the mere gardener of earth, or the shepherd of her flocks; "it carried with it an imposing and majestic aspect; it had a pedigree and illustrious ancestors; it had its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... opinion, he discredited the integrity of the Hebrew literature. In nothing is his singular want of poetic taste, and of the power to appreciate the beauties of the literature of young nations, and the ethical value of moral institutions, more visible, than in denying the literary and monumental value of the Bible, and the moral influence of Christianity.(535) Infidels who have hated revealed religion as bitterly as Voltaire, have at least not had the meanness or the want of taste to depreciate the literary and moral interest which ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... gasped and closed her eyes, lying like one in a swoon. Soft, moaning sounds came from her lips. He could not help feeling a vast pity for her, she was so gentle, so miserably hurt by something he could not understand, but knew to be monumental in its ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... insatiably greedy for office and wages, but who at least never served but one party; the Duke of Arschot, who was to serve all, essay to rule all, and to betray all—a splendid seignior, magnificent in cramoisy velvet, but a poor creature, who traced his pedigree from Adam according to the family monumental inscriptions at Louvain, but who was better known as grandnephew of the Emperor's famous tutor Chievres; the bold, debauched Brederode, with handsome, reckless face and turbulent demeanor; the infamous Noircarmes, whose name was to be covered with eternal execration for aping ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... obscure secrets of the Sanctuary. Whatever proportion of truth there may have been in their spiritual claims and imaginings, if indeed there was any, such men as the Prince Harmachis have been told of in the annals of every great religion, and, as is shown by the testimony of monumental and sacred inscriptions, they were not unknown among the worshippers of the Egyptian Gods, and more especially ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... respects, and pathetic novel, which, nevertheless, errs in this; and I even think the pathos is injured by the last page, which is too painful for tenderness, which appears the object of the able author. A monumental effigy is but the mockery of all life's doings, which are thus, with their sorrows and their joys, rendered nugatory; and all that we have been reading, and are interested about, is unnecessarily presented to us as dust and ashes. Such is the tale ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... appears however to be set at rest by the epitaph which some friendly or kindred hand has inscribed on a tomb in the chapel of the English Nuns at Antwerp, commemorating the virtues and the fate of the Duke, and of his brother Lord John Drummond. This monumental tribute would hardly have been inscribed without some degree of certainty that the remains of the Duke were indeed ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... great garden attached to it. But that scheme was overweighted by the incorporation with it of the plan for a London monument, and both collapsed ignominiously. In 1835 a strong committee was formed at Stratford to commemorate the poet's connection with the town. It was called "the Monumental Committee," and had for its object, firstly, the repair of Shakespeare's tomb in the Parish Church; and secondly, the preservation and restoration of all the Shakespearean buildings in the town. Subscriptions were limited to L1, and all the members ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... which were earliest and most deeply touched by the Renaissance should excel in the designing of these noble and costly pieces of furniture. The cabinets of Italy, France and the Netherlands were especially rich and monumental. Those of Italy and Flanders are often of great magnificence and of real artistic skill, though like all other furniture their style was often grievously debased, and their details incongruous and bizarre. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... most interesting of all monumental relics of our ancestors; but the question of their original purposes has excited much controversy among the lovers of antiquarian lore. They are immense stones, by some believed to have been the altars, by others, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... light diurnal page, Inscribed on high in monumental gold, That strain might kindle each succeeding age, Which thus thy generous ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so intolerably did ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... found for the usurpation of the functions of government by a private individual, or group of individuals. This justification is success. It has been the custom to represent Dr. Jameson's decision to "ride in" as "an act of monumental folly," alike from a political and a military point of view. But this opinion overlooks the fact that the affair may have been so planned in Rhodes's mind that success did not depend upon the victory of the Uitlanders, aided by Jameson's troopers, but on the presence of the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... in the pit accident at Hartley a few years ago. They were grouped in families of two, three, four, or five, and these family groups were arranged in extended rows; but all were nameless. Near them slept the dust of the hereditary owners of the soil under monumental marble, loaded with statuary and inscriptions. Subjects of Christ's kingdom, "it shall not be so among you." Nor is the law which obtains in the heavenly the direct reverse of that which obtains in the earthly kingdom; it is not the poor, but the "poor in spirit," to whom ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... ridiculous hypothesis with the remark that the gossip which attributes to the Danes our lofty monumental pyramids and cairns, our Druid altars, our dry stone caisils or keeps, and our raths or fortified enclosures for the homes or cattle of our chiefs, is equally and utterly unfounded; and is partly to be accounted for from the name of power and terror which these barbarians left behind, and partly ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... value of the Literature of To-day, we can but express conjectures, or at most opinions, that are binding upon none. We may hope that After-Generations will interest themselves not merely in the Classic Forms of Poetry and History, but also in this less monumental Mode of the Criticism of our Era. And if this be not the case, we may console ourselves in advance with the reflection that the After-World is not of necessity going to be cleverer than the Present—that we have indeed no guarantee that it will be ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... period, with its immense epaulettes, queer cocked-hat, breeches, gaiters, ponderous cartridge-box, buckled shoes, and what not, would look strange and barbarous now. Ideas have changed; invention has followed invention. Soldiers were monumental objects then. A divinity still hedged kings here and there; and war was considered a ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... entering it in the midst of a dense mass of verdure. At last, after a journey of forty minutes further, upon the arid declivity which extends from Ain-Tabiga to the mouth of the Jordan, we find a few huts and a collection of monumental ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... such an act of barbarism! There is still standing in this town, the house of a Roman senator, now inhabited by a shoe-maker. In the cathedral they have a marble-stone, on which there is engraved, in Arabic characters, a monumental ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... but also for ornamentation or commemoration in any and every sphere in which merchants desired to leave the impress of their personality and interest. They were to be found on the fronts of houses, over the fireplace in halls, on seals, on sepulchral slabs and monumental brasses, and on painted windows. In his description of a Dominican convent—printed in full in Prof. Skeat's "Specimens of English Literature" (a.d. 1394-1579)—the author of "Peres the ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... a point on it, Mr. Ward Hunt is not, and the two manage to seat themselves with some approach to comfort. The First Lord of the Admiralty further eases the pressure on his colleagues by throwing his left arm over the back of the bench, where it hangs like a limb of some monumental tree. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... in progress, a monumental memorial had been projected by the British Army to their late commander-in-chief, the Duke of York; an expression of grateful sympathy which must be recorded to the honour of truly British hearts. The funds for this tribute were augmented ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... sand-covered paths between the flowerbeds they walked to the boxwood hedge which bordered the park on the southern side. They passed before the orange-grove, the monumental door of which was surmounted by the Lorraine cross of Mareuilles, and then passed under the linden-trees which formed an alley on the lawn. Statues of nymphs shivered in the damp shade studded with pale lights. A pigeon, posed on the shoulder ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... and supplement, in the light of continuous changes in our society and its economy, the monumental work of the Committee on Recent Social Trends which was appointed in 1931 by President Hoover. Its report has stood the test of time and has had a beneficial influence on national development. The new Committee ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... cathedral and the Luther Monument. It is a dull town. We recalled that it was here great Caesar stood, and Attila drove his cavalry of devastation over the Rhine. Here lived the hero of German classic song,—Siegfried. The cathedral has a monumental history. In 772 war was declared in it against the Saxons. Here was held the famous Diet of Worms at which Luther ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... emphasis, that the antiquity of the Negro race is beyond dispute. This is a fact established by the most immutable historical data, and recorded on the monumental brass and marble of the Oriental nations of the most remote period of time. The importance and worth of the Negro have given him a place in all the histories of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. His position, it is true, in all history up to ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Hector's wife!" Some haughty Greek, who lives thy tears to see, Embitters all thy woes by naming me. The thoughts of glory past and present shame, A thousand griefs, shall waken at the name! May I lie cold before that dreadful day, Pressed with a load of monumental clay! Thy Hector, wrapped, in everlasting sleep, Shall neither hear thee sigh, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Palace of the Caesars. The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender verdure. Daisy was strolling along the top of one of those great mounds of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental inscriptions. It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as just then. He stood, looking off at the enchanting harmony of line and color that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odors, and feeling the freshness of the year ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... was to be erected there, close to a tree, the seed of which had been planted on the occasion of his marriage. The facade of the house on the Rue Fortunee, now the Rue Balzac, was also to be embellished, and the central pavilion made to represent the novelist's apotheosis, with a monumental bass-relief and a niche. Only a small portion of these alterations was completed. On Madame de Balzac's death, in 1882, the property was bought by the Baroness Salomon de Rothschild; and, before the end of the century, it was demolished and the ground it covered was incorporated ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... "And the monumental nonsense it is," said Mrs. Fairbanks, "for men of high culture and special training to lose themselves in such ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... and locks and bars and dismal dungeon cells and flagellations and manifold tortures of the less humane and less enlightened past are justly abhorrent; an age which measures its magnificent philanthropy by munificent millions, bestowed without stint upon monumental mansions for the indwelling of the most pitiable and afflicted of the children of men, safe from the pitiless storms of adverse environment without which are so harshly violent to the morbidly sensitive and unstable insane mind; an age in which he who strikes a needless shackle ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... the Poly. Prospectus. Booty was a slender, agile youth with an innocent, sanguine face, the face of a beardless faun, finished off with a bush of blond hair that stood up from his forehead like a monumental flame. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... lay the town, literally buried in the wooded combe. Slabs of gray wall and purple roof, sunk in the black-green like graves in grass. A white house here and there faced him with the stare of monumental marble. In the middle a church with a stunted spire squatted like a mortuary chapel. They had run up a gaudy red-brick villa or two outside, but on the whole Little Sutton was all right, too. He had always thought it very like ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... buckets to the mountain stream, and, in due course, filled his trough, and left one bucket full for other uses. He then prepared and lighted his forge. As he plied the bellows, and the coals gleamed brighter and brighter, monumental figures came out and glared at him; mutilated inscriptions wavered on the walls; portions of the dark walls themselves gleamed in the full light, and showed the streaks and stains of age and weather, and the shadow of a gigantic ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... for yourself. The impression on copper is thought to appear best; and you will soon receive a number for the members. I have presented one to the King and another to the Queen, (p. 091) both in gold; and one in silver to each of the ministers, as a monumental acknowledgment, which may go down to future ages, of the obligations we are under to this nation. It is mighty well received, and gives general pleasure. If the Congress approve of it, as I hope they will, I may add something on the ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... wakening brain. The greater the glory! For you see the lead you take? You are saving your class. They should lead, and will, if they prove worthy in the crisis. Their curious error is to believe in the stability of a monumental position.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... play-hour in wandering through the classic shades of the Abbey next door, looking over the memorial tablets of "sculptured brass and monumental marble," erected to the honour of departed worthies:—I wished, you know, to keep my mind in a properly reflective state for the afternoon hours of examination—history and other abstruse studies ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Idealism is symbolically solved in the Eleusinia. For us there is nothing real except as we realize it. Let it be that myriads have walked upon the earth before us,—that each race and generation has wrought its change and left its monumental record upon pillar and pyramid and obelisk; set aside the ruin which Time has wrought both upon the change and the record, levelling the cities and temples of men, diminishing the shadows of the Pyramids, and rendering more shadowy the names and memories ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the Princes, of Henri IV. The Festival Hall is very beautiful, with its rich and abundant ornamentation, its walnut floor, divided into octagonal panels richly outlined with inlaid gold and silver, its monumental mantelpiece, with its figures, emblems, and fantastic frescoes, the brilliant masterpieces of Primaticcio, and of ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... back, very civil and quiet in tone—such an answer as Tibby himself would have given. The cheque was returned, the legacy refused, the writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this to Helen, adding in the fulness of his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a monumental person after all. Helen's reply was frantic. He was to take no notice. He was to go down at once and say that she commanded acceptance. He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited them. The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had wandered ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... church was struck by lightning in 1848, and restored under the care of G. E. Street, R.A. The font, of Norman design, was preserved from mutilation in Puritan times by veiling its beauties beneath a covering of plaster. During the restoration a granite monumental stone was unearthed, of Romano-British character; it has been placed in the wall outside the tower, and its inscription reads Conectoci fili Tegerno Mali. Whether legends of the lost Langarrow are true or not, there was evidently a considerable population of this part in early British times. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... me. I was five years old at the time, and I remember the day as if it were yesterday. My nurse's abode was just over the doorway of the house, and the window was framed in the heavy and monumental door. From outside I thought it was beautiful, and I began to clap my hands on reaching the house. It was towards five o'clock in the evening, in the month of November, when everything looks grey. I was put to bed, and no doubt I went to sleep ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... something to him he was sure, because it was so familiar,—yet he found it impossible to grasp the comprehension of that meaning! It was a singular spectacle enough; the lofty four-sided white pillar, that had so lately been a monumental glory of Al-Kyris, had split itself with the violence of its fall into two huge desolate-looking fragments, which now lay one on each side of the square, as though flung thither by a Titan's hand,—the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... forgiveness. The Israelite of old, gasping in his agony in the sands of the wilderness, had but to "look and live;" and still does He say, "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." Up-reared by the side of his own cross there was a monumental column for all Time, only second to itself in wonder. Over the head of the dying felon is the superscription written for despairing guilt and trembling penitence, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... lives. I was born in that little town, and bred up amid the memories of that day. When a boy my mother lifted me up, one Sunday, in her religious, patriotic arms, and held me while I read the first monumental line I ever saw:— ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... During the previous interruption in my work, which had lasted rather a long time, Hartel had engraved the first act of the score, and Bulow had arranged it for the piano. Thus a portion of the opera lay before me in monumental completeness, while I was still in a fruitful state of excitement with regard to the execution of the whole. And now in the early months of the year the orchestration of this act, which I continued to send in groups of sheets ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... Carolina, rich in biographical notices of distinguished citizens and inscriptions from their tombstones, upon reading which one might well wonder why North Carolina had not long ago eclipsed the rest of the world in wealth, wisdom, glory, and renown. On almost every page of this monumental work could be found the most ardent panegyrics of liberty, side by side with the slavery statistics of the State,—an incongruity of which the learned ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Toros stands just outside the monumental gate of the Alcala. It is a low, squat, prison-like circus of stone, stuccoed and whitewashed, with no pretence of ornament or architectural effect. There is no nonsense whatever about it. It is built for the killing of bulls and for no other purpose. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... "Like monumental bronze, unchanged his look— A soul which pity never touched or shook— Trained, from his lowly cradle to his bier, The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook Unchanging, fearing but the charge of fear— A stoic of the mart, a man without ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... glanced them over, and attempted some discrimination; but, as the group were all so new to him, he could not very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand, which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the d'Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life's battle as yet, even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest peasantry. So much for Norman blood ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... claim, have been received with plaudits which would have been exaggerated if applied to some of our acknowledged classics. The critical declaration that 'Eric Bright-eyes' could have been written by no other Englishman of the last six hundred years than Mr. Rider Haggard may be allowed its own monumental place in the desert of silly ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... authorities, among whom he stands as chief, were the objects of Mommsen's research. From jurisprudence he passed to the study of general history, and of the most interesting period of Rome he absorbed into his mind all the lore that has survived. This he digested and set forth in a monumental work, which, translated into English, has been, in the English-speaking world of scholars at least, as familiar as household words. At a still later time he was an active striver in the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... him shudder to even think of it. It was hard enough for him to realise that he had had the monumental courage to try it on that never to be forgotten occasion. As a matter of fact, he was rather proud of it, which wouldn't have been at all possible if he had ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... comfortest as music does, and wine, And grief dies smothered in thy purple fold. Let one greater than I, Kiss, and more bold, Rear thee a classic, monumental line. ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... of the village church there is a statue of Jeanne, the work of a native artist, in which she appears kneeling in her peasant's dress, one hand pressed upon her heart and the other lifted towards Heaven. And in a little clump of fir-trees near her house stands a sort of monumental fountain, surmounted by a bust of the Pucelle. The house itself remained in the possession of the last descendant of the family, a soldier of the Empire named Gerardin, down to the time of the Restoration. Some Englishman, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... needy wretch, was yet alive, No generous patron would a dinner give. See him, when starved to death and turned to dust, Presented with a monumental bust. The poet's fate is here in emblem shown,— He asked for bread, and he received ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... must admit that Unitarianism is a monumental failure in organizing churches, it is their boast that it has powerfully affected other religious bodies. This fact we admit; but as the effect is devitalizing, disorganizing and ultimately demoralizing, we ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... pirates with household names such as Kidd, Teach, and Avery. A few, too, of the buccaneers, headed by the great Sir Henry Morgan, come in for their share. But I compare with indignation the meagre show of pirates in that monumental work with the rich profusion of divines! Even during the years when piracy was at its height—say from 1680 until 1730—the pirates are utterly swamped by the theologians. Can it be that these two professions flourished most vigorously side by side, and that ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... of the snow-clad hills we had seen before, and in little more than an hour we arrived at the gates of the Cemetery. This Campo Santo is indeed most eloquently illustrative of loving reverence and remembrance of the dead, and is quite a museum of beautiful monumental statuary. ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... find your judgment such, They'll scorn their sires, and wish themselves born Dutch; Each haughty poet will infer with ease, How much his wit must under-write to please. As some strong churl would, brandishing, advance The monumental sword that conquered France; So you, by judging this, your judgment teach, Thus far you like, that is, thus far you reach. Since then the vote of full two thousand years Has crowned this plot, and all the dead are theirs, Think it a debt you pay, not alms you give, And, in your ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... in the church itself, rests beneath a plain slab, which aimed so consciously at modesty as thereby to achieve special distinction: Lorenzo, leaving no such directions, has nothing, while in the same room are monuments to two common-place descendants to thrill the soul. The disparity is in itself monumental. That Michelangelo's Madonna and Child are on the slab which covers the dust of Lorenzo and his brother is a chance. The saints on either side are S. Cosimo and S. Damian, the patron saints of old Cosimo de' Medici, and are by Michelangelo's assistants. The Madonna was intended for the altar ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... sculpture, and even painting, were not suitable vehicles. They belong to moods, and are not suitable for illustration in the market place and the temple. The roads which led to Greek cities were frequently bordered with monumental tombs. If in the reliefs and inscriptions of these tombs there had been any telling echo of the sorrow and regret of bereaved survivors, every one would have entered the cities in a black mood. As it is, as every one who has been in the museums of Athens knows, the sepulchral artists ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... wonder, and perhaps are inclined to condemn our—well, our reticence about this news. Do you know my fear? It is that if, in its present mood, suddenly, the British public, and more especially the London public, were allowed to realize clearly both what has happened in East Anglia, and the monumental unfitness of our authorities and defences to meet and cope with such an emergency—that then we should see England torn in sunder by the most terrible revolution of modern times. We should see statesmen hanging from lamp-posts in Whitehall; 'The Destroyers' ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... what secret influence I feared to dissipate by breaking silence, but we followed the great deserted drives without speaking, looking at the crosses, the monumental columns, and the mortuary wreaths ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... really known and practised (though doubtless in rare instances) at a very early date. The signet cylinder of the monarch who founded the most ancient of the buildings at Mugheir, Warka, Senkareh, and Niffer, and who thus stands at the head of the monumental kings, was in the possession of Sir R. Porter; and though it is now lost, an engraving made from it is preserved in his "Travels." [PLATE XIV., Fig. 2.] The signet cylinder of this monarch's son has been recently recovered, and is now in the British Museum. We are entitled to conclude ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... humour existed too, but ere it could come up from his deep nature to the surface, it must freeze and stiffen into monumental scorn —a laughter that seemed, while mocking at all things else, to mock at its own mockery most of all. Aird speaks in his 'Demoniac,' of a smile upon ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... on Washington's own diaries and letters and secret archives and it told not simply the epic story of this great life but the truth about the birth of our nation. Marshall later spent fifteen years revising the first edition, verifying to the last detail every chapter, page and paragraph of his monumental work. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... before setting out on his expedition down the Amoor, is full of bad taste, bad rhetoric, and bad grammar. If we had read no farther, we should have thought that a more unfit personage than this gentleman with the monumental name could not have been chosen for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still, I sit by the form in the coffin, I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin;) To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best, I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs, And set a ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Lincoln is the monumental one in ten large volumes by Nicolay and Hay, the President's private secretaries. This contains considerable material not found elsewhere, but since its publication in 1890 much new matter has been unearthed, especially by the enterprise of Miss Ida Tarbell, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... he added to French territory La Bresse, Le Bugey, the district of Gex, and the citadel of Bourg, which still held out after the capture of the town. He was more and more dear to France, to which he had restored peace at home as well as abroad, and industrial, commercial, financial, monumental, and scientific prosperity, until lately unknown. Sully covered the country with roads, bridges, canals, buildings, and works of public utility. The moment the king, after the annulment of his marriage with Marguerite ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... white silken hair. Any Japanese would recognise them at once as the Old People of Takasago, the personification of the Perfect Marriage. They are staring with wonder and alarm at the Brandan sapphires, a monumental parure designed for the massive state ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... murmur like a shell; The muffled tramp of the Museum guard Once more went by me; I beheld again Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street; Again I longed for the returning morn, The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds, The consentaneous trill of tiny song That weaves round monumental cornices A passing charm of beauty: most of all, For your light foot I wearied, and your knock That was the glad reveille of my day. Lo, now, when to your task in the great house At morning through the portico ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Augmenting still his force. The torrent grows, Spreads deep and wide, till braving all restraint Ev'n mountain ridges feel the imperious press; Forced from their ancient rock-bound base—they leave Their monumental sides, erect, to guard The pass—and tell to future days, and years, The wond'rous tale! Meanwhile, The conqueror flood holds on his course, Resistless ever—sinuous, or direct. Unconscious tribes beneath ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Abraham Lincoln glorified by his martyr death! How he rose at once into a great figure in history—a monumental form before which enmity was silenced! All men forgot their hostility, their criticisms, their sneers—forgot that they had ever done anything but honor him. The assassin, who thought to revenge the wrongs of the southern ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... therefore a monumental task, covering a wide field of operation and with constant peril hovering over the heads of the two adventurous aviators who had undertaken so joyously to spread the net and draw its meshes ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... Chariot of Death is the second of Eugene Sue's monumental serial known under the collective title of The Mysteries of the People; or History of a Proletarian Family ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... rhapsodies—the classic Anne—the demoniac Marian—but you're landed high and dry this time. The mystery may have something to do with it, but the woman has far more. She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld and she looks intelligent and keen in spite of that monumental repose. And what a great lady!" Gora sighed. How she once had longed to be a great lady! She no longer cared a fig about it, and would not have changed her present state for that of a princess in a stable world. But old dreams die hard. There was no one of Madame ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... agreeable error by reading the date of its erection on the tablet over the door. It is a stately church surrounded by an enclosure of the loveliest green, within which appear urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of monumental marble, the tributes of private affection or more splendid memorials of historic dust. With such a place, though the tumult of the city rolls beneath its tower, one would be willing to connect some ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Trojan Hector's wife!" Some Argive, who shall live thy griefs to see, Embitters thy great woe by naming me: The thoughts of glory past and present shame, A thousand griefs, shall waken at the name. May I lie cold before that dreadful day, Pressed by a load of monumental clay Thy Hector, wrapped in everlasting sleep, Shall neither hear thee sigh nor ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr. Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a single irradiating image or one monumental phrase. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... category it must be set down as simply episodal. Foster's "Voyages," a translation from the German published in England at the beginning of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a compendium of monumental importance, continued the tradition of Hakluyt and Purchas. By this time the sea-power of England had become supreme,—Britannia ruled the waves, and a native sea-literature was the result. The sea-songs of Thomas Dibdin and other ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... preceded him, and all were anxious to behold the old chief whose name and deeds had excited so much commotion on the frontiers of the north west. The President happened to be in Baltimore at the same time, and, the "monumental city" was never, perhaps, honored by the presence of two more distinguished "lions" upon the same day, than upon this occasion. They both attended the theatre on the evening of the sixth; and, it is said, that the ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... of fact we have the testimony of the Rev. John Eliot, than whom no one is better known for his labors in behalf of the spiritual welfare of the Indians of eastern Massachusetts, and for his works in their language, including that monumental work which went through two editions, Eliot's Indian Bible. It is thought that Eliot began his study of the Indian language about 1643, but it is possible that he began much earlier. In a letter dated February ...
— John Eliot's First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de-Long Island and The Story of His Career from the Early Records • William Wallace Tooker
... modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... venture to say that when my new edition is out it will be found on the tables of every cultivated home, and will be among the best sellers of the year. All that is needed is to give to this really monumental book the same chance that is given to every other work of fiction in the ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... of the Icelanders to Christianity, writing, and the materials for writing, first came into the land, about the year 1000. There is no proof that the earlier or Runic alphabet, which existed in heathen times, was ever used for any other purposes than those of simple monumental inscriptions, or of short legends on weapons or sacrificial vessels, or horns and drinking cups. But with the Roman alphabet came not only a readier means of expressing thought, but also a class of men who were wont thus to express themselves.... Saga after Saga was reduced to writing, and ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... architecture, with rusticated basements, rounded windows and bold projecting cornices—the manner which is so nobly illustrated by the Rucellai and Strozzi palaces at Florence—executed also for Pius the monumental Palazzo Piccolomini at Siena. It is a great misfortune for the group of buildings he designed at Pienza, that they are huddled together in close quarters on a square too small for their effect. A want of space is peculiarly injurious to the architecture of this date, 1462, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... every one spends twenty-five years on the elaboration of some twisted fancies. Most of my correspondents write the monumental thoughts of their systems with decisive brevity. A physician informs me that every thought and act of our lives is transfixed on the etheric vapours that surround our earth, and that it is therefore only natural that a clairvoyant is able to see those fixed events and ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... throat, as a terrier catches a rat, and wrings from you the last drop of pity and awe. His skill in avoiding 'the inevitable word' is simply miraculous. He is the despair of the translator. Far be it from me to belittle the devoted labours of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway, whose monumental translation of the Master's complete works is now drawing to its splendid close. Their promised biography of the murdered grandmother is awaited eagerly by all who take—and which of us does not take?—a breathless interest in Kolniyatschiana. But Mr. and Mrs. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the Government of the United States will long stand as monumental in the history of Government exhibits. Not content with the exhibition of special features of governmental activity in the various departments of the exposition, Congress provided for the erection of a Government exhibition palace, which was confessedly ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... scholarship, or as the successor of Dr. Whewell in his high office, but also as having said some of the wittiest things which we have heard since Voltaire's pour encourager les autres. I saw him in his chamber, a feeble old man, but noble to look upon in all "the monumental pomp of age." He came very near belonging to the little group I have mentioned as my coevals, but was a year after us. Gentle, dignified, kindly in his address as if I had been his schoolmate, he left a very charming impression. He gave me several mementoes of my visit, ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of the Hammersmith 'bus as a "kind of hockey on horseback"—in very full swing no doubt. Only unfortunately Iglesias found himself on the wrong side of the palings. And, since he had learned, indirectly, from the observations of the monumental police-sergeant—directing the stream of carriages at the entrance gates—to other would-be spectators, that to the polo ground, as to so much else obviously desirable in this world, there is "no admission except ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the future of this branch of literature for the Italians. It is not uncharacteristic of Florentine genius that while the chief city of Tuscany was deficient in historians of her achievements before the date which I have mentioned, her first essays in historiography should have been monumental and standard-making for the rest of Italy. Just as the great burghs of Lombardy attained municipal independence somewhat earlier than those of Tuscany, so the historic sense developed itself in the valley of the Po at ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... to scare his young. This was, no doubt, admirable in its way, and it would be narrow-minded to disparage it because it did not stand on the ethical level of Polygnotus's work. But painters did not always keep within the limits of what is innocent. No longer restrained by the conditions of monumental and religious art, they began to pander not merely to what is frivolous, but to what is vile in human nature. The great Parrhasius is reported by Pliny to have painted licentious little pictures, "refreshing himself" (says the writer) by this means after more ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... reserves and inhibitions of generations. The only flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained. She knew that he excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and precedents. He would always reach the goal, but his race would never carry him beyond the end of the course; he would always fulfil the law, but he would ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... "A monumental volume, which no American who cares for the memory of the public men of his country can afford to be without."—New ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland. Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Egyptians having pulled their neglected monuments to pieces quite as unscrupulously as do their modern successors. The houses of an ancient Egyptian town were clustered round its temple, and the temple stood in a rectangular enclosure to which access was obtained through monumental gateways in the surrounding brick wall. The gods dwelt in fortified mansions, or at any rate in redoubts to which the people of the place might fly for safety in the event of any sudden attack upon their town. Such towns as were built all at once by prince or king ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... that Sanscrit scholars have met with names for the bow in Sanscrit writings dating back nearly two thousand years. If this information could be supplemented by reliable monumental evidence of the existence of a bow of some rude kind among the nations of the East about the commencement of the Christian era, its value would necessarily be complete. In the absence of such evidence we are left ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart |
