"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... live, keen ones that did most of the drinking. They were the more comradely men, the more venturous, the more individual. Perhaps it was too much temperament that made them turn from the commonplace and humdrum to find relief in the lying and fantastic sureties of John Barleycorn. Be that as it may, the men I liked best, desired most to be with, were invariably to be found in John ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Weelkes' last work, "Airs or Fantastic Spirits for three voices," a collection of lively and humorous ditties. Oliphant writes:—"For originality of ideas, and ingenuity of construction in part writing, (I allude more especially to his ballets,) Weelkes in ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... on subjects whose interest depended on character and incident, he would start off in another direction, and leave the delineations of human passion, which he could depict in so able a manner, for fantastic creations of his fancy, or the expression of those opinions and sentiments, with regard to human nature and its destiny, a desire to diffuse which was the master ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... a wooden Post Office, painted brown; a red college, where boys in white disported upon a green field; a fawn-coloured school, with a playground full of pinafored little girls; and a Red Tape Office—designed in true Elizabethan style, with cupolas, vanes, fantastic chimney-tops, embayed windows, wondrous parapets—built entirely of wood and painted the colour of Devonshire cream, with grit in the paint to ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... as exquisite specimens of the neatness with which those slight vessels could be put together, sewn as they were merely with strips of the same bark, than from any intrinsic value they possessed. Covered over with fantastic figures, done either in paint, or in quill work artfully interwoven into the fibres of the bark, they presented, in their smooth and polished surface, strong evidence of the address of the savages in their preparation of this ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... solely for the benefit of others, should be thenceforth adopted as a perfectly legitimate source of income for himself professionally. The ball was at his feet: should it be rolled on, or fastidiously turned aside by reason of certain fantastic notions as to its derogating, in some inconceivable way, from the dignity of authorship? That was the alternative in regard to which Dickens had to decide, and upon which he at once, as became him, decided manfully. The ball was rolled on, and, as it rolled, grew in bulk like ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... the girl! To have permitted a course of events to discover her! Shameful! He jumped into bed, and pulled the coverlet close to his nose, and was soon asleep, sleep broken by fantastic dreams, in which the past and present mixed with the improbable chances of ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... admirable than the decorated works of India. They are, indeed, in all materials capable of colour, wool, marble, or metal, almost inimitable in their delicate application of divided hue, and fine arrangement of fantastic line. Nor is this power of theirs exerted by the people rarely, or without enjoyment; the love of subtle design seems universal in the race, and is developed in every implement that they shape, and every building that they raise; ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... which Bartlemy had laughed and died, and now from this gloomy shadow came something that whirred by my ear and was gone. But in that moment I had swept my companion behind a rock and with sword advanced leapt straight for the tree; and there, in the half-light, came on a fantastic shape and closed with it in deadly grapple. My rusty sword had snapped short at the first onset, yet twice I smote with the broken blade, while arm locked with arm we writhed and twisted. To and fro we ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... that gathered brought arms and ammunition. The twenty-seven gentlemen assembled in the office were also armed, "to defend the rights of person, and property, and the liberty of the press." At first only stones were used by the assailants, answered by volleys of blank cartridges. After scenes almost fantastic in fury, the gentlemen were finally overcome and marched to gaol for safety. But after dark another mob gathered round the gaol, and overcoming the guard, broke in. Mr. Gwynn pushed his way through a group of fifty men to General Lingan who ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... of 1095 was seen such a sight as the world never afforded before nor since. The great plain of La Limagne, in Auvergne, shut in by lofty volcanic mountains of every fantastic and rugged form, with the mighty Puy de Dome rising royally above them, was scattered from one boundary to the other with white tents, and each little village was crowded with visitants. The town of Clermont, standing on an elevation ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... divisions of the martial host, there ran a murmur of obloquy and derision against the pure object of public veneration. He was reviled as a whimsical Reformer, and a rash Enthusiast, who had absurdly sacrificed his life in a vain and fantastic pursuit. This base spirit of calumnious malignity was not communicated to any one division of the martial multitude; but the universal zeal for the glory of HOWARD seemed to be almost annihilated; even Gratitude and Admiration appeared to grow faint in their darling ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... that will evolve the descent into the world of so many pleasure-bound spirits of retribution and the experience of fantastic destinies; and this crimson pearl blade will also be among the number. The stone still lies in its original place, and why should not you and I take it along before the tribunal of the Monitory Vision Fairy, and place on its behalf its name on record, so that it should descend into the world, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Which, meeting me upon the way, These secrets didst to me bewray, Which now I am in telling; My pretty, light, fantastic maid, I here invoke thee to my aid, That I may speak what thou hast said, In numbers ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... as she would, there was something in the loneliness of this limitless stretch of hilltop that got on her nerves. The very shadows cast by the moonshine seemed too fantastic for reality. Something eerie and unearthly hovered over it all, and before she knew it a sob choked ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... lay parallel with the railroad tracks, and he drove for some time beside long lines of freight and coal cars as they stood resting for the night. The fantastic Queen Anne suburban stations were dark and deserted, but in one or two of the block-towers he could see the operators writing at their desks, and the sight in ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... unconditional agreement. Why could not his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic question—as though it was not for her to decide: "Are we still Christians?" And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for a priest and prophet. Were women Undines ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... peak and towering mountain wall that is thrown around Italy on the north, as it unrolls itself from the plains of Lombardy and Venetia. How often one has gazed at it in sheer delight over its bewildering wealth of contrasting color and fantastic form, its effect of light and shade and measureless space! But now, for these many months past, keen eyes have been bent upon it; eyes, not of the artist or the poet, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... which in point of rugged grandeur far surpasses the Almannajau, though it lacks the extent and symmetry which give the latter such a remarkable effect. Here was a tremendous gap in the earth, over a hundred feet deep, hacked and shivered into a thousand fantastic shapes; the sides a succession of the wildest accidents; the bottom a chaos of broken lava, all tossed about in the most terrific confusion. It is not, however, the extraordinary desolation of the scene that constitutes ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... dark, the big steel girders taking on weird and fantastic shapes. A train rushed across its span, roaring and throwing a shower of ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... He asserts that the saying 'cost the Earl his head, which his insurrection had not cost him, but for that speech.' Essex did not stop at sneers. He caballed with persecuted Papists and Puritans alike, and with various desperados. He alarmed King James with fantastic accounts of conspiracies for the Infanta's succession. In the plot were, he intimated, Ralegh potent in the West and Channel Islands; Cobham, Warden of the Cinque Ports; the Lord Treasurer; the Lord Admiral; Burleigh, Cecil's brother, President of the North; and Carew, President of Munster. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... swayed to meet each other. Melons lay drying on flat roofs, and yet now and then would come a high-pitched northern gable. Latin and Teuton met and mingled in the place, and, as Mr. Gibbon has taught us, the offspring of this admixture is something fantastic and unpredictable. I forgot my grievous thirst and my tired feet in admiration and a certain vague expectation of wonders. Here, ran my thought, it is fated, maybe, that romance and I shall at last compass a meeting. Perchance some princess is in need of my arm, or some affair of high ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... is much too small to belong to an imperial residence; but, on the other hand, it would be hard to find one more beautiful or better arranged. The park of Versailles is grander and more imposing; but it has not the picturesque irregularity, the fantastic and unexpected beauties, of the park of Schoenbrunn, and more closely resembles the park at Malmaison. In front of the interior facade of the palace was a magnificent lawn, sloping down to a broad lake, decorated with a group of statuary representing ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... English—a small, slim personage, clad in a sort of black velvet tunic (as it seemed), and with a mass of auburn hair, which gleamed in the moonlight, escaping from a little mediaeval birretta. In a tone of the most insinuating deference he asked me for my "impressions." He seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal. Hovering there in this consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of aesthetic hospitality—if the genius of aesthetic hospitality were not commonly some shabby little custode, flourishing a calico pocket-handkerchief ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... only badges of his office which his dress exhibited. In other respects, it was such as to match with that of the most courtly nobles. His bonnet displayed a medal of gold, he wore a chain of the same metal around his neck, and the fashion of his rich garments was not much more fantastic than those of young gallants who have their clothes made in the extremity of ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... elders when by chance they get wind of the fact. Perhaps the belief that children can be educated by the eye is more plausible than well supported. In any case, it is good that the illustration should be well drawn, well coloured; given that, whether it be realistically imitative or wholly fantastic is quite a secondary matter. As we have had pointed out to us, the child is not best pleased by mere portraits of himself; he prefers idealised children, whether naughtier and more adventurous, or absolute ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Thieves" which Miss Budge performed with unbounded applause both at the "Surrey" and "The Wells." Mrs. Crump sat in a little bar, profusely ornamented with pictures of the dancers of all ages, from Hillisberg, Rose, Parisot, who plied the light fantastic toe in 1805, down to the Sylphides of our day. There was in the collection a charming portrait of herself, done by De Wilde; she was in the dress of Morgiana, and in the act of pouring, to very slow music, a quantity of boiling oil into ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... out of date. Why, yes. Those guardsmen who drenched their beards in scent and breakfasted off caviare and chocolate and sparkling Moselle—they certainly seem fantastic. They really were fantastic. They did drench their beards in scent. The language and habits of these martial heroes are authenticated in the records of their day; glance, for instance, into back numbers of Punch. The fact is, we were all rather ludicrous ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... yards across; and feeling as if they had escaped a horrible danger, and in perfect ignorance of the fact that their position was as perilous as ever, Steve feasted his eyes on the glorious spread of fantastic beauty before him, and felt as if he had just awakened in a world where everything was silver, even to the ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... linen, and betrays the last agonies of a mortally wounded man, their breasts were bared. Their braces crossed upon the chest—their wide red belts bristling with arms—their cry of attack and rage, all that must have given a decidedly fantastic touch to the scene. Arrived in the square, they perceived the gendarmerie drawn up in motionless ranks, through which it would have been impossible to force a passage. They halted an instant and seemed to consult together. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... been erected upon them, to grind the grain for the city. The four streets bordering the principal canals are hardly to be surpassed in Europe. The buildings, which are mostly of brick, are unique, with fantastic gables and projecting eaves. Many of the streets are lined with trees on the banks of the canals. On the whole, the students were more interested in Amsterdam than in any other city they had visited, partly, perhaps, on account of its ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... Frenchmen who were private persons and quite unaffected by political considerations, this aspect became very clear. You might persuade them that some current estimates as to the amount to be got out of Germany were quite fantastic. Yet at the end they would always come back to where they had started: "But Germany must pay; for, otherwise, what is ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... invited to her wedding though I live within a stone's throw of the door. No; I have done my duty in calling attention to that light, and whether it's the bull's-eye of a burglar—perhaps you don't know that there are rare treasures on the book shelves of the great library—or whether it is the fantastic illumination which frightens fool-folks and some fool-dogs, I'm done with it and done with you, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... a shore where the trees fringed the very water, frequently overhanging the element that mirrored their fantastic forms. At this point, a light skiff was moving leisurely along in their own direction, but a short distance in advance. On a hint from John Effingham, a few vigorous strokes of the oars brought the two ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... state banquet on the Serapis in the evening, while Colombo was illuminated and the ships were a blaze of light. Never were the Cinghelese more happy than on that day and night, and spectators found it hard to describe the revel of light, fantastic, Eastern pleasure. On the following day the railway train was taken for Kandy amid genuine British cheers from throngs of men clad in petticoats and wearing combs in front ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... The secret was out. That was the explanation of this fantastic journey. George Fox, after gathering a 'great people' up in the North, was now himself kept a close prisoner in Carlisle Gaol: yet he was the magnet attracting this lad, frail of body but determined of will, to travel right across England for the hope of ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... moral approbation involve no perception of beneficial tendency, how do we make out the coincidence of the two?' It might seem that the foundation of morals is thus made to rest on a coincidence that is mysterious and fantastic. According to the author, the conclusive answer is this. Although Conscience rarely contemplates anything so distant as the welfare of all sentient beings, yet in detail it obviously points to the production of happiness. The ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... conventions, a string of verses that reveals the absurdity of the situation. It was in reply to "A Clerical Appeal," issued by the Rev. Nehemiah Adams, whose "South-Side View of Slavery" received more Anti-slavery attention than it deserved, for it expressed only his own fantastic ideas. In the "Appeal" he maintains that women should paint in water colors only, not in ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... building were begun and completed; but they were mainly the growth of wealth, vanity, speculation, and peace. Where his influence was directly felt it proved unfortunate. He lavished millions in creating vicious models, and fantastic styles of architecture, and brought into fashion artists without capacity or taste. There was not in his kingdom a more discerning judge of painting; but he had no imagination for the higher class of art. He preferred the exquisite and humorous realities of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... incidents of Saturday, November 26, 1910, when we slipped from the wharf at Lyttelton at 3 P.M. We were to call at Dunedin before leaving civilization, and arrived there on Sunday night. Here we took on the remainder of our coal. On Monday night we danced, in fantastic clothing for we had left our grand clothes behind, and sailed finally for the South the following afternoon amidst the greatest enthusiasm. The wives remained with us until we reached the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have understood that these arrangements are of capital importance; and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of locomotion marks it as an idiosyncratic, exceptional, fantastic creature, having no fellow, that I know of, in the insect world. Though endowed with legs—a trifle short, it is true, but after all as good as those of a host of other larvae—it never uses them for walking. It progresses on its back, always on its back, never otherwise. By means of wriggling movements ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... if she is willing to be paid by men. At first she refuses with pathos, but under the suggestive pressure of luring arguments she slowly weakens, and finally consents to exchange her street gown for a fantastic costume of half-nakedness. The feelings of the audience are saved by the detective who breaks in at the decisive moment, but the arguments of the advocates of sexual education cannot possibly be saved after that voluntary yielding. Sylvia knows what she has to expect, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... him now, a silent, pitying group, appearing fantastic, perhaps, by the dim light of that single lanthorn, he attempted to raise his head, and then with a groan he dropped it back upon the straw that pillowed it. From out of a face white, as in death, and drawn with haggard lines of pain, a pair of great lustrous blue eyes were turned upon ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... not even as if, in vital matters, Russia started the war in a satisfactory condition. The most vital of all questions in a country of huge distances must necessarily be that of transport. It is no exaggeration to say that only by fantastic efforts was Russian transport able to save its face and cover its worst deficiencies even before the war began. The extra strain put upon it by the transport of troops and the maintenance of the armies exposed its weakness, and with each succeeding week of war, although ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... it is! though its age strikes one less, perhaps, than the quaintness of its structure, which is curious and fantastic to the last degree. Little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames, predominate; while the body of the building is in the ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... on before, pressing eagerly and breasting the hill. I neither felt fatigue nor noticed that I did not feel it. The extreme angle of the slope suited my mood, nor was I conscious of its danger, though its fantastic steepness exhilarated me because it was so novel to be trying such things at night in such a weather. The moon, I think, must by this time have been near its sinking, for the mist grew full of darkness round about us, and at last it was altogether ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... fatigue. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could not bear the dance any more. It was, perhaps, absurd of her. Her brain, fatigued by travel, was perhaps playing her tricks. But she felt as if Maurice were escaping from her in this wild tarantella, like a man escaping through a fantastic grotto from some one who called to him near its entrance. A faint sensation of something that was surely jealousy, the first she had ever known, stirred in ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and, with them, beauty. Ravines, mountains, ravines, mountains, poplars stick out from the ravines, vineyards loom dark on the mountains—all this is bathed in moonlight, is new and wild, and sets one's imagination working in harmony with Gogol's "Terrible Vengeance." Particularly fantastic are the alternating precipices and tunnels when you see now depths full of moonlight and now complete sinister darkness. It is rather uncanny and delightful. One feels it is something not Russian, something alien. I reached Sevastopol ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... by the wind and hurled on the very wall, done greater and more irreparable mischief than the combustibles themselves. Up, up, seeming to the very heavens, the lurid flames ascended, blazing and roaring, and lighting the whole scene as with the glare of day. Fantastic wreaths of red fire danced in the air against the pitchy blackness of the heavens, rising and falling in such graceful, yet terrible shapes, that the very eye felt riveted in admiration, while ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... night, with a quantum sufficit of tallow candles, (against the use of which Lady Penelope often mutinied,) enabled the company—to use the appropriate phrase—"to close the evening on the light fantastic toe." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... fearful that she might see the repugnance in his eyes. He could not sit there an instant longer, facing this reminder of Bob Grand. Something atavistic in his nature urged him to strike out with all his strength at the fantastic face that forced itself ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... tenderness swept for an instant over the hard glint in them. It was gone as swiftly as it came, and the stare settled unwaveringly upon the stupefied girl. For stupefaction had gripped Dolores in that first entry into the great chamber. Her wildest dreams, and they had been at times fantastic, had never showed her anything measurably approaching the scene that smote her eyes now. For the moment death, Red Jabez, her destiny, everything melted into the visionary beyond and left her capable ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... wares,— The willow pattern, that we knew In childhood, with its bridge of blue Leading to unknown thoroughfares; The solitary man who stares At the white river flowing through Its arches, the fantastic trees And wild perspective of the view; And intermingled among these The tiles that in our nurseries Filled us with wonder and delight, Or haunted ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... forearmed in case of the differences coming to blows. He raised, uniformed a la Zou-zou, a score of young men like himself and proceeded to give exhibitions at home and then in the East. The writer retains a vivid memory of the odd and fantastic show, which, however, was regarded as "not war, though magnificent." But Captain Ellsworth was in earnest. Mustered in with his company, he started the Zouave movement which led to two or more regiments being formed. His being the first volunteers at the fore, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Alice was satisfied. Mignon looked prettier and daintier than ever in her light fantastic robe of white and spangles, with silver bracelets on her wrists and little anklets hung with bells about her slender ankles. Round and round and round galloped the white horse, the fairy figure on his back now standing, now lying, now on her ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... singing, executed a fantastic slow dance, stopping at certain points to clink a pair of little cymbals attached to her ankles, and to look for a moment archly ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the curtains at a window. As you have seen from a hill the winking lights of a city disappear at daybreak, so, one by one, the stars went out. Masses of angry clouds reared themselves in ominous, fantastic forms against a sullen sky. The hot land breeze changed to a cold wind which made me shiver. Suddenly the mounting rampart of clouds, which seemed about to burst in a tempest, was pierced by a hundred flaming lances coming from beyond the horizon's rim. Before their ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... present a set of critical essays, giving a picture of English poetry of which, though there are gleams of a better hope, and praise is specially bestowed on a "new poet," the general character is feebleness, fantastic absurdity, affectation and bad taste. Force, and passion, and simple truth, and powerful thoughts of the world and man, are rare; and poetical reformers appear maundering about miserable attempts at English hexameters and sapphics. What was to be looked for from all that? Who could suppose what ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... "it is not equal to that mansion, whose upper floors are at this moment a chevaux-de-frise of charcoal beams and rafters depicted on a dark sky, and whose lower floors are a fantastic compound of burned bricks and lime, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... the first view the whites had of the Natchez women. When their work was completed, they commenced to chant a song in slow and measured tones; soon, however, it quickened into merry cadences and the young females commenced a wild, fantastic dance. The older sang on, keeping time by slapping their hands and a swinging movement of the head and body right and left. Apparently, at the termination of a stanza, they would stoop suddenly forward and slap the hands upon each thigh, uttering at the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... introduce our narrative to our readers. It is usual, with writers of fiction and romance, to preface their literary exhibitions with high-wrought and dazzling descriptions of natural and artificial objects—the sun, moon, and stars; the clouds, meteors, and other fantastic creations of the atmosphere; the seas, rivers, and lakes; the mountains, fields, and gardens; the birds, fishes, and the inhabitants of the savage forests, as well as the forests, groves, and woods themselves,—in a word, all nature ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... and the mainland that no swimmer could stem it; and then I come up here, and look down from above upon it. It's the finest point on all our Cornish coast, this point we stand on. It has the widest view, the purest air, the hardest rock, the highest and most fantastic ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... stars or suns, and the other has only small cups and a few transverse lines. There are some shaped stones, sometimes perforated for suspension, made of the same material; while another group of similar objects is made of cannel coal. All these are highly ornamented by a fantastic combination of circles, dots, lines, cup-and- rings with or without gutters, and perforations. A small pebble (plate XV. no. 10) shows, on one side, a boat with three men plying their oars, and on the other an incised outline of a ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... lived in a sea of trifles, and she was desperately angry if her lover was not always sailing a pleasure-boat in the same ocean. Now this was expecting too much from me, and, after twisting our silken strings of attachment into all manner of fantastic forms, we fell fairly out one evening and broke the little ligatures in two. No sooner had I quarrelled with Tarleton than Lady Hasselton received him in my place, and a week afterwards I was favoured with an anonymous ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the crowd that now pressed upon her went like wine to her head; her cheeks flamed, her eyes brightened, and she lifted her small hands in fantastic gesture and danced, crying, "We are cast down, but not destroyed, because God Almighty has given to us a ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Tanana, and pushed on. Past camps Stoneman and Woodworth, where the great Klondyke Expeditions lay fast in the ice; along the white strip of the narrowing river, pent in now between mountains black with scant, subarctic timber, or gray with fantastic weather-worn rock—on and on, till they reached the bluffs of the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... In a letter to the Army and Navy journal, written at the suggestion of General Wheaton, I compared the Indians in the lava beds to "ants in a sponge." In the language of another it is a "black ocean tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes, a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, barrenness—a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder, of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness, and all these ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... a bandbox, that lay on the toilet-table; and lifted out a fantastic-looking blond peruke, constructed after "his excellency's own design." Kaunitz was not aware of it, but this wig of his, with its droll mixture of flowing locks before, and prim purse behind, was an exact counterpart of the life and character of its ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Renaissance. "Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor Brewer, who edited with ability and learning ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... possibilities, hideous, fantastic, appalling, flashed through his mind. He was beginning to learn what Zani Chada had meant when he had said: "I have ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... blue air deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green, looking like a giant pathway to ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... older theory. It sounds late and elaborate but still it follows easily if the dialectic of Gotama is applied uncompromisingly not only to our mental processes but to the external world. Yet even in India the result was felt to be fantastic and sophistical and it is not surprising if after the lapse of a few generations a new system of idealism became fashionable which, although none too intelligible, was abstruse ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... not seriously concerned over the outcome. Public feeling was high, to be sure; the men of Sheep Camp were in a dangerous frame of mind and their actions were liable to be hasty, ill-considered- -their verdict was apt to be fantastic—but, secure in the knowledge of his innocence, Pierce felt no apprehension. Rather he experienced a thrill of excitement at the contretemps and at the ordeal which he ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... in the silent and deserted wing was full of fantastic shadows. He threw himself on a chair beside a window without lighting his lamp. The rose garden outside was steeped in moonlight; the magnolia bells gleamed waxen-white against their glossy green leaves; the vines on the tall trellises ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... have left some trace of it in his dramatic works and that the contemporaries who mention him would not have preserved a profound silence as to his artistic talent[28]; yet Men['e]ndez y Pelayo himself speaks of Vicente's alma de artista[29] and of the plastic character which the most fantastic allegorical figures receive at his hands[30]. If we were assured that the dreamy Bernardim Ribeiro had fashioned the Belem monstrance we might well remain sceptical, but Vicente stands out from among the vaguer poets ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... and shadowful. Long reaches of violet and vermilion clouds pressed thickly on the western line of hills. The mists began to rise, changing from opal to sapphire. The fantastic melodies of wandering gypsy songs went throbbing through the room; rollicking gavots, Hungarian dances, low and slumbrous nocturnes. As the music grew sadder and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... seem to be the picturesque in it which wove the spell; but would her throat have tightened, those tears be springing to her eyes at a thing no deeper than the picturesque? No, in what seemed that fantastic setting were things genuine and fine: simplicity, hospitality, friendship, comradeship, loyalty, courage in danger and good humor ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... stood a grove of cedars, old, gray, and drear, as weirdly impressive as the cacti in a Mexican desert. Torn by winds, scarred by lightnings, deeply rooted, tenacious as tradition, unlovely as Egyptian mummies, fantastic, dwarfed and blackened, these unaccountable creatures clung to the ledges. The dead mingled horribly with the living, and when the wind arose—the wind that was robustly cheerful on the high hills—these hags cried out with low moans of ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... be Big[8]as old women, wanting gravity. Then do not blame me, 'cause I thus describe them. Flatter I may not, lest thereby I bribe them To have a better judgment of themselves, Than wise men have of babies on their shelves.[9] Their antic tricks, fantastic modes, and way, Show they, like very boys and girls, do play With all the frantic fopperies of this age, And that in open view, as on a stage; Our bearded men do act like beardless boys; Our women please themselves with childish toys. Our ministers, long time, by word and pen, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... say. Gent. reader, nothing; a mere speculation, For which my sole excuse is—'t is my way; Sometimes with and sometimes without occasion I write what 's uppermost, without delay: This narrative is not meant for narration, But a mere airy and fantastic basis, To build up common ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... she has done something fantastic, naturally! For my part, I should have thought her own ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and his defalcation as postmaster, prostrated him financially and politically. In the hope of retrieving his fortunes he embarked in real estate speculation, thus completing his ruin and making him still more visionary and fantastic. Nevertheless, he struggled on with industry and courage for more than twenty years, occasionally coming into public or political notice as a writer of caustic letters, or ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... was pretty clear that if I hoped to work my way in this wicked world, I must suspect a scoundrel in every man I met, and forestall mischief by suspicion. As I sat and thought, I sifted the beans through my fingers, and saw that there were lots of strange seeds mixed with them, some of very fantastic shapes; and I wondered what countries they came from, and with what shape and scent and colour the plants blossomed, and thought how Charlie would like some of them to sow in pots and watch. As I drove my hands deeper into the heap, I felt ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead of acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule's slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... out of the world, in this strange, fantastic, yet beautiful old city. We have been rambling all morning through its winding streets, stopping sometimes at a church to see the dusty tombs and shrines, or to hear the fine music which accompanies the morning mass. I have seen no city yet ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... academic critics. Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller are most free from either influence, and most impressed with the duties which a poet owes, before all, to the nation to which he belongs. Klopstock's national enthusiasm borders sometimes on the fantastic; for, as his own times could not inspire him, he borrowed the themes of his national panegyrics from the distant past of Arminius and the German bards. Lessing looked more to his own age, but he looked in vain for national ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... required for the mundane task of regarding the donkeys' packs, or the pace of the cautious-stepping pagazis, it was gratifying to watch the vapours play about the mountain summits—to see them fold into fleecy crowns and fantastic clusters, dissolve, gather together into a pall that threatened rain, and sail away again before the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... said, "though I am but a poor gitana and humbly born, yet I have a certain fantastic little spirit within me, which moves me to great things. Promises do not tempt me, nor presents sap my resolution, nor obsequiousness allure, nor amorous wiles ensnare me; and although by my grandmother's reckoning ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... back into the living-room, started "Molly Magee, My Girl," and to its cheerful strains he danced a fantastic jig, while the maid stared from the dining-room, and Mother, at the bedroom door, wept undisguisedly, murmuring, "Oh, my boy, my boy, that planned ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger—the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... employed upon a number of subjects at once. It lies between physician and patient, teacher and pupil. The unconscious but active motive must be brought under the conscious will. The fantastic world of childhood must be re-created. The teacher, dealing with childhood has an advantage over the physician who applies his ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Birt's last fantastic doubt vanished. Oh no! this was not Satan in disguise. When did the enemy ever counsel a boy ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... his "Royal and Noble Authors," designates the Marquis as a "fantastic protector and fanatic," and describes the " Century of Inventions" as "an amazing piece of folly;" and Hume, who does not even know the title of the book, boldly pronounces it "a ridiculous compound of lies, chimeras, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... everywhere present in the volume rival the exquisite manner of Merimee himself. One traces and unconsciously accepts as a veracious narrative the record of a fantastic though abiding love. No woman in the flesh could ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... weather-cocks. The tavern was astir, and the figure of the old, smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen beneath the stoop. Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into the valley, others high up towards the summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... history, is typical of Patiomkin's regime. This extraordinary man—mountebank, writes the English envoy, "esprit reveur," says the keener-eyed Prince de Ligne—a barbarian, of terrific appearance; fantastic beyond the verge of madness, acquired a greater influence with Catharine than any other man of her reign. He had been created "Prince of Taurida" (the Crimea) after the conquest of the southern provinces; and was resolved to dazzle Europe ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... to erect a tower in iron which, reaching the height of three hundred metres, would represent, at the industrial sight, the resultant of the modern progresses. M. Locroy reflected and accepted. Hardly twenty years ago, this project would have appeared fantastic and impossible. The state of the science of the iron constructions was not advanced enough, the security given by the calculations was not yet assured; to-day, they know where they are going, they are able to count ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... she was changed, As by the sickness of the soul! her mind Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes, They had not their own lustre, but the look Which is not of the earth; she was become The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts Were combinations of disjointed things, And forms impalpable and unperceived Of others' sight familiar were to hers. And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise Have a far ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... drawing was noticed by his chalking the floors and grave-stones with all manner of fantastic figures, and by sketching the outline of any known character of the village, dogs, or horses, which were instantly recognised as faithful portraits. The halfpence he got were always laid out in chalk or coarse ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... dark, uncertain, sombre as night's sable curtain, Filled them, thrilled them with fantastic funkings seldom felt before; So that now, to still the beating of faint hearts, they kept repeating Futile formulas, entreating Closure for the "Obstructive Bore"— With a view to Truth defeating, such they ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... and could not tell whether it was in earnest or in irony that he invited him to try St. Anne for any trouble he happened to be suffering from. But he winced at the suggestion, while his heart leaped at the fantastic thought of hanging that money-belt at her altar, and so easing himself of all his pains. He grotesquely imagined the American defaulters in Canada making a pilgrimage to St. Anne, and devoting emblems of their moral disease to her: forged notes, bewitched accounts, false statements. At ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... overhanging rock, about 50 feet high, through which water pours from above, in innumerable little streams, like a perpetual shower of rain! The never-abating action of the water has worn the rock into many fantastic shapes; and, crusting round the moss and fibres of the roots of trees, has given to it almost the appearance of a spar cavern. In several places the water has worn little reservoirs for itself, which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... own private preserve. There was absolutely every element necessary to explain Frank's remarks during his delirium; he was a religiously-minded boy, poisoned by a toxin and treated by the anti-toxin. What in the world could be expected but that he should rave in the most fantastic way, and utter every mad conception and idea that his subjective self contained. As for that absurd fancy of the doctor himself, as well as of his servant that there was "something queer" in the room—the more he thought of it, the less ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... soarings that aspired and broke; in arabesques that laughed; in gothic arches that prayed; in large undulations that wept. Sometimes he drew whole edifices—fairy castles, domes, towers, spires—which, once created, went floating off forever on the blue, freighted with their fantastic inhabitants, invisible, impalpable, and imperishable. And always within him was the record of the created thing, the record of created beauty, etched forever in the ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... the smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici—those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... sparks which flew from the torches fell to the earth as jewels. Some of the rats were shouting "Zurkielis" incessantly; and whenever a rat uttered this cry, a piece of gold fell from his mouth. The procession was followed by a great number of fantastic forms, which collected the gold from the ground, and put it into large sacks. When the farmer saw this he also gathered together as much of the gold and jewels as he could reach. Presently a cock crew, and everything vanished. The farmer returned to his house, but the gold and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... what I said at last night's 'light fantastic,' she has sent you to me!" he cried excitedly, as he opened the door on ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... by words. We hold in our hands an illuminated missal, some Gospel of Nature according to June or October, as the case may be. The price she pays for this astonishing gift is to be often overmastered by it, to be often betrayed into exuberant and fantastic phrases, and wanderings into the realm of words unborn. One fancies the dismay of the accomplished corrector of the University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over "incanting" and "reverizing" and "cose." Yet closer examination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... politicians considered that he was the mouthpiece of schemers for a Russo-French alliance in his repeated and successful endeavors to gain Napoleon's good-will, he was adroitly sounding the French emperor's mind and character. He soon convinced himself that it was shallow and fantastic, and he built upon this conviction one of the most hazardous designs which ever originated in a brain observant of realities—that identical design which eventually led Prussia, some years later, first to Schleswig ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... to behave with great circumspection; Massy's somber and fantastic humors intimidated him as being outside one's usual sea experience; but he was quite intelligent enough to realize almost from the first that he was there in the presence of an exceptional situation. His ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... confusion worse confounded by changes and experiments soon abandoned. Perseverance and intelligence now had a different result, and the little army, called into existence by the republic, proved admirable in discipline, various and fantastic as were ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... naturally ask, "if Fathom lacks the amusing, and not infrequently stimulating, hurly-burly of Smollett's former novels; if its characters, though well-conceived, are seldom divertingly fantastic and never thoroughly animate; what makes the book interesting?" The surprise will be greater than ever when the answer is given that, to a large extent, the plot makes Fathom interesting. Yes, Smollett, hitherto ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... tongue," said her father; "I believe in deeds, not in words. He has it in his power to help me, and he chooses instead, for a miserable fantastic notion of his own, to balk all my care for him. Of course the hospital was offered to him out of respect for me. No one cares for him. He is about as much known in Carlingford as—little Amy is. Of course it is to show their respect to me. And here he comes with his fantastic nonsense ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Adriano de Arma'do, the fantastic Spaniard. He is cunning and versatile, facetious and playful.—Shakespeare, Love's ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... like the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the Goblin Land near the Yellowstone. It would seem that it ought to be made a State park. Here one fancies one's self to be amid the ruins of castles, cathedrals, and fortresses, so fantastic are the shapes of the broken mountain-walls. It is a land of birds and flowers; of rock roses, wild sunflowers, golden-rods; of wax-wings, orioles, sparrows, and eagles. Here roams ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... other; and Rosythe shot an arrow of laughter towards me. Perhaps he knew about the vagaries of my Aunt Caroline; anyhow, he would have a fantastic tale to tell about me, and was going to exploit ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... network of wool and little jingling bells. Then when Don Sanchez had solemnly debated whether we should not awake Don Lopez to say farewell, and we had persuaded him that it would be kinder to let him sleep on, we mounted into our high, fantastic saddles, and set out towards the mountains, our guides leading, and we following close upon their heels as our mules could get, but by no guidance of ours, though we held the reins, for these creatures are very sagacious and so pertinacious and opiniastre that I believe ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... would hear nothing but vibrations because of the high frequency it would immediately attain while passing through. Only on its return from Mars would Spud's voice become audible on Earth. It sounded fantastic but Dr. Shalt spoke of it as if it were a certainty and Crawford knew he was recognized ...
— The Second Voice • Mann Rubin
... them at the hydrant, and then turn them loose on the grass plot; and, seemingly with the greatest delight, he would watch them as they alternately nipped the green grass, or engaged in those extraordinary fantastic exercises which horses that have been pent up in the stable, or in harness all the week, know so well how to perform. Our back yard was separated from the front by a grape arbor, which extended entirely across, and beyond which boundary the horses were not ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... of carved wood, and substituted others of marble, fixed in the wall, which are exactly like modern chimney-pieces, and have the worst effect amidst the surrounding antiquities. The exterior is rather fantastic, but the columns are beautiful, and John of Bologna's bronze doors admirable. The Campo Santo is full of ancient tombs, frescoes, modern busts, and morsels of sculpture of all ages and descriptions. The Leaning Tower[9] is 190 feet high, and there are 293 steps to the top of it, which I climbed ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... of the necromancer's chair was a heavy curtain, or portiere of cloth, covered with fantastic figures, and this was drawn aside a minute or so after Mr. Mole ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... statues stand, The polish'd works of Grecia's skillful hand; Nor dazzling palace view, whose portals proud Each morning vomit out the cringing crowd; Nor wear the tissu'd garment's cumb'rous pride, Nor seek soft wool in Syrian purple dy'd, Nor with fantastic luxury defile The native sweetness of the liquid oil; Yet calm content, secure from guilty cares, Yet home-felt pleasure, peace, and rest, are theirs; Leisure and ease, in groves, and cooling vales, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... that this "eccentric old man," of whom you have heard such ridiculously fantastic tales, is and has been for a number of years telegraph operator for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad at their little wayside station, Kilgore. It is within a few miles of the mill town of thriving Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky, and ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... attention that the crowd could spare from the fire was given to her. Delia was not aware of it. She stood a little in front of the crowd, with her veil thrown back, her hands clasped in front of her, an image of rapt despair. Her face, like all the faces in the crowd, was made lurid—fantastic—by the glare of the flames; and every now and then, as though unconsciously, she brushed away the mist of ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... garden dreaming, Where the flowers had human names, Methought, in fantastic seeming, They ...
— A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden • Walter Crane
... the surf was breaking with the noise of thunder, tossing up clouds of spray and foam to the height of a cathedral. We coasted slowly along, rounding several tall forelands, some of them piled up by the hand of nature in the most fantastic shapes. About nightfall Cape Finisterre was not far ahead,—a bluff, brown, granite mountain, whose frowning head may be seen far away by those who traverse the ocean. The stream which poured round its breast was terrific, and though our engines plied with all their force, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the islands are also of volcanic origin; some contain active volcanoes, and while the land in some instances has sunk, in others it has risen, and is broken into the most curious and fantastic shapes, bringing up also with it the coral rocks which were formed on it while it lay beneath ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... It is fantastic. So far as I know there exists not one fact upon which definite predictions such as these may be based. But also there exists not one fact which warrants specific denial of predictions such as these. And if any inference ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... man, Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, * * * * * Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven As make the angels weep, who, with our spleens, Would all themselves ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... benumbed state. It had all seemed a fantastic dream, but he had only to look around him to know that it was reality. Three or four battle lanterns were shining and they threw a ghostly light over the deck of the schooner, which was littered with spars and sails, and the bodies of men who had fallen before the fire of the ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the forces of right. The Golden Rule should be, and as the world grows in morality it will be, the guiding rule of conduct among nations as among individuals; though the Golden Rule must not be construed, in fantastic manner, as forbidding the exercise of the police power. This mighty and free Republic should ever deal with all other States, great or small, on a basis of high honor, respecting their rights as jealously as ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... brightest summer day, which, in these forest aisles, became a misty green translucence, the silence, the vastness, the solitude laid each a finger on you, bidding you go softly all the way. But in the twilight hour the real held still more aloof, and all the shadows bristled with dim fantastic shapes to awe ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... their lungs, and hurled oranges and sugar-plums at each other vigorously; and above the chariots and the throng, as far as the eye could reach, one could see banners fluttering, helmets gleaming, plumes waving, gigantic pasteboard heads moving, huge head-dresses, enormous trumpets, fantastic arms, little drums, castanets, red caps, and bottles;—all the world seemed to have gone mad. When our carriage entered the square, a magnificent chariot was driving in front of us, drawn by four horses covered with trappings embroidered in gold, and all ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... half-furnished salon, I clung to M. de la Tourelle, and begged to be taken to the rooms he had occupied before his marriage, he seemed angry with me, although he affected to laugh, and so decidedly put aside the notion of my having any other rooms but these, that I trembled in silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called up as peopling the background of those gloomy mirrors. There was my boudoir, a little less dreary—my bedroom, with its grand and tarnished furniture, which I commonly made into ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... like me an intense desire to witness them with my own eyes; and when I did see them there was no desillusion, and the effect was so overpowering that it seemed like the revelation of a new sense in me. The first glimpse I had of Loch Awe, from the top of the coach, was like the realization of a fantastic and splendid dream; I could not believe it to be a reality, and thought of some mirage; but my husband was ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... chewing a blade of grass, lay idle and withdrawn, her fair brows unpuckered by the afternoon sun (because it was July, 1920), her blue eyes on Barry, who was so different; or else she would be withdrawn but not idle, for she would be drawing houses tumbling down, or men on stilts, fantastic and proud, or goblins, or geese running with outstretched necks round a green. Or she would be writing ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... arrived at Wickham Place. The sun had set, and the backwater, in deep shadow, was filling with a gentle haze. To the right of the fantastic skyline of the flats towered black against the hues of evening; to the left the older houses raised a square-cut, irregular parapet against the grey. Margaret fumbled for her latchkey. Of course she had forgotten it. So, grasping her umbrella by its ferrule, she leant over ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... His benignity of manner placed his auditors entirely at their ease; and inclined them to listen delighted to the sweet low tone in which he began to discourse on some high theme. At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it: but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength, seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away among ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... existence without an awful shuddering; while the few fairies, which Slavic poetry and superstition present us, strike us by the distinctness and freshness of their forms, and give us the unmingled impression either of the ludicrous or of the wild and fantastic. ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... through the diamond panes of the window, throws rhomboids of light on to the polished floor. It looks like some enchanted chessboard. Leaning back and gazing with half-closed eyes, he peoples it with fantastic rooks, and knights and bishops, when suddenly the strangely penetrating voice of Angela ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... to the novelist, insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public—a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious society, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... carried out. Orders to wash a patient and open windows are never obeyed, because the whole village would rise up if, later on, the illness ended in death, and accuse the relatives of murder. I suppose they regard us and our like who live on the other side of the dividing wall as persons of fantastic notions which, when carried into effect among our own children, do no harm because of the vast strength of the children accumulated during years of eating in the quantities only possible to the rich. Their idea of happiness is eating, and they naturally suppose that everybody eats ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... the street he shook his head. It all seemed so fantastic. But the money in his hand was real money—and there was a lot of it! Suddenly he realized that people were staring at the handful of bills, and he hurriedly stuffed them in a pocket. When he was alone for a moment he stepped into a vacant ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... itself from time to time for fear of the laugh of the world at its sincerity,—how many young men were spoiled and how many more injured by becoming bad copies of a bad ideal! The blood of Don Juan ran in the veins of Vivian Grey and of Pelham. But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way of ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Lancers. However, I may console myself, for he may be in it a long time without doing much mischief, for I do hope that the people of the nations of modern Europe are too strong and too wise to let their sovereigns and ministers play such fantastic tricks as they were "wont to play," when George the 3rd, and Edward the 3rd, and Henry the 5th were kings. Property, good sense, and good business have greatly increased and spread, and are every day ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... colors, often polished below by the waves, and sometimes far up the sides, where showers have washed the sands over the cliffs. At one place I have a walk for more than a mile on a marble pavement, all polished and fretted with strange devices and embossed in a thousand fantastic patterns. Through a cleft in the wall the sun shines on this pavement and it ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... it," was Miss Jane's answer, when the dame told her. "I am not an admirer of fetes and fantastic worldly doings such as I conclude will take place at Texford. I fear there is more harm done ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... not only a power and a right, but they are bound in conscience to bring in a verdict accordingly.' BOWELL. The World is described by Gifford in his Baviad and Marviad, as a paper set up by 'a knot of fantastic coxcombs to direct the taste of the town.' Lowndes (Bibl. Man. ed. 1871, p. 2994) confounds it with The World mentioned ante, i. 257. The 'popular gentleman' was Fox, whose Libel Bill passed the House of Lords in June 1792. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... fantastic ideas, in which my hope and desire and credulity were centred, I had accepted those body-guards of state who never left my carriage. The poor Queen had murmured: I had disdained her murmurs. The public had manifested its disapproval: I had hardened myself and fought against ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan |
