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More "Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been stated, it will be seen that the Printer's Mark plays a by no means unimportant part in the early history of illustration,—whether the phase be serious or grotesque, sublime or ridiculous, we find here manifold examples, crude as well as clever. Although it cannot be said with truth that the Mark as an institution reached, like typography itself, its highest degree ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... of the Brigadier-General in Chaotong, the entrance is guarded by the customary stone images of mythical shape and grotesque features. They are believed to represent lions, but their faces are not leonine—they are a reproduction, exaggerated, of the characteristic features of the bulldog of Western China. The images ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... are grotesque, or fanciful, or so descriptive that their mention is sure to provoke a grin, occur with pleasing frequency. Who can help but smile at "Hairpin Catcher," "Hearts and Gizzards," or "Tangled Garters?" Other grotesque names ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... Wayout-on-the-Hill the other day, we shall have to reconsider the entire lot proposition. We may as well face the fact that the house which is everything appropriate and artistic in one place may in another be simply grotesque. In this phase of the selective work we will profit by the advice of the architect, if he be something of an artist and not simply a draughtsman. At any rate, if we have the lot, let us decide what style of house ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... sublimated, metaphysical love was not without its caricatures and eccentricities. One of the most grotesque figures of the period of the troubadours was Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a German knight. As a page, we are told, he drank the water in which his mistress had washed her hands. Later on he had his upper lip amputated because it displeased ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the afternoon looking ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... of women—the merest slut at home, a milliner's lay figure out of doors—she had one square foot of looking-glass upon the chimneypiece, and therein tried effects, and conjured up grotesque simpers upon ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... hard to picture a more sinister and menacing looking man than this emperor, with his averted looks and his haughty contempt for the world and mankind; and yet there was something about him which made it difficult to take him seriously, especially to an Alexandrian. There was a touch of the grotesque in the Gallic robe with a red hood in which this ominous-looking contemner of humanity was wrapped. It was called a 'Caracalla', and it was from this garment that Bassianus Antoninus had gained ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to evade it, to stifle and smother it; an inward struggle ensued which brought the perspiration in beads upon my cheeks—a struggle short, sharp, decisive. It was useless—useless to try to put it from me—this idea so wretchedly bizarre, so grotesque and fantastic, so utterly inane—it was useless to deny that the cat bore a distinct ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... your mounted animals in easy natural poses unless you are making a grotesque, in ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... Italian origin, Bonaparte had not a decided taste for the fine arts, and his taste in composition seems to have leaned towards the grotesque and the bombastic. He used always the most exaggerated phrases; and it is seldom, if ever, that his bulletins present those touches of sublimity which are founded on dignity and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... southern frontier from Bahawalpur to Gurgaon. The infiltration of English words and phrases into the languages of the province is a useful process and as inevitable as was the enrichment of the old English speech by Norman-French. But for the present the results are apt to sound grotesque, when the traveller, who expects a train to start at the appointed time, is told: "tren late hai, lekin singal down hogaya" (the train is late, but the signal has been lowered), or the criticism is passed on a popular officer: "bahut affable hai, lekin hand ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... hatching by millions. Sometime will you read from Carlyle's "Past and Present" his chapters on work, particularly that on "Labor and Reward"? Mr. Carlyle has written much that is unintelligible to most readers. He has a very grotesque, volcanic style not good to imitate. He is often sad and hopeless about the human race, but he knew from hard experience what work could do against despair. So, in spite of his ravings, notwithstanding his eruptive ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... leather, iron, steel, brass, and every thing else that could by any possibility be used for the purpose; the queer-looking postillion, with his long cue, huge boots, and pipe, all combine with the grotesque appearance of the Diligence itself, to form an ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... at the moment, but came back in half an hour to make some unnecessary remarks about the part. "Why did you say just now that I insulted you?" he asked. "Because you do," I replied. "Never, never!" he exclaimed, with most grotesque energy. "I have never insulted you." You know, my dear, he has twenty times endeavoured to kiss my hand, and once he saw fit to stroke my hair. Beast! If you knew the sort of feeling I have for him—such as you would have if you found a cockroach in your dressing-case. Of course in our life ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... the most unusual fiestas in all Spain is held every March in Valencia in honor of St. Joseph. It is called the "Fallas de San Jose" because of the huge, grotesque figures called "fallas" which are the main feature of the celebration. Every club and religious group in the city spends weeks in advance of St. Joseph's Day building these figures out of papier-mache, and each group tries to keep its design secret until the fiesta takes place. The best falla ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... so if he had given me the chance I sought. It must be understood that my second attempt to photograph the flight of the soul had proved as great a fiasco as the first. Suddenly I hit upon a perfectly conceivable (even though it seem a wilfully grotesque) explanation of my failure. What if the human derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments had no souls to photograph? Sodden with drink, debauched, degraded, and spiritually blurred or blunted to the last degree, these after all ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... thought of Milly's absurdities, to which, in description, I cannot do justice, simply because so many details have, by distance of time, escaped my recollection. But her ways and her talk were so indescribably grotesque that she made me again and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... postponed. It was suddenly precipitated on the arrival of Governor Rising, in 1654, by his capture of Fort Casimir, which the Dutch had built for the practical assertion of their claim. It seems a somewhat grotesque act of piety on the part of the Swedes, when, having celebrated the festival of Trinity Sunday by whipping their fellow-Christians out of the fort, they commemorated the good work by naming it the Fort of the Holy Trinity. It was ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... whoa!" cried the driver, for the old white steed had caught sight of the car and was testifying to its dislike of it by grotesque prancings and sidlings that threatened to wreck the ramshackle trap. "Here, get out of my way!" he ordered Oliver, "that is, if you know how to handle that snorting locomotive that you ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... the frequency of the swearing prevent its making its proper impression in the right place. And the name "Robert Herrick," bestowed on one of the three beach-loafers, might have been shunned. You may call an ordinary negro "Julius Caesar": for out of such extremes you get the legitimately grotesque. But the Robert Herrick, loose writer of the lovely Hesperides, and the Robert Herrick, shameful haunter of Papeete beach, are not extremes: and it was so very easy to avoid the association ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were shiny and thick with grease, stretched over a small round body, that contrasted strangely with his lean and bony face. And all this formed a jovial, grotesque and rather alarming picture. ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... to Sibou on the Rajah's promise to build a fort at Kenowit, are of the same tribe, and number about three hundred men. They speak the Milanow language, and have the same customs of burial. The men and some of the women are tattooed in the most grotesque patterns. When you look at them closely the invention displayed is truly remarkable; but at a distance they give a dingy, dusky appearance to the men, as if they were daubed with an inky sponge. Nature having denied them ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... excited by inspection of an exotic curio. In his dedication of the book the author begged Mme. la Duchesse de Richelieu not to look for any meaning in it, but to receive it in the same spirit in which she would receive "some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesque carved ivory idol, or some preposterous trifle brought back from the fatherland of all preposterousness." It is a record of a bit of the wandering life of a poet who makes himself a part of every scene into which fortune throws him. He has spent a summer with a Japanese mousme, whom he had married ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... convey a correct idea of the beauty, the magnificence, of some of the scenes through which we passed. Sometimes thousands of the most grotesque, fanciful, and beautiful icebergs and icefields surrounded us on all sides, intersected by numerous serpentine canals, which glittered in the sun (for the weather was fine nearly all the time we were in the straits), like threads of silver twining round ruined palaces of crystal. ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... many interesting things in the house—objects of art and of worship; things which told of distant lands and of hoary antiquity; engravings of a strange and disturbing character; variegated stones, turquoise, pearls; ugly, amorphous, and grotesque idols; representations of the god-child—there were many of these, but only one face ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... out of his waistcoat pocket, and waited till Lucilla had fairly exhausted herself with laughing. Then the examination—so cruelly grotesque in itself, so terribly serious in the issues which it involved—resumed its course: Herr Grosse glaring at his patient through his magnifying glass; Lucilla leaning back in the chair, holding the handkerchief ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... once a grand ducal residence there, which was famous in the later Medicean days for the multiplicity and ingenuity of its water-works. All kinds of surprises, picturesque and grotesque effects, and practical jokes, had been prepared by the ingenious, but somewhat childish skill of the architect. Turning the handle of a door would produce a shower-bath, sofas would become suddenly ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... his voice grew cheery, his old face shone, and in a burst of hearty enthusiasm he flung up his cap and cheered like a boy. So did the others, and as the fairy shout echoed through the belfry a troop of shadowy figures, with faces lovely or grotesque, tragical or gay, sailed by on the wings of the wintry wind and waved their hands to the ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... was protecting me!" he thought. "She is the man and rejoices that I, the weak comrade, should be protected from danger. . . . What a grotesque situation!" ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... so; at first earlier myths gathered around him, and then from time to time any unusual feats of skill or cunning shown off on one or another countryside, till many of the stories make him at the last grotesque, little more than a clown. So in Bible History, while lesser kings keep their dignity, great Solomon's wit is outwitted by the riddles of some countryman; and Lucifer himself, known in Kiltartan as "the proudest of the angels, ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest—some kind of an income ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... surprise and amazement; others were agonized with sympathy for the poor minister; and others still were full of mirth, and would have laughed outright if they had not been in a religious meeting. As to myself, the whole matter took a mirthful turn. I had been in church before, when by some queer or grotesque conjunction of affairs, the whole audience lost self control. I had witnessed mistakes, blunders and accidents that would make even solemnity herself laugh, and remained serenely grave. But to see myself in the presence of that polite audience, standing at ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... existence. 'Its best works,' says this modern Scaliger, 'are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence.... The United ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... countries about this chasm of Hierapolis, and the part it played in the Deluge, in the enigmatic expressions of the Koran respecting the oven (tannur) which began to bubble and disgorge water all around at the commencement of the Deluge. We know that this tannur has been the occasion of most grotesque imaginings of Mussulman commentators, who had lost the tradition of the story to which Mohammed made allusion. And, moreover, the Koran formally states that the waters of the Deluge were absorbed in the bosom ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... the revealers not only of theology and the ritual, but of all human knowledge.[14] The names of the Oriental Hipparchi and Euclids who solved the first problems of astronomy and geometry were unknown; but a confused and grotesque literature made use of the name and authority of Hermes Trismegistus. The doctrines of the planetary spheres and the opposition of the four elements were made to support systems of anthropology and of morality; the theorems of astronomy were used to establish ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... very orthodox. Her daughter Miss Boyle(600) who has real genius, has carved three tablets in marble with buoys, designed by herself. Those sculptures are for a chimney-piece; and she is painting panels in grotesque for the library, with pilasters of glass in black and gold. Miss Crewe, who has taste too, has decorated a room for her mother's house at Richmond, which was Lady Margaret Compton's in a very pretty manner. How ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect, to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... return with the news to Lady Chepstow, and was casting round in his mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow had bent forward out of the deeper darkness of the house-passage into the murk and gloom of the ill-lit street, and was straining his eyes as if ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... knows what would have happened to Paul, after a year or so at the factory, if Barney Bill, a grotesque god from the wide and breezy spaces of the world, had ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... have the happy disposition of animal cubs,—once out of the nursing stage, they forget they ever had parents. It is quite the natural and proper thing, born as they were born,—it would never do for them to have any over-filial regard for us. Imagine Humphry weeping for my death, or yours! What a grotesque idea! And as for Rupert and Cyprian,—it is devoutly to be hoped that when we die, our funerals may be well over before the great cricket matches of the year come on, as otherwise they will curse us for having left the world at an inconvenient season!" He laughed. "How sentiment ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... man behind him, who did not recognize him, began to quicken with anger. Almost at the flute's first note the image on the window-shade started and hearkened. A moment later it expanded to grotesque proportions, the room swiftly grew dark, and in another minute the window of a smaller one behind it shone dimly as with the flame of a lamp turned low. The flutist fluted on. From the melody it appeared that the musician had at some date not indicated, and under some unaccountable influence, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... were forced to go, Don Sanchez and I, and there being stripped we were given such dirty foul rags and so grotesque, that when we came down, Jack Dawson and Moll fell a-laughing at us, as though they would burst. And, in truth, we made a most ludicrous spectacle, —especially the Don, whom hitherto we had seen only in the neatest and most noble of clothes,—looking more like a couple of scarecrows than ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... hand on one of them, and feel that it was solid. I half groped my way through them, and got out into the open field, by creeping through between the stems of what had once been a hawthorn hedge, but had in the course of a hundred years grown into the grimmest, largest, most grotesque trees I have ever seen of the kind. I had always been a little afraid of them, even in the daytime, but they did me no hurt, and I stood in the vast hall of the silent night—alone: there lay the awfulness of it. I had never before known what the night was. The real sting of its ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... direction. These have been corroded by storms and worn smooth by time, until they present the appearance of half-baked images of clay molded by human hands, instead of sandstone rocks fashioned by wind and weather. Each grotesque and fantastic shape has received a name. One is here introduced to the "Washerwoman," the "Lady of the Garden," the "Siamese Twins," and the "Ute God," and besides these may be seen the "Wreck," the "Baggage Room," ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... in their hands; then saw his suspected slave enter through a back door, his black skin painted to represent a skeleton. The old man held up a fat toad, which, he said, was his familiar, and the company began to worship it with grotesque and obscene ceremonies. Though he felt a thrill of disgust and even a dim sense of fear at the spectacle, the planter broke in at the door and confronted the Obeah man. Had he ordered the old fellow to do any given task ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their situation, and afforded ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Orders in Council, and often under British convoy.[269] The fact was noteworthy, as bearing upon the contention of the United States Government soon after, that the Non-Intercourse Law was adequate security for the action of American merchant vessels; a grotesque absurdity, in view of the embargo experiences. That it is not consonant with national self-esteem to accept foreign assistance to carry out national laws is undeniable; but it is a step further to expect another nation ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... continued Roland rising, "this is between ourselves, isn't it? Not a word to any one. The ghosts might be forewarned and act accordingly. It would never do to let those gay dogs get the best of us; that would be too grotesque." ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... any doubt, I am thought to be one of the most indifferent men in the world. I am sceptical, which is not the same thing, sceptical because I am clear-sighted. And my eyes say to my heart, Hide yourself, old fellow, you are grotesque, and it hides itself." ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... saving life made expiation. In dignity, simplicity, humor, in sympathetic etching of a sturdy fisher people, and above all in the echoes of the sea, Doctor Luke is worthy of great praise. Character, humor, poignant pathos, and the sad grotesque conjunctions of old and new civilizations are expressed through the medium of a style that has distinction and strikes a note of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... was insensibly led on. She still followed the course of the stream to where the deep shades retired, and the scene again opening to day, yielded to her a view so various and sublime, that she paused in thrilling and delightful wonder. A group of wild and grotesque rocks rose in a semicircular form, and their fantastic shapes exhibited Nature in her most sublime and striking attitudes. Here her vast magnificence elevated the mind of the beholder to enthusiasm. Fancy caught the thrilling sensation, and at ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... which, at the same time, has a greater proportion of impertinence. He has been vastly lavish of erudition, of smut, and insipid raillery. An agreeable tale of two pages is purchased at the expense of whole volumes of nonsense. There are but few persons, and those of a grotesque taste, who pretend to understand and to esteem this work; for, as to the rest of the nation, they laugh at the pleasant and diverting touches which are found in Rabelais and despise his book. He is looked upon as the prince of buffoons. The readers are vexed to think that a ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... this person draws an obliterating brush. As practically every traveller who has honoured our unattractive land with his effusive presence has subsequently left it in a printed record that our ceremonies are grotesque, our priesthood ignorant and depraved, our monasteries and sacred places spots of plague upon an otherwise flower-adorned landscape, and our beliefs and sacrifices only worthy to exist for the purpose of being made into jest-origins by more refined communities, the omission on this one's part may ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... roads became blocked with all manner of rickety vehicles, many of them of the most primitive description, filled with the families and furniture of peaceable farmers, who had left their homes in fear of the approaching rebels. A more grotesque picture than was presented by this anxious train it ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... restraint which made their predecessors, the Buccaneers, both formidable and respectable. These Ishmaels of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the moment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, after serving as boon companion in some hideous debauch, or might sit at his ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... heartless f. Trifling f. Fooded f. Astrological and figure-flinging f. Thick and threefold f. Genethliac and horoscopal f. Damasked f. Knavish f. Fearney f. Idiot f. Unleavened f. Blockish f. Baritonant f. Beetle-headed f. Pink and spot-powdered f. Grotesque f. Musket-proof f. Impertinent f. Pedantic f. Quarrelsome f. Strouting f. Unmannerly f. Wood f. Captious and sophistical f. Greedy f. Soritic f. Senseless f. Catholoproton f. Godderlich f. Hoti and Dioti f. Obstinate f. Alphos and Catati f. Contradictory ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... |Changes in method of manufacture. |By adventition—|Changes in environment. |Changes of use. Modification of form—| |Lack of use. | Influence of new or exotic forms, etc. | | /To enhance usefulness. |By intention—| | To please fancy.—/For the beautiful. For the grotesque. ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... races are most impressed by such qualities as lightness and delicacy of outline, round and softly-flowing curves and elegance of ornamentation, the German appears, to the Anglo-Saxon and Latin, to be more impressed by the elaborate, the gigantic, the Gothic, the grotesque, the hard, the made, the massive, and the square. In both styles are to be found "beauty and harmony, the aesthetic," to quote the Emperor, but they appeal differently to people of different national temperaments. To the Anglo-Saxon and ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... opened. The lights dazzled her. The doorway, as she stood faltering, almost fainting, before it, seemed to be full of grotesque dancing faces, some swathed in bandages, others powder-blackened, some hot with excitement, others pallid with fatigue. They were such faces, piled one above the other, as are seen ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... to spring up spontaneously in every quarter of the country, like the natural wild flowers of the soil. But the unaffected beauties of sentiment, which seem rather the result of accident than design, were dearly purchased, in the more extended pieces, at the expense of such a crude mass of grotesque and undigested verse, as shows an entire ignorance of the principles of the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... books who had been in similar evil straits,—with Marc Antony, with King Arthur in Gwendolen's enchanted castle, and with Geraint the strong but slothful,—rather far-fetched this last comparison,—and of all the rest. It was a grotesque variety, but amid it all he really suffered. And he would make good resolves and, for the moment, firm ones, and return to town when the dew was falling and the moonlight coming, and the tale was but retold. And the woman was wise, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... impatient amidst the heartless courtesies of society, and little practised in the minuter attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlaughing graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato ingeniously compares Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams. The man of genius amidst many a circle may exclaim with Themistocles, "I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city;" and with Corneille, he may be allowed to smile at his own ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... world; and he was a quite undistinguished person until he found a way to produce some effect upon his grandmother the public by shocking her into attention. His method is to choose the ugliest models to be found; to put them into the most grotesque and indecent postures imaginable; to draw them in the manner of a savage, or a depraved child, or a worse manner if that be possible; to surround his figures with blue outlines half an inch wide; and to paint them in crude and staring colors, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... what more natural, more comprehensible, Charles being who and what he was? Not that he would, in the faintest degree, lend himself to such misplaced affection. Of that he was incapable. The bare idea was grotesque. He, of course, was guiltless. But, assuming there was a feeling on Theresa's side, wasn't she equally guiltless? She could not help being fascinated.—Thus Miss Felicia was bound to acquit both. Alike they left the court without a stain on their ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the table there should be a curious, grotesque, but very gay flower, standing upright in a pot of wood or heavy paper, which will not break when Thyrsis drops it. Concealed at the root of this plant there should be a small sack of black confetti, to be used ...
— Aria da Capo • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... which originated in the middle ages, in connection with the gross perversion of the truth of God, that this person is one of repulsive and grotesque countenance, with the figure of a monstrosity, is an invention and cannot be verified from Scripture. The Bible knows nothing of such a being with a horrible face and figure. The very opposite is the teaching of the Word of God. He was originally the greatest and most marvelous ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... majority—admired and even loved him, he died the death of a dog. Tremendous as was the power of imperialism, the Romans often treated their individual emperors as Nero himself treated the Syrian goddess, whose image he first worshipped with awful veneration and then subjected to the most grotesque indignities, for retribution did not linger, and the vengeance fell at once on the guilty Emperor and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on the contrary, some wholesome stimulus to the fancy of men like Luca and Donatello themselves, came of the grotesque and ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... kept the lower curtain of his window jealously drawn. But at night his shadow, strongly projected on the curtain, was in incessant motion; and far into the morning hours a gigantic head and arms shifted and blended upon it in grotesque forms. At the other window of the workman's apartment the young girl often sat, book in hand, and moved her lips as if she were reading aloud. Her eyes were never seen to wander to the outer world with those longings for freedom and fresh air which are natural to the youthful heart, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and it fitly prefigured the sight of that long file of tumbrils bearing to the Place de la Revolution the fairest scions of French aristocracy. On the other hand, 'God Save the King,' in its original, has one or two lines as grotesque as 'Yankee Doodle' itself; yet we have paraphrased it in 'America,' and made it a hymn meet for all our churches. But the 'Star-spangled Banner' combines dignity and beauty, and it would be hard to find a line of it that ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... imagined more graceful than the airy open colonnades of its two spires, light as a handful of wheat ears loosely bound together. The colour of the grey stone gives solemnity to the rest of the exterior, which is massive and astonishingly rich in the grotesque element. We carefully studied the gargoyles round the roof, and, in spite of defacements, made out most of them—here a grinning demon with a struggling human being in its clutch—there an odd beast, part human, part pig, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Cupido', and the idea is common. I have made no attempt to correct the tags of Latinity in this play. Mrs. Behn openly confessed she knew no Latin, and she was ill supplied here. I do not conceive that the words are intentionally faulty and grotesque. Lady Knowell is ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... concerning whom Hawthorne says, "scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous gift as a story-teller," was Captain Stephen Burchmore, the public storekeeper. The stories of themselves were generally extravagant and grotesque. It was "the marvelous gift" of narration that carried people off their legs. I have known the company present to roar with laughter, and not one more convulsed ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... blue sky; monstrous serpents coiled in groups like the spirals of a solomonic column; gigantic negroes, heads down and hands on the ground, the roots like fingers thrust deep into the soil, their feet in the air, grotesque stems with bunches of leaves springing from them. Some, vanquished by the centuries, were lying on the ground, sustained by forked branches, like old men trying to lift themselves with ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected: 'He shall be able to see,' 'He ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chairs received them on the lower floor, carried them out into a chill rain that drummed overhead and splashed along the compound path in silver points. The sunken flags in the road formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire. A few grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles, or like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets. The smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of opium, grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... grinning upon the cats, gathered them up, two under each arm, and bore them away, moving out of sight between the box borders like some queer monster, with her wide humping flanks of black bombazine enhanced by four angrily waving yellow cat tails, which gave an effect of grotesque ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... steps, placed in its centre and at the extremities, into what might be called the garden proper, and was fenced along the top by a stone parapet with a heavy balustrade, ornamented from space to space with huge grotesque figures of animals seated upon their haunches, among which the favourite bear was repeatedly introduced. Placed in the middle of the terrace between a sashed-door opening from the house and the central flight of steps, a huge animal of the same species supported ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... These remarkable and grotesque appearing birds attain a length of about 48 inches. The plumage varies from white to a deep rosy red. It requires several years for them to attain the perfect adult plumage, and unlike most birds, they are in the best of plumage during the ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... worthy of influencing us, is there any good in enquiring concerning them? Shall I mind a thing that is not worth minding, because it came to me in a dream, or was told me by a ghost? It is the quality of a thing, not how it arrived, that is the point. But true things are often mingled with things grotesque. For aught I know, at one and the same time, a spirit may be taking advantage of the door set ajar by sleep, to whisper a message of love or repentance, and the troubled brain or heart or stomach may be sending forth fumes that cloud the vision, and cause evil echoes ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... window, in a wide wooden arm-chair, sat a large woman about sixty, dressed in black. She wore on either side of her long white face two corkscrew curls, which gave her a somewhat ridiculous appearance. But she ceased to be ridiculous or grotesque when she rose from her chair to greet her son. Her face beamed, and she held out her hands in a beautiful gesture ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... while Schillie, Madame, and I worked for another half hour, and went through like ladies to see a sight which enchanted us. A most magnificent cavern, cool and dark, though some light penetrated in from above somewhere, the ground was covered with fine dry sand, the numerous grotesque shapes and oddities all around the cavern seemed almost made on purpose for little private habitations and snug corners. It was so large in size that it had nothing of the musty feeling of the little caverns ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... Stooping over the parapet of the stockade they look off over the sea. They see more than the thin blue line of boundary between the sky and sea. The ocean does not interest them for its fine changing colors, nor the sky for the huge grotesque shapes of its clouds. What they see off there in space is something more real to them than the tint of waters and the face of the clouds: something that they love. They look for the boats that sailed for the fishing grounds, and that must now soon appear on the ...
— Our Children - Scenes from the Country and the Town • Anatole France
... swine with two tails apiece. The knights are provided with shields, bearing Saint Andrew's cross and the thistle for a device, and would have been arrayed, without doubt, in kilt and tartan had it been possible. The bishops wear grotesque-looking cocked hats, intended for mitres, and their countenances are so singularly truculent and unprepossessing, that Max accuses the artist of having in this petty way, evinced "his Scottish and Presbyterian ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Nature, however exalted or however grotesque, have their foundation in experience. The notion of personal volition in Nature had this basis. In the fury and the serenity of natural phenomena the savage saw the transcript of his own varying moods, and he accordingly ascribed these phenomena to beings of like passions ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... thus lost, the footnotes are, to a certain extent, progressive; that is to say, a word already explained in a foregoing ballad is not always explained again; and to the best of my ability I have freed the notes from the grotesque blunders observable in ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... A discord in music is felt to be a discord only as it is isolated; when it takes its fitting and inevitable place in the large unity of the symphony, it becomes full of meaning. The hippopotamus, dozing in his tank at the Zoo, is wildly grotesque and ugly. But who shall say that, seen in the fastnesses of his native rivers, he is not the beautiful perfect fulfilling of nature's harmony? To a race of blacks, the fair-skinned Apollo appearing among them could not but be monstrous. The smoking factory, sordid ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... From the narrowness of the enclosure, the house on each side seemed to be very high, and Linda, looking round with astonished eyes, could see that at every point the wood was carved. And the waterspouts were ornamented with grotesque figures, and the huge broad stairs which led to the open galleries on the left hand were of polished oak, made so slippery with the polishers' daily care that it was difficult to tread upon them without falling. All around the bottom of the court there ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... on he rode, at a foot's pace, followed by his twin shadows; past the temples of Maha Deo, still rosy where they faced the west, still rumbling and throbbing with muffled music; past wayside shrines, mere alcoves for grotesque images—Shiva, Lord of Death, or Ganesh the Elephant God—each with his scented garlands and his nickering chiragh; past shadowy groups round the dinner fires, cooking their evening meal: on and out through the double fortified gateways into the deserted road, his whole being ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress; for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacra—phantasms; and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... at the same time portend wind and storm. All Rome was early astir. It was ushered in by the criers traversing the streets, and proclaiming the rites and spectacles of the day, what they were, and where to be witnessed, followed by troops of boys, imitating, in their grotesque way, the pompous declarations of the men of authority, not unfrequently drawing down upon their heads the curses and the batons of the insulted dignitaries. A troop of this sort passed the windows of the room in which Julia and I were sitting at our morning meal. ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... anxious to be taught, and most docile under direction. Their ignorance previously was universal and extreme. It is no wonder that their religious camp-meetings had become associated with the most grotesque ideas and narrations. It is no wonder that their phraseology was a caricature of civilised language. For how could they be expected to manifest intelligence without any education? So deplorably destitute of instruction were they that ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... sat at too careless an angle; his black hair was a little too long. These eccentricities the cartoonists seized on and exaggerated so that most people who have not seen the man picture Bryan, not as a determined looking man with a piercing eye and tightset mouth, but as a grotesque frock-coated figure with the sombrero of a cow-puncher and the hair of a poet. If the delegates at the convention noticed any of these peculiarities as Bryan arose to speak, they soon forgot them. His undoubted power to carry an audience with him was ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... the cave lay only a few feet below, faintly discernible in the yellow light which issued from a hooded lantern. Gregory's eyes searched the grotesque shadows which fell ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... less ready and less able than Hellas and old England were to look through the insistent, and often grotesque, substance at the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... inspired yet eccentric and hardly likely to endure, attract our attention. In these eccentric movements the power of Christ's personality is manifest, and yet it appears amid circumstances so peculiar that the phenomena in themselves are grotesque. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... ago—the earth, basking in the warmth of a tropical climate, had produced a luxuriant vegetation and a swarming progeny of gigantic small-brained animals for which the exuberant vegetation provided abundant and easily acquired sustenance. They were a breed of huge, clumsy, and grotesque monsters, vast in bulk and strength, but of little intelligence, that wandered heavily on the land and gorged lazily on the abundant food at hand. With the advance of the carnivora, the primitive forerunners ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... The dinner service was of white porcelain, edged with blue, and was in perfect order. The decanters were of the old-fashioned octagonal kind still in use in the provinces, though they have disappeared elsewhere. Grotesque figures had been carved on the horn handles of the knives. These relics of ancient splendor, which, nevertheless, looked almost new, seemed to those who scrutinized them to be in keeping with the kindly and open-hearted nature of ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... may be history or may be allegory. There is in them nothing grotesque, nothing which could mar the feeling of authenticity, the sense of the actual occurence of the dream incident. The faces and figures perceived have the light shade and expression which seems quite proper to the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... entitled to notice in any sketch of her life, however meagre, he is the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown Folks;" and "Oldtown Fireside Stories" embody the experiences of his childhood and youth among the grotesque and original characters ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... luniolatry, the parent tree. If the new moon, with its waxing light, may represent the primitive nature-worship which spread over the earth; and the full moon, the deity who is supposed to regulate our reservoirs and supplies of water: the waning moon may fitly typify the grotesque and sickly superstition, which, under the progress of radiant science and spiritual religion, is readier ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... deliberately assume a frightful, terrifying or grotesque appearance. This they do by inflating their bodies, by erecting hair, skin, or folds, or by unusual poses. Darwin speaks of the hissing of certain snakes, the rattle of the rattle-snake, the grating of ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... too grotesque marching to church like a lot of children, because he tells us to do ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... beautiful, in the dark style which I cannot help thinking has fallen into unmerited abeyance; and as she passed us I could see that she was very graceful. She was dressed in a lady's acceptance of the fashions of that day, which would be thought so grotesque in this. I have heard contemporaneous young girls laugh at the mere notion of hoops, but in 1870 we thought hoops extremely becoming; and this young lady knew how to hold hers a little on one side so as to give herself room in the narrow avenue, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... clothes could not fit smoothly on his gaunt and bony frame. He was no tailor's figure of a man; but from the first he clothed himself as well as his means allowed, and in the fashion of the time and place. In reading the grotesque stories of his boyhood, of the tall stripling whose trousers left exposed a length of shin, it must be remembered not only how poor he was, but that he lived on the frontier, where other boys, less poor, were scarcely better clad. In Vandalia, the blue jeans he wore was the dress of his ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... shadows of the trees were getting the grotesque and exaggerated forms which precede the last rays of the luminary, and while the people were still listening to their pastor, a solitary individual was placed on a giddy eyrie, whence he might note the movements of those who dwelt in the hamlet, without being the subject of ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Jimsy King with emphasis but without passion. The statement was too grotesque for ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... cigarettes from a famous tobacconist. Beyond that little oasis, however, were all the evidences of a hired abode. A hole in the closely drawn curtains was fastened together by a safety pin. The horsehair easy-chairs bore disfiguring antimacassars, the photographs which adorned the walls were grotesque but typical of village ideals, the carpet was threadbare, the closed door secured by a latch instead of the usual knob. One side of the room was littered with golf clubs, a huge game bag and several boxes of cartridges. Two shotguns lay upon the remains of a sofa. It scarcely needed the costume ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... light coat that they had me put on, that covered my tunic and hose, and a hat of grotesque round shape that they put on my head. They led me then out of the building and ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... sit perfectly upright, some with their backs and some with their breasts toward me, but every head turned squarely in my direction. Their eyes are closed to a mere black line; though this crack they are watching me, evidently thinking themselves unobserved. The spectacle is weird and grotesque. It is a new effect, the night side of the woods by daylight. After observing them a moment I take a single step toward them, when, quick as thought, their eyes fly wide open, their attitude is changed, they bend, some this way, some that, and, instinct ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... is presented to our view. Shupaulovi is built in terraces about a central court, or plaza, and in the plaza about fifty men are drawn up in a line facing us. These men are naked except that they wear masks, strange and grotesque, and great flaring headdresses in ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... of William IV. took place on the 8th of September. The ceremony was shorn of the grotesque pageantry of chivalric times, and was confined to the interior of the abbey. The royal procession moved in state carriages from St. James's Palace, and was escorted by the cavalry. His majesty was saluted with hearty ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... being comparatively poor, while the two last are exceedingly fine. The story begins in the middle of the Saint's life. The first scene shows "How God punished Florenzo," a wicked rival abbot, who had tried to poison S. Benedict, and to lead his monks astray. In the background four grotesque devils are tearing down the walls of his convent, with extraordinary energy of action, and three others bear away the soul of the monk, whose body may be seen crushed beneath the ruins. In the foreground the Saint listens to the tale, told by ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... small and red, and that had added to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... had a far different part to play. Every morning, with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for news of John Storm. She had not far to look. A sort of grotesque romance had gathered about him, as of a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His name was the point of a pun; there were cartoons, caricatures, and all other forms of the joke that is not a joke ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the Baboo is merely a grotesque Bracken shadow, but in the course of geological ages it might harden down into something palpable. It is this possibility that leads Sir Ashley Eden to advise the Baboo to revert to its original type; but it is not so easy to become homogeneous after you have ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... off, followed by Baptiste and a short, square, old negro, very black and grotesque, who had introduced himself to the mulatto, with many glittering and cavernous smiles, as "d'body-sarvant of d'Rev'n' ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... then the fallen rider, being assisted, got up slowly and stood rubbing his arm. No serious injury seemed to be done to the man, and the couple presently turned their attention to the machine by the roadside. They were not in cycling clothes Hoopdriver observed. One wore the grotesque raiment for which the Cockney discovery of the game of golf seems indirectly blamable. Even at this distance the flopping flatness of his cap, the bright brown leather at the top of his calves, and the chequering of his stockings were perceptible. The other, ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... grotesque heaps—a woman's blouse was flung across the back of a chair and hung limply; a pair of shoes stood beside the bed in the attitude of walking—tired-looking shoes, run down at the heels and skinned at the toes. And on the far side of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... their officialism; for here and there in them you see exquisite bits of low relief carving, that a Greek would have been proud of, hidden away in interminable hieroglyphic histories spread indiscriminately over grotesque pillars and vast walls, as regardlessly of decorative effect as advertisements in a newspaper's columns. The open desert is the best of Egypt, and this thread of blue canal strung with lakes through its sand is very pretty and interesting all the way. We come to ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the smooth slope leading down to the grotesque cedars and out to the Pass, Venters's cool nerve returned. One long survey to the left, then one to the right, satisfied his caution. Leading the burros down to the spur of rock, he ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... particoloured ends of ribands and poor glass toys completed the ornamental portion of his attire. The fluttered and confused disposition of all the motley scraps that formed his dress, bespoke, in a scarcely less degree than his eager and unsettled manner, the disorder of his mind, and by a grotesque contrast set off and heightened the more ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... revolutions, which, blind and fierce by nature, fell furiously upon it, rent its rich array of sculpture and carving, shivered its rose-windows, shattered its necklaces of arabesques and quaint figures, tore down its statues—sometimes because of their crown; lastly, changing fashion, even more grotesque and absurd, from the anarchic and splendid deviations of the Renaissance down to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of the diatribe; she knew a flood of abuse was pouring from the lips of the Jewess, but she was too stunned to hear the details of the abuse. Joe, her Joe, was Joe Fleming the prize-fighter. It was abhorrent, impossible, too grotesque to be believable. Her clear- eyed, girl-cheeked Joe might be anything but a prize-fighter. She had never seen one, but he in no way resembled her conception of what a prize- fighter must be—the human brute with tiger eyes and a streak ...
— The Game • Jack London
... have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers' mental aberration, that grotesque potiche, works! The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions. It heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like a Bravo of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... and the Goblin, tracing the history of the young miner and the princess after the return of the latter to her father's court, where more terrible foes have to be encountered than the grotesque earth-dwellers. ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... engaged in copying a humorous picture from the last page of Harper's Weekly. It was an ambitious attempt on the part of so young a pupil, but he had succeeded remarkably well, reproducing with close fidelity the grotesque expressions of the ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... my own, however, I call it goblin, because an odd aspect of the quaint in it yet never quite achieved the picturesque. Grotesque, probably, is the truer word, for everywhere I noticed, and for the first time, this slight alteration of the natural due either to the exaggeration of some detail, or to its suppression, generally, I think, to the latter. Life everywhere appeared ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... dreadfully startled and the Mayor's obsequies were instantly suspended, while with pale faces and in trembling tones we begged her to say what had alarmed her. The younger children were so agitated that they held their candles unsteadily, and the waving shadows of our figures danced with uncouth and grotesque movements on the walls and flung themselves into the most uncanny attitudes. The face of the dead man, now gleaming ghastly in the light, and now extinguished by some floating shadow, appeared at each emergence to have taken ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... which occurred in 1870 at St. Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of "The Ring and the Book"—the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... in taking such liberties With every other chair in the house. Clara treated it with still greater reverence, often taking occasion to smooth its cushion, and to brush the dust from the carved flowers and grotesque figures of its oaken back and arms. Laurence would sometimes sit a whole hour, especially at twilight, gazing at the chair, and, by the spell of his imaginations, summoning up its ancient occupants to appear in ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... minute, or I shall give you somethin' worse than medicine. Open your mouth!" And Ephraim opened his mouth as if his mother's will were a veritable wedge between his teeth, swallowed the medicine with a miserable gulp, and made a grotesque face of wrath and disgust. Caleb, watching, swallowed and grimaced at the same instant that his son did. There were tears in his old eyes as he took ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... by the hissing flame; and Nick, the guide, as he leaned over, looking downward after it,—every one of the innumerable wrinkles in his black face made more distinct, with his white beard and mustache, and the whites of his eyes seeming to glow in the blue elfish light,—was a caricature, half grotesque, almost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... because he was adverse: it suffered rather from his favour: the extravagant tastes of the princeps and the many eccentricities of his life and character may perhaps find a reflection in some of the more grotesque extravagances of Lucan, such for instance as the absurdly servile dedication of the Pharsalia. But even in this direction his influence was ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... swelling buds of trees were visible against the sky, and the branches were like grotesque designs on a Japanese plate. There was a little clump of moss, very cool and soft, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... distance from the half-open door lay Dainty Chase, clothed only in her night robes, her fair face upturned to the dim night light like the face of one dead, while over her bent the figure of old black mammy, grotesque in her red flannel petticoat, large-flowered calico sacque, and white turban, and pathetic in the grief with which she chafed Dainty's cold little hands, begging her to open her eyes and speak just one word to her ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... His choice of language, though often homely, and sometimes quaint or coarse, was always adapted to his purpose. He had a great command of racy phrases in common use, and frequently gave them an unexpected turn which enlivened his style as by a sudden stroke of wit or grotesque humor. But these touches were rapid, never detained him; he kept grappling with his argument, and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... an expression of distaste to cross his face. He looked at the chubby man across the desk and felt the distaste deepen and crystallize. John Hart's face was round, with little lines going up from the eyes, an almost grotesque, burlesque-comic face that belied the icy practical nature of the man behind it. A thoroughly distasteful face, Shandor thought. Finally he said, "The story, John. On Ingersoll. Let's have ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... themselves and their families by unsuitable alliances. The long confinement with all its inconveniences, produced the desired effect, in rendering the princess obedient to the wishes of her royal parent. This barbarous case, which is ornamented with much grotesque carving, still remains as a memento in terrorem to all the young ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... Titian. The handsome patrician, a little too proud of his rank, his magnificent garments and accoutrements, his virile beauty, stands fronting the spectator in a dress of crimson and gold, wearing a plumed and jewelled hat, which in its elaboration closely borders on the grotesque, and holding a hunting-spear. Still more astonishing in its exaggeration of a Venetian mode in portraiture[44] is the great crimson, dragon-crowned helmet which, on the left of the canvas, Cupid himself ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... the interview when I took down the will. I answered them all. But I vaguely felt he and I were at cross-purposes. I grew almost as uncomfortable under his gaze as if he had been examining me in the interest of the other side. He managed to fluster me. As a witness for Harold, I was a grotesque failure. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... inhuman wretch took up one of the round cushions from the nearest chair, held it up at arm's length, as if it were a head which he held by the hair, and then slapped it twice with the palm of his left hand. The gesture was so horrible and withal so grotesque, that Esther closed her eyes with a shudder, and her pale cheeks took on a leaden hue. Merri laughed aloud and ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the first rays of the sun lit up the Biggersbergen in all their grotesque beauty, I realised for the first time where I was, and found that I was considerably more than 12 miles from Elandslaagte, the fateful scene of yesterday. Tired out, half-starved and as disconsolate as the donkey in the ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... the Asika looked at this man in a reflective way, and Alan looked at him also through the eyeholes of his mask, finding him well worth studying. As has been said, notwithstanding his paint and grotesque decorations, he was very good-looking for a native, with well-cut features of an Arab type. Also he was tall and muscular and not more than thirty years of age. What struck Alan most, however, was none of these things, nor his jewelled chains, nor even his gilded pigtail, ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... wooden bridges, and were much struck with the brilliant fire-flies which were flitting about among the trees. On re-entering the town, we passed large arched gateways leading to particular quarters, and remarked in that inhabited by the Chinese, the grotesque-looking houses, lit up with large paper-lanterns, of gaudy colours, and Chinese inscriptions or monsters on them, and the long rows of Chinese characters up and down the door-posts, or over the windows. After the quiet of the sea, our senses were confused by the strange cries, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... finding names which really depict the animal, call the larva "the Devilkin." It is indeed a spectre, a diabolical phantom worthy of the pencil of a Callot. (Jacques Callot (1592-1635), the French engraver and painter, famous for the grotesque nature of his subjects.—Translator's Note.) There is nothing to beat it in the extravagant medley of figures in his "Temptation of Saint Anthony." Its flat abdomen, scalloped at the edges, rises into a twisted crook; its peaked head carries on the top two large, divergent, tusk-shaped horns; ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... man sat staring into the fire. The six-foot logs crackled and roared up the chimney, and the blaze lighted the wide, dignified room. From the high chimney-piece, that had been the feature of a great hall in Florence two centuries before, grotesque heads of black oak looked down with a gaze which seemed weighted with age-old wisdom and cynicism, at the man's sad face. The glow of the lamp, shining like a huge gray-green jewel, lighted unobtrusively ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... discontented Irishmen will demand either the extension of federalism or separation. In every federal government the tendency of the States is to diminish as far as possible the authority of the federal power. But this tendency will be specially strong in the grotesque Anglo-Irish federation, since the federal power will be nothing but the predominance of England. The mode of weakening the federal authority is only too obvious. 'The more there is of the more,' says ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... a husband and a father, for his effort of valor as a soldier, he had been rewarded with the most horrible punishment which can fall upon a man. Effort, therefore, on his part was useless; it was worse than useless, it was grotesque. Let others make ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... finish, which excited the envy of the Camel and made him desire to win the favour of the assembly by the same means. So he got up from his place and began dancing, but he cut such a ridiculous figure as he plunged about, and made such a grotesque exhibition of his ungainly person, that the beasts all fell upon him with ridicule and ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... is, in the track of his Leader, the only true Conqueror, so Hercules, in spite of all the grotesque adjuncts that the lower inventions of the heathen hung round him, is a far closer likeness of manhood—as, indeed, the proverbial use of some of his tasks testifies—and of repentant man conquering himself. The great crime, after which his life was a bondage ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the doorway, his lanky form with the red glare of the fire behind it casting a grotesque shadow on the interior wall of the cabin. He remained there on guard, lest any of ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... swear I have met with characters and figures that would be condemned as extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently eforescent, like a full-blown ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... his court—including an outsize animated picture of a mermaid ballet, quite an eye-catcher. But the broad quartz windows showed merely a shifting greenish-blue of seawater, and the only live fish visible were in an aquarium across from the bar. Pacific Colony lacked the grotesque loveliness of the Florida and Cuba settlements. Here they were somehow a working ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... returning on the stage, reined in with a sudden interest. Stover hastily executed a series of grotesque inclinations and, grasping the clumsy valise, disappeared behind the door, hearing; as he struggled up the stairs, the roar from without ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... the principles peculiar to French traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, for the quays immediately to swarm with jerseys and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... observed, the grotesque is that which is most obviously distinctive in Hood's writings. But in different degrees it is combined with other elements, and in each combination altered and modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Materiam superabat opus, cannot be said of us. We may be accused of grossness, but not of flimsiness; of extravagance, but not of affectation; of want of art and refinement, but not of a want of truth and nature. Our literature, in a word, is Gothic and grotesque; unequal and irregular; not cast in a previous mould, nor of one uniform texture, but of great weight in the whole, and of incomparable value in the best parts. It aims at an excess of beauty or power, hits or misses, and is either very good indeed, or absolutely good for nothing. This ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... madness, catalepsy, premature burial, torture, mesmerism, and revengeful cruelty; tales of weird beauty; allegories of conscience; narratives of pseudo-science; stories of analytical reasoning; descriptions of beautiful landscapes; and what are usually termed "prose poems." He also wrote tales grotesque, humorous, and satirical, most of which are failures. The earlier tales are predominantly imaginative and emotional; most of the later ones are predominantly intellectual. None of the tales touches ordinary, healthy life; there ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... they will take the hint; but there is too much kindness underneath his wrath for him to be capable of murdering even a thievish sparrow. He likes to make others believe, however, that he is desperately in earnest. His keen sense of the comic and the grotesque in human nature makes him one of the raciest of story-tellers; but although he does not put his tongue in traces, he is none the less a worthy priest. There are many such as he in France—men who are really devout, but never ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the deep bass of his whilom accents? Where now the grotesque majesty of his bearing, and the impressive gestures that erstwhile had ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... Salisbury for that very speech?"—a retort that produced a tempest of cheers. There were then some scornful and contemptuous allusions to Mr. Russell—to his stale vituperation, and, above all, to his grotesque charge against Mr. Morley of making himself the tool of clericalism. "There are more kinds of clericalism than one," said Mr. Morley, alluding to the violent partisanship of the Presbyterian clergymen of South Tyrone. Finally, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... its pivot. The hall was now cleared for the masks. In this play, the Black Knight himself generally joined, laughing heartily at and hurrying on the mis-haps of the revellers. Many horrible and grotesque-looking shapes and disguises soon made their appearance; but one, more especially than the rest, excited no slight degree of distress and alarm. His antics proved a continual source of annoyance to the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... looked a dark slaty grey. Over the screen in the centre was seen the head of what seemed an image, very great and horrible. The light, which came from an opening immediately above the image, showed a horned and bearded head, misshapen and grotesque. Possibly at another time and place Paullinus might have smiled at the ugly thing; but here, peering at them over the screen, in the fetid gloom, it froze the blood in ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with the furtive motion of the bat, she looked in all directions, but saw nothing, and only heard, faintly, the flying footfalls of the lad. Can there be anything more dreadful than the matutinal apparition of an ugly old maid at her window? Of all the grotesque sights which amuse the eyes of travellers in country towns, that is the most unpleasant. It is too repulsive to laugh at. This particular old maid, whose ear was so keen, was denuded of all the adventitious aids, of whatever kind, ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... thought before that one might love San Marco!" Caterina said, as she turned her glowing face frankly to the old man; "he was never a person, but just a grotesque ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... 'fifties the north-east coast collier brigs and schooners were usually commanded by this type of illiterates, and innumerable stories might be told of their strange methods and grotesque beliefs. The following is a fair example. The London trade once became congested with tonnage, and a demand sprang up for Holland, whereupon a well-known brig was chartered for Rotterdam. She had been so long employed running along ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... her own room. St. Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his whole past, even the clothing that was part of it. Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer converted to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque devices to express his utter separation from the world. Others, it is true, have chosen quieter methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls the cell of self-knowledge the solitude they required; but some decisive break was imperative for ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... arts prevail; 1040 (For vice, though frontless, and of harden'd face, Is daunted at the sight of awful grace;) An hideous figure of their foes they drew, Nor lines, nor looks, nor shades, nor colours true; And this grotesque design exposed to public view. One would have thought it some Egyptian piece, With garden-gods, and barking deities, More thick than Ptolemy has stuck the skies. All so perverse a draught, so far unlike, It was no libel where it meant to strike. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... expecting him to join me toward sunset. We located each other through a code of yodeling that we arranged; his part of these vocal gymnastics being very pleasant to hear, for he had a flexible, rich voice. I shudder to recall how largely my own performances partook of the grotesque. But in the forest where were no musical persons (I supposed) to take hurt from whatever noise I made, I would let go with all the lungs I had; he followed the horrid sounds to their origin, and we would return to ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... psychology. Spinoza wants to explain mental phenomena through their primary causes because a knowledge of man's nature is the radical cure for his ills. The greatest obstacle man has to contend against is his emotional nature. Not that it is inherently degraded or sinful—the grotesque superstition some religious moralists have maintained; but man's emotional nature masters, more often than not, man's rational nature, and leads man astray. When the emotions are unrestrained and undirected by knowledge and intelligence, they violently attach themselves ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentioned—O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... the waist upward, emaciated by opium smoking, and having a sickly look painful to see. Most of the shops have a carved railing and a counter facing the street, the ends of which are ornamented by grotesque shapes of dogs and gilded idols. A figure of a pug-nosed dog with bandy legs is very common. At the first glance it would be supposed that this was one of those nondescripts the Chinese are so fond of devising, but a closer examination shows that the figure is an admirably life-like ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ought to adopt that kind of attitude, Major. If you had been trained in theology, or even secular metaphysics, it might be excusable; though then, of course, you wouldn't do it. But in a simple and almost entirely uneducated country gentleman like you, it's simply grotesque." ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... ignorant of the fact that his own wife was wishing him out of the way, praying for death to claim him. Praying? What if the prayers of the wife had in some way wished an illness upon the unsuspecting old man? Of course that was purely grotesque, yet as the ghastly notion occurred to her, Esther felt a sudden longing to confide in someone—Miss Clifford, the ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... trifle more rigid, and the fingers of one hand seemed to close vindictively. "It is grotesque—almost horrible, isn't it?" ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... marshalled. Late in October the decision of the tribunal was announced. A majority, consisting of Lord Alverstone and the three American members, had decided substantially in favour of the United States. Sir Louis Jette and Mr Aylesworth declined to sign the award, and declared it in part a 'grotesque travesty ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... him over the rattle of the wheels, and he became more and more irate. The high price of whisky was one source of complaint—it appeared, according to one of them, that it was all going to France, which caused a shortage for those at home. Then the military situation. . . . Impossible, grotesque. . . . Somebody ought to be hanged for having allowed such a thing to happen. After four years to be forced back—inexcusable. What was wanted was somebody with a business brain to run the Army. . . . In the meantime ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... to seek assistance, and left the dark room with the dead man lying in the pool of yellow light, and the parrot perched on the body, muttering to itself. It was a strange mingling of the horrible and grotesque, and the whole scene was hit off in the phrase applied to it by Vandeloup. It was, indeed, 'The Comedy ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... brother's arm, for though she knew everything was to be as weird and grotesque as possible, yet it was delightful to feel the ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... of Kent and her daughter visited Brighton, and stopped in that grotesque palace of George IV., called the Pavilion. I have seen a picture of the demure little Princess, walking on the esplanade, with her mother, governesses, and gentlemen attendants, the whole elegant ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... moved towards the door in a silence that was as much the result of some conviction that any violent demonstration against him would be as grotesque and monstrous as the situation, as of anything he had said. Even the flashing indignation of Julia Jeffcourt seemed to become suddenly as unnatural and incongruous as her brother's chief mourner himself, and although she shrank from his passing figure she uttered no ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... it practically impossible to connect this frenzied fugitive with the quiet man in his office chair at Haverly, the man who was or was not Judson Clark. He lay on a bank at noon and faced the situation squarely, while his horse, hobbled, grazed with grotesque little forward jumps in an upland meadow. Either Dick Livingstone was Clark, or he was the unknown occasional visitor at the Livingstone Ranch. If he were Clark, and if that could be proved, there were two courses open to Bassett. He could denounce him to the authorities and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... eye around the uniquely decorated walls, upon which hung, here, the shrieking prospectus of a mythical gold-mine; there a small but venomous political placard, and on all sides examples of the uncouth or unusual in paid print; exploitations of grotesque quackeries; appeals, business-like, absurd, or even passionate, in the form of "Wants;" threats thinly disguised as "Personals;"' dim suggestions of crime, of fraud, of hope, of tragedy, of mania, all decorated with the stars of "paid matter" or designated ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... towns, is difficult to obtain; and, when it is obtained, it is extremely difficult to judge of their manners according to our standard of what is proper, respectable, or gentlemanlike. The misunderstandings are frequent and often most grotesque; and such, we must confess, is human nature, that when we hear the different and often most conflicting accounts of the character of the Hindus, we are naturally skeptical with regard to unsuspected virtues among them, while we are quite disposed to accept unfavorable ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... stables at Laxton! I, as it happened, could report to Lord Massey their earlier condition; he to me could report their immediate changes. I won him easily to an interest in my own Irish experiences, so fresh, and in parts so grotesque, wilder also by much in Connaught than in Lord Massey's county of Limerick; whilst he (without affecting any delight in the hunting systems of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire) yet took pleasure in explaining to me those characteristic features of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the Gadarene story. The following passage in his letter is worth quotation: "Now to the materialistic and scientific mind, to the uninitiated in spiritual verities, certainly this story of the Gadarene or Gergesene swine presents insurmountable difficulties; it seems grotesque and nonsensical. To the experienced, trained, and cultivated Spiritualist this miracle is, as I am prepared to show, one of the most instructive, the most profoundly useful, and the most beneficent which Jesus ever wrought in ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... endlessness of imagination; in both every detail that man achieves in art is carefully completed and different from its neighbour; and in both there is an exuberance of the human soul: but with this difference, that something in the Spanish temper has killed the grotesque. Both districts have been mingled in history, yet it is not the Spaniard who has invigorated the Delta of the Rhine and the high country to the south of it, nor the Walloons and the Flemings who have taught the Spaniards; but each of these highly ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Pierre faithfully reported to his mistress the groom's extraordinary insolence and impudence of the night before. The girl struggled with and conquered her desire to laugh; for monsieur was somewhat grotesque ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... scattered reports were followed by a furious burst of yells; there was the rush of feet, sounds as of blows struck against the stout poles, and directly after, dimly-seen against the starlit sky, dark grotesque-looking heads appeared as at least a dozen of the Indians gained the top of the defence, but only to be beaten back by the butt-ends of the men's fire-locks, all save two who dropped over in our midst, and fought desperately for a time ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... of Cornish ancestors has furnished with another splendid specimen of ecclesiastical architecture, the upper half of the chief tower, a square one, being fretted on every stone with florid carving, and grotesque devices: but what shall I say of Probus tower, which from top to bottom is covered with delicate tracery cut in granite? it rises above the miserable surrounding village, a satire upon neighbouring degeneracy in things religious: ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of the Lay. His romances in verse contain some passages which are sublime, many which are beautiful, some pathetic. They are all interesting, and written in the same easy, careless style, interspersed with the most homely and grotesque expressions, which is so well known to all the readers of the Iliad. The battle in Marmion is beyond all question, as Jeffrey long ago remarked, the most Homeric strife which has been sung since the days of Homer. But these passages are few and far between; his poems are filled with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the older "Spielmannsdichtung", or minstrel poetry, in the terseness and vigor of its language and in the lack of poetic imagery, but it is free from the coarseness and vulgar and grotesque humor of the latter. It approaches the courtly epic in its introduction of the pomp of courtly ceremonial, but this veneer of chivalry is very thin, and beneath the outward polish of form the heart ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... sundry inviting dishes were zealously discussed. Roast turkey was eloquently extolled by one; another set forth the attractions of a table to which forest, mountain-stream, or river had contributed delights. Sometimes the grotesque imagination of some wild fellow would conjure up a feast so full of horror that a famished cannibal might well protest. In striking contrast with this was the gentle pathos of word and manner as some boy told of dinner at the old farm-house among the hills, where mother ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... grease and tar, and as the mid did not admire the roughness of the razor, he began to be a little restive, when over he went into the tub, where he floundered for some short time. He was drawn out, the bandage removed from his eyes, and he appeared not a little surprised to see so many grotesque figures around him. He soon recovered himself and entered into ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... a mile from the town we met a man who was standing guard against a surprise by the ladrones. Nothing could well have been much more grotesque and nothing could much better illustrate the absolutely primitive condition of the Filipinos in the interior of the islands than the appearance of this guard. A pair of knee pants, a conical grass hat, and a hemp shirt formed his entire apparel. A long flat wooden shield, a bolo, ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... satisfaction because it had been sadly neglected. There was no headboard to mark the spot, no familiar mound of earth; only a sunken stretch, a pitiful little patch of sand, with a few weeds thrusting up out of it, nodding to the slight breeze and casting grotesque shadows ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to his nose as they possibly could, in the vain hope of glancing over the high, ridgy barrier it formed between them, which gave to their owner a peculiarly acute, penetrating expression,—a glance which appeared to look you through and through; yet, though extremely grotesque, it was a benevolent, pleasing face, full of blunt kindness and ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... many occasions on the point of taking his own life, but was observed so closely and guarded so well by his companion Mariotto that he lived to be an old man—finished the course of his life at the age of sixty-four, leaving behind him the name of a good and even rarely excellent master of grotesque-painting in our own times, wherein every succeeding craftsman has always imitated his manner, not only in Florence, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... writhed itself again into grotesque lines, and she broke out into shrill wailing ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... great measure conjectural. The romance, such as we generally have seen it, resembles a Gothic window-piece, where monarchs and bishops exhibit the symbols of their dignity, and saints hold out their palm branches, and grotesque monsters in blue and gold pursue one another through the intricacies of a never-ending scroll, splendid in colouring, but childish in composition, and imitating nothing in nature but a mass of drapery and jewels thrown over the commonest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... of the tables and other woodwork produced during the same reign, bearing the impress of the more severe style of Inigo Jones, that there were then in England two styles of decorative furniture. One of these, simple and severe, showing a reaction from the grotesque freedom of Elizabethan carving, and the other, copied from Venetian ornamental woodwork, with cupids on scrolls forming the supports of stools, having these ornamental legs connected by stretchers the design of which is, in the case of those in the King's Bedchamber at Knole, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... des Canadiens-francais, M. Drummond a trouve le moyen d'eviter un ecueil qui aurait semble inevitable pour tout autre que pour lui. Il est reste vrai, sans tomber dans la vulgarite, et piquant sans verser dans le grotesque. ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... the experiment they proposed was so grotesque that its acceptance by Gilles proves that he was either insane or a victim of the superstition of his time. His wretched accomplices told him that the Evil One alone was capable of revealing the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... the team. They could hear the dogs whining as they advanced. The cabin took shape in their faces—grotesque, dark, lifeless. It was a foreboding thing, that cabin. He remembered in a flash all that the Missioner had told him about Tavish. His pulse was beating swiftly. A shiver ran up his back, and he was filled with a strange dread. Father Roland's ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... as it was, had its grotesque features. Mrs. Squeers stood at one of the desks, presiding over an immense basin of brimstone and treacle, of which delicious compound she administered a large instalment to each boy in succession: using for the purpose a common wooden spoon, which widened every ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... human countenance. In order to have the proper background for such figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers with grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and ridiculous old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the brutal laughter and the obscene words. Looking at these pictures, one would naturally conclude that Holland was inhabited by the ugliest and most ill-mannered ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the same authentic source as that preceding it, is a somewhat grotesque portraiture of one of the Lancers of the Sultan of Begharmi, described, in an historical and geographical account by a native prince, as an extensive country, containing woods and rivers, and fields fit for cultivation; but now desolated, as the inhabitants say, by the "misconduct ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... the same word as antique. The association between what is old or old-fashioned and what is odd, fantastic, or grotesque is obvious enough. Cf. Milton, Il Pens. 158: "With antick pillars massy-proof." In S. A. 1325 he uses the word as a noun: "Jugglers and dancers, anticks, mummers, mimicks." Shakes. makes it a verb in A. and C. ii. 7: "the wild ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... forgiven to one trained with Western, modern eyes, who at first sight of these monuments, in total ignorance of their meanings, sees them as strange or grotesque. But when, as their strangeness wears away, one comes to see the unfailing accuracy with which the glyphs are drawn, one's opinion of their makers has to change. And when, with this familiarity gained, one advances ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... fashion. Regarded from the height which the art had reached two hundred and fifty years after, "how dwarfed a growth of cold and night" do these miracle-plays show themselves! But at a time when there was no printing, little preaching, and Latin prayers, we cannot help thinking that, grotesque and ill-imagined as they are, they must have been of unspeakable value for the instruction of a people whose spiritual digestion was not of a sort to be injured by the presence of a quite abnormal quantity of husk and saw-dust in their food. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... not shift the camp, as the horses were in clover. Our little plain is bounded on the north by peculiar mountains; it is also fringed with scrub nearly all round. The appearance of the northern mountains is singular, grotesque, and very difficult to describe. There appear to be still three distinct lines. One ends in a bluff, to the east-north-east of the camp; another line ends in a bluff to the north-north-east; while the third continues ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... head the nail which he intended to hit. But they are not on that account ballads. Literally, a ballad is a song, but it has come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or pathetic, or grotesque,—or it may have all three characteristics or any two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a ballad,—nor, of course, any pathetic or any political poem. Jacob Omnium's Hoss may fairly be ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... does not revel long among such dreary slices of life. The Poe illustrations are grotesque and shuddering, but after all make believe. The plate of The Black Cat piles horror on horror's head (literally, for the demon cat perches on the head of the corpse) and is, all said, pictorial melodrama. The Berenice illustration ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... sighed a great sigh, and declared he could go no farther. At that, two odd little beings sprang to his side; the one brown as the earth itself, with eyes like diamonds for brightness, and deft little fingers, cunning in all works of skill. Pulling off his wisp of a cap, and making a grotesque little bow, he asked, "Will you take a guide for the under-world tour?"—"That I will," said Alba, "for I no longer find myself able to move a step."—"Ha, ha!" laughed the dwarf, "of course you can't move ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque. A little girl in Punch improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with the maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... the parlour window leading me to infer, after a while, that she was not there, I lifted up my eyes to the window above it, where I saw a florid, pleasant-looking gentleman, with a grey head, who shut up one eye in a grotesque manner, nodded his head at me several times, shook it at me as ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... they "saw it so." For there undoubtedly exists a rough physical standard of rightness in drawing, any violent deviations from which, even at the dictates of emotional expression, is productive of the grotesque. This physical standard of accuracy in his work it is the business of the student to acquire in his academic training; and every aid that science can give by such studies as Perspective, Anatomy, and, ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... from within, and a skinny, gnarled little man suddenly appeared in the guard's light, like a grotesque, twisted ghost out of the blackness. Wide blue eyes regarded Meyerhoff from beneath uneven black eyebrows, and then the little man's face broke into a crafty grin. "Paul! So they sent you! I knew ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... mathematical." Interspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ground. For on one side of the loftiest and most grotesque of the heights around Himri, there leans against it a level table rock of considerable extent which is perfectly desolate, and which the superstitious imaginations of the inhabitants of this aoul have made the scene of almost as much witchery as was ever located ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... Chavernay mused, affecting the fancies of some fashionable romance; and then, finding that his attentions appeared strangely to embarrass the angular individual in black, he turned on his heels to make for the bridge, and again came to a halt, for on the bridge appeared another figure as grotesque as the first-comer, but grotesque in a ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... prediction was being fulfilled rapidly. The last bill had been stuck in place and the drunken gang had staggered to their feet, jeering and laughing at the grotesque appearance of their victim. They formed in two lines with sticks in their hands in preparation for the moment when the prisoner would be released and forced to run the gauntlet of their blows in ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... containing Latin prayers; it is adorned with miniatures set off with gold, representing devotional subjects, stories from sacred history, or from the lives of saints and martyrs. Every page is encircled with arabesques mingled with garlands of fruit and flowers, amid which spring up grotesque figures ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... head, unobserved. Then slowly raising himself on his rheumatic fore-legs, the old dog heaved erect and waddled towards the piano. Even so no one paid any heed to him until, halting a foot or so from the hem of Tilda's skirt, he abased his head to the carpet while his hind-legs strained in a grotesque effort to pitch his body ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Intelligence have in the past been made by the poets and, in recent times, by story-writers. They have been keen observers and recorders and reckoned freely with the emotions and sentiments. Most philosophers, on the other hand, have exhibited a grotesque ignorance of man's life and have built up systems that are elaborate and imposing, but quite unrelated to actual human affairs. They have almost consistently neglected the actual process of thought ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... the year 1845. The copper-plate engravings of lovely ladies, who had flourished in that day, were yellow and spotted with mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties faded and commonplace. Even the little clusters of verses (in which the poet's feeble candle shed its sickly light upon the obscurities of the artist's meaning) had an old-fashioned ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... masons in the rare opportunity the gargoyle afforded them of representing the dragons, serpents, etc., in which their fancy revelled, is made apparent when we view the futile attempts of modern architects to introduce this feature in their churches, for modern gargoyles are generally grotesque caricatures, and anything but happy appendages to the buildings ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... not see that her child is mortified and harmed when she says to her, in the presence of strangers, "How do you suppose you look with your mouth open like that?" "Do you want me to show you how you are sitting?"—and then a grotesque imitation of her stooping shoulders. "Will you sit still for one minute?" "Do take your hands off my dress." "Was there ever such an awkward child?" When the child replies fretfully and disagreeably, she does not see that it is only an exact reflection ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... which added to his solemnity. He had an exceedingly long, melancholy face, on both sides of which hung a mass of oily-looking black hair; his nose, too, was elongated and thin, and a long drooping moustache concealed his mouth. On the whole his appearance was redeemed from the grotesque by an extraordinary pair of black eyes, which were round and large as those of a Persian cat. Despite the man's exceeding thinness, he conveyed a certain suggestion of strength. At that moment he had a handkerchief between ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... a decided failure in government. Since 1718, the different councils had been abolished; defended by Abbe St. Pierre, under the grotesque title of Polysynodie, they had earned for the candid preacher of universal peace his exclusion from the French Academy, which was insisted upon by the remnants of the old court, whom he had mortally offended by styling Louis XIV.'s governmental system a viziership. The Regent ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his mind as grotesque the suggestion that he should contribute a hundred pounds to the organ fund; it revolted his sense of the fitness of things; the next morning he had entirely forgotten it. But two days afterwards, when he was finishing ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... said. Yes, he was celebrating. He laughed and leaned over the table toward us. His eyes danced and his elaborate mustache made a grotesque halo for his smile. He didn't want to intrude on us with his story, but in Persia and Turkey and the Urals he had found life very nice. And here in Chicago he had found life also very nice. Life was very nice wherever you went. And Anderson ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... many different generations. But those who preserved it to the present day had avoided the lamentable plastering which disfigures so many others. The walls were built with fine large stones, on which time had left its melancholy impress. There was no grotesque painting on them to mar their quiet beauty, and the dim light that filtered through at that early hour gave them a ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... of a Florentine family famous for the extraordinary ugliness of its men: whereby it came to pass that any grotesque or extremely ugly man was called a Baroncio. Fanfani, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... took up some of the drawings, and cast my eye over them. One of the subjects struck me from its singularity. It represented the great Hall of the Castle of Lindenberg. A door conducting to a narrow staircase stood half open. In the foreground appeared a Groupe of figures, placed in the most grotesque attitudes; Terror ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... lacking in many volumes of short stories. They deal with Syrians and Turks, queer folk with queer ways, and Mr. Duncan has gotten at them with such sympathetic insight as only the poetic heart and the story-teller's eye can possess. Character, humor, poignant pathos, and the sad grotesque conjunctions of old and new civilizations are expressed through the medium of a style that has distinction, and strikes ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... more than a mile behind, yet farther and farther the bit feetie were straying, farther from home and love, and safety, when a grotesque, hideous form suddenly emerged from a wood on the opposite ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... round about. Toucans were not uncommon. I have never seen any other bird take such grotesque and comic attitudes as the toucan. This day I saw one standing in the top of a tree with the big bill pointing straight into the air and the tail also cocked perpendicularly. The toucan is a born ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... coronation. Many deputies arrived, and with them a swarm of those presidents of cantons who occupied a conspicuous place in the annals of ridicule at the close of the year 1804. They became the objects of all sorts of witticisms and jests. The obligation of wearing swords made their appearance very grotesque. As many droll, stories were told of them as were ten years afterwards related of those who were styled the voltigeurs of Louis XIV. One of these anecdotes was so exceedingly ludicrous that, though it was probably a mere invention, yet ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... separated by bodies ending in termini, and whose heads supported the Ionic volute, while the arch, which appeared to spring from these capitals, had, for a keystone, heads more monstrous than those of the fabled animals of Ctesias; or so ludicrous, that you forgot the classic griffin in the grotesque conception of the Italian artist. Here was a gibbering monkey, there a grinning pulcinello; now you viewed a chattering devil, which might have figured in the "Temptation of St. Anthony;" and now a mournful, mystic, bearded ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... uncontrollable horror prevented her from turning lest she should see the yawning mystery in the middle of the floor, or hear some awful sound from its unknown depths. The very shadows on the walls thrown up wildly by the expiring firelight were objects of grotesque terror. Never—never—in her whole youth of strange vicissitude, had the nerves of this brave girl been ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... nothing to be imagined more graceful than the airy open colonnades of its two spires, light as a handful of wheat ears loosely bound together. The colour of the grey stone gives solemnity to the rest of the exterior, which is massive and astonishingly rich in the grotesque element. We carefully studied the gargoyles round the roof, and, in spite of defacements, made out most of them—here a grinning demon with a struggling human being in its clutch—there an odd beast, part human, part pig, clothed in a kind of jacket, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the idea is common. I have made no attempt to correct the tags of Latinity in this play. Mrs. Behn openly confessed she knew no Latin, and she was ill supplied here. I do not conceive that the words are intentionally faulty and grotesque. Lady Knowell is a pedant, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... long sweeps of slanting roof, which marked that era's close. In most cases additions had been thrown out from time to time, ells trailing at the back, or excrescences bulging at the sides, that were not grotesque only because there had been little in the first effect to spoil. In more than one instance the original fabric was altered beyond recognition; here and there a house she could remember had altogether disappeared; a new one had replaced it that before long might be replaced by a newer ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... reached the upper landing of the spiral ascent, he paused a moment before laying hold of a grotesque knocker which ornamented the door of the atelier where the famous painter of Henry IV.—neglected by Marie de Medicis for Rubens—was probably at work. The young man felt the strong sensation which vibrates in the soul of great artists when, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... frequently afterwards. At the theatre, at balls, at concerts; at the promenades in the gardens of San Georgio; at the grotesque exhibitions in the square of St. Mark; among the throng of merchants on the Exchange by the Rialto. He seemed, in fact, to seek crowds; to hunt after bustle and amusement; yet never to take any interest in either ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... unexpectedly good for a time over highly polished, green sea-ice, and thence on to snow, amid a field of numerous small bergs. Many of these showed a marked degree of ablation, and, in places, blocks of ice perched on eminences had weathered into most grotesque forms. There were numerous streams of thaw-water running from mud-covered bergs. Perspiring in the heat, we more than once stopped ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... removed her wig and exposed her poor old scalp, with its thin, forlorn wisps and patches of grey hair, grotesque, almost indecent, in its nudity. But the coiffeur measured it in sublime seriousness, putting his tape this way and that way, while Madame Valiere's eyes ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... his divinities; for he venerated them only so long as they conferred physical benefits[27] upon him; and his idea of beneficence was wholly concrete. He had no established form of worship; the ceremonies, which partook of a religious character, were grotesque in their conception, variable in their conduct, and inhuman in their details. Such, for example, are the torturing of prisoners, and the ceremonies observed on the occasion of a young Indian's placing himself ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... never been shaved. His cheeks were ruddy, and his red, moist mouth was noticeable because he laughed so often and so heartily. He had that rare thing, a rich, ringing laugh. Gertrude Coppard had watched him, fascinated. He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own father had a rich fund of humour, but it was satiric. This man's was different: soft, non-intellectual, warm, a kind ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... remains. The canopy of tabernacle work has been ruthlessly destroyed, together with the major part of the easternmost section. All the shafting is very richly moulded with a great number of diminutive mouldings, principally ogee and hollow. Foliage work of rare beauty and representations of grotesque animals form the greater part of the ornament. There are interesting remains of diaper work in the wall which forms the back. The plinth and seats are probably modern work. At the top are placed some pieces of battlement work, of which there is a great ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... for it was a great resource. There were illustrations of all kinds, from Lord Fordham's careful watercolours, and Mrs. Brownlow's graceful figures or etchings, to the doctor's clever caricatures and grotesque outlines, and the contributions were equally miscellaneous. There were descriptions of scenery, fragmentary notes of history and science, records more or less veracious or absurd of personal adventures, and conversations, and advertisements, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an elaborate pantomime of shock, horror, indignation, grotesque dismay and a dozen other assorted emotions. "Little man, youre fruitcake sure. W R wouldnt part with half a C for a tipoff on the Secondcoming. No, brother—you rang the wrong bell. Five I might get you—but ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... mouth partly open; almost a grotesque picture of terror he looked in that dim light. Then he spoke, in an odd strained tone, more to himself than to any ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... public of our theatres. No doubt a few of the social reformers are sprinkled over the audiences. There are a few in the boxes as well as in the galleries who discern the realities and who hear the true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas. But with the overwhelming majority it is quite different. For them it is entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant comic opera shows more actual ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the West. To successfully steam a vessel up those streams against the remarkably swift currents, high-pressure engines had to be adopted generally. In that year, however, there were still a number of boats on the Mississippi and Ohio which, like the Champion, had low-pressure engines and the grotesque walking-beams. ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... throw the soul into irresistible tumults of laughter. Who can refrain from experiencing risible emotions when he beholds a lively representation of Don Quixote and Sancho Panca—Hudibras and his Ralpho—merry old Falstaff shaking his fat sides, gabbling with Mrs. Quickly, and other grotesque figures to be found in the vast variety of human character? To lash the vices and expose the follies of mankind, is the professed end ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... nearly to topple over backward from the steps. Heaven alone knows what I fancied it might be; indeed, I had little enough time in which to guess, for I had barely touched the ground,—my mind still filled with memories of Seth's grotesque horrors,—when the whole figure emerged into view, and I knew him instantly for a negro, though I had never before seen one of his race. He was a dandified-looking fellow, wearing a stiff white waistcoat fastened by ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... came near and made him feel that he was the subject of their talk. As a matter of fact, he generally was. He was a source of great speculation with them. Some of them had gone so far as to bet he wouldn't live a year. They all seemed grotesque to him, so work-scarred and bent and hairy. Even the men whose names he had known from childhood were queer to him. They seemed shy and distant, too, not like his ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... had gone the Phoenician galleys, full of hook-nosed men in purple and brass, their beards scented with spikenard. From the mining towns that they built in the jungle, surrounded by cyclopean walls and adorned with grotesque stone images, came the stores of gold with which the Sidonians enriched King Solomon. To-day all those workings were apparently exhausted. The Zimbabwe—the cities of stone—had crumbled; the jungle had closed in; ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... the head of the procession, and sit there in places of honor. The boys are already in their seats, with smug fresh faces and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches; the chapel is lighted, and Founder's tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful shadows and lights. There he lies, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and gown, awaiting the great Examination Day. We oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys again as we look ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... waterless desert stretching between the Cimarron and the Arkansas, consisting of almost a dead level of alkali and sand, although toward the northern extremity the sand had been driven by the ceaseless wind into grotesque hummocks. The trail, cut deep by traders' wagons earlier in the spring, was still easily traceable for a greater part of the distance, and Hamlin as yet felt no need of caution—this was a country the Indians ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... conventional. Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... history, exegetics, Talmudical controversies, menus, recipes, priestly prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful—like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen—a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... young man what did Jay Gould see? He saw, in the first place, that society, as it was organized, had neither patience nor compassion for the very poverty its grotesque system created. Prate its higher classes might of the blessings of poverty; and they might spread broadcast their prolix homilies on the virtues of a useful life, "rounded by an honorable poverty." But all of these teachings were, in one sense, chatter and nonsense; the very classes which so ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... your bargain, promised to stick to it, and here after three days you are trying to break out, and are insinuating that the circumstances are too horrible for you to continue bearing it. Surely your reason and common sense must tell you that your behaviour is grotesque." ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... eyes grew large with terror, his mouth opened in helpless agitation. Charley Steele was lying under the waters of the great river, his bones rotting there for a year, yet here was his voice coming out of the night, in response to his own grotesque imitation of the dead man. Seeing his agitation, women turned pale, men felt their flesh creep, imagination gave a thrilling coldness to the air. For a moment the silence was unbroken. Then John Brown stretched out his hand and said, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was sure that the little hump-backed oddity had risen to its feet and was a veritable creature: an actual uncouth, shambling grotesque, instead of a mere flat ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... poetical works. Certain it is that the appetite for all kinds of fun, verbal and other was a part of Hood's nature. We see it in the practical jokes he was continually playing on his good-humored wife—such as altering into grotesque absurdity many of the words contained in her letters to friends: we see it—the mere animal love of jocularity, as it might be termed—in such a small point as his frequently addressing his friend ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... first found free play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal for the masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece of his own invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more sophisticated refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost the ruddy glow ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... just on that he counted to subdue you; keep this carefully in your mind; in order to let you give him an easy throw, he will present you at need grotesque arguments, and so soon as he sees you confident, simply satisfied with the excellence of your replies, he will involve you in sophisms so specious that you will fight in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... the bodies and souls of men. Seen half a continent away, through the mists of ignorance and prejudice and partisan passion, "Wall Street" has loomed like some vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns his weekly salary in that street, the Nebraska notion of "Wall Street" is too grotesque for discussion. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... sought—trampled bracken, a broken bush.... He followed the trail with a slow certitude of which ordinarily he would have been incapable.... It did not lead very far. The trees thinned abruptly. A rounded moss-covered rock rose up between him and the moon ... and on the rock, grotesque and darkly ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... written disclosures only that De Quincey could do much mischief; for it was scarcely possible to be prejudiced by anything he could say. The whole man was grotesque; and it must have been a singular image that his neighbors in the valley preserved in their memory. A frail-looking, diminutive man, with narrow chest and round shoulders and features like those of a dying patient, walking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... affair. True, Wilhelmine had taunted him cruelly with his failure, and the man always took her lightest word to heart. He had conceived an affection for her which was a trifle inconvenient—a jealous, fierce affection made grotesque by ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... apparently, was changed. At the sight of each dear and familiar object he was profoundly affected. His heart beat audibly, his emotion nearly suffocated him; an ache was in his throat. Unconsciously he quickened his pace until he almost ran, his long shadow making grotesque efforts to keep ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... from the tumult that drew together about the counter of the sturdy oak table in the centre of the room. She was sitting in the towering old settle by the fireplace, leaning a little forward as if she awaited her opportunity to spring in and determine the tumult when something of this grotesque male violence ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Drer's day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of Art, in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... thought the West must be exile for a literary man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which our citizenship is ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can, after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly old New England saints, hampered by poverty, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... like Longfellow and most of the other American poets, wrote prose as well as poetry, having produced a number of wild, grotesque, and powerfully-imagined tales; unlike most of them he was a literary man pur sang. He depended for support entirely on his writings, and his career was more like the precarious existence of an author in the time of Johnson and Savage than the decent life of an ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... little child had forgot her loss in her interest in the bullock cart with its grotesque lure; and she climbed into the cart just as Kathlyn appeared, followed by the excited leopard. She saw the child and snatched her instinctively from the cart. The leopard leaped into the cart at the rear, while Kathlyn ran toward the chief's ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... a great rock jutted out above the lake, that same barren rock wherein I had sat the day I discovered this cataract; now as I viewed this rock I was struck by its grotesque shape and then, all at once, I saw it was hatefully like to a shrivelled head—there were the fleshless jaws, the shrunken nose and great, hollow eye-socket. And now even as I stared at the thing my companion spied it also, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... singing, talking loudly. Stumbling over a log his burning eyes had not seen, he turned in grotesque humor to offer curtsy and abject apology, then hastened on upward. Later, carroming from a huge tree he had hit head on, he addressed it in grave good humor: "Please keep to the right." His flushed face purple in the green light of the deep woods, he hurried ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... caps of the "stream-lined" variety had all been sold, so the war baby was obliged to buy a general service hat. The only one that fitted him was shapeless as a Hausfrau, ponderous as a Bishop, unstable as a politician, grotesque as a Birthday Honours' List. It was a nice quiet hat, we assured Marmaduke—just the thing for active service. Did it suit him? Very well indeed, we replied—made him look like Lord Haldane at the age ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... had slumbered in his chair from time to time. But his sleeping had been of that painful, wakeful nature which brings with it no refreshment. It had been full of dreams, in all of which there had been some grotesque reference to the property, but in none of them had there been any memory of the Squire's terrible death. And yet, as he woke and woke and woke again, it can hardly be said that the truth had come back upon him as a new blow. Through such dreams ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... world—Jean de Charpentier, director of the mines at Bex, a skilled geologist who had been a fellow-pupil of Von Buch and Von Humboldt under Werner at the Freiberg School of Mines. Charpentier laughed at the mountaineer's grotesque idea, and thought no more about it. And ten years elapsed before Perraudin could find any one who treated his notion with greater respect. Then he found a listener in M. Venetz, a civil engineer, who read ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... bulwarks, and leaned there in uncontrollable sea-sickness. Until the gale was done I believe he had not felt a qualm. Now, on the top of his nausea, he had to endure the raillery of Mr. Fett, whose active fancy had already invented a grotesque and wholly untruthful accusation against his friend—namely, that when assailed by the Moors, and in the act of being kicked below, he had dropped on his knees ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Here and there, the fancy or interest of the owner had induced him to remodel the structure; and an ill-designed and ungraceful mixture of the modern with the ancient gave to the whole somewhat of a grotesque appearance, that was heightened by the noble trees, which had once towered in majesty and beauty, being in many places lopped and docked, as if even the exuberance of nature was a crime in the eyes of the present lord of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... In grotesque juxtaposition he remembered, together with that picture of Sylvia as he had seen her last night, the case of a respectable old lady, named Mrs. Meeks, the widow of a clergyman who had had a living in ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... might not be approved by rigid lawyers as a faithful and felicitous indication of the manner of that mysterious growth of ages, from occult beginnings, that was never profaned by the invading wit of man 97; but it is less grotesque than it appears. Lord Halifax was the most original writer of political tracts in the pamphleteering crowd between Harrington and Bolingbroke; and in the Exclusion struggle he produced a scheme of limitations which, in substance, if ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... entirely without foundation. Why the man had uttered it was soon explained. The wild expressions that were pouring from his lips, with the grotesque gestures he was making with his arms proved that ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... into his folk-tales, and does so without the least idea of treating them disrespectfully. He makes them talk in his own language because he has no other language; and if the talk seems a little grotesque and irreverent, it is due to the low level of the narrator's literary culture, and not to any intention, on his part, of treating God and the angels with levity. The whole aim of the story is a moral and religious one. The narrator is trying to show that sympathy ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... railway." The domestic, with leisurely movement, left us in the hall, and dawdled upstairs to report the remarkable case of the importunate English. By-and-by he returned, and showed us into the saloon, a huge, bare, fireless room, with a few grotesque photographs and French prints on the walls, and a stiff green sofa and chairs. The Signor Conte kept us waiting twenty minutes, whilst he shaved and exchanged his dressing-gown for the suit of sables which is the correct raiment of the Latin race. Nothing could be more polished than his manners. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:—the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting; men drinking, playing mora, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... C. grandiflorus and C. Macdonaldiae, the famous Night-blooming cereuses, have white flowers which remain open only one night. They are, however, though so transient, a marvelous sight. Prone to strange tasks indeed is the hand of Nature which has fashioned these grotesque, clumsy, lifeless looking plants to accumulate nourishment and moisture for months from the niggardly desert sands, and to mature for a few hours' existence only these marvelously fashioned flowers which ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... immediately with a tart in his hand. An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said, with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger. The Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... from her hand, and the omelette rolled, a grotesque mass, upon the carpet. She swayed, dizzily, raising one hand to her brow, but had recovered herself even as Leroux sprang ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... of some adventures more or less grotesque, four monks are killed at one time near an inn. The old woman who keeps this hostelry, fearful of being implicated in a murder, wishes to get rid of the corpses. She hides three of the bodies, and has one buried by a monk who is passing by. She pretends that the dead man ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... effects of their efforts. A mob was raised in Edinburgh, but it was appeased without the loss of life and with no other casualty save the frightening of the provost's wife. There were some eccentric movements among the Cameronians, rendered all the more grotesque by the Jacobites taking the leadership in them; and some of the more vehement clergy betook themselves to their own special weapons in the holding of a day ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... shadow at the edge of the opening. The first arrival came in with a rush. There was a sudden scurry behind me, and over the log he came with a flying leap that landed him on the smooth bit of ground in the middle, where he whirled around and around with grotesque jumps, like a kitten after its tail. Only Br'er Rabbit's tail was too short for him ever to catch it; he seemed rather to be trying to get a good look at it. Then he went off helter-skelter in a headlong rush through the ferns. Before ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... and probably elsewhere, the old man was one of the principal grotesque characters. These things, as Rousseau pointed out, have a great effect upon morals. Once the old man became a recognised traditional stage-butt, his social authority had come to an end. In the de ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... dreams which may be history or may be allegory. There is in them nothing grotesque, nothing which could mar the feeling of authenticity, the sense of the actual occurence of the dream incident. The faces and figures perceived have the light shade and expression which seems quite proper to the wonderworld in which the eye ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... marriage in peasant life we may turn to a death and a burial. There are frequent allusions in the Skazkas to these gloomy subjects, with reference to which we will quote two stories, the one pathetic, the other (unintentionally) grotesque. Neither of them bears any title in the original, but we may ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... acknowledgment of a common danger, would crush the Radical force in an instant. These are valuable manifestations, and worth a hundred clauses in the Corporation Bill; for what matters it whether aldermen and town clerks are perpetuated or suppressed? and it really is grotesque to fight for these puerilities as if it was a contest pro aris et focis, and to hesitate one instant whether a collision should be provoked between the two Houses of Parliament, and the advantages both direct and collateral flowing from Peel's mediation be thrown away, for the sake of ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... It is our firm faith that bright solemn angels in celestial watchings were frequent guests in the homely room of the two sisters, and that passing by all accidents of age and poverty, withered skins, bony features, and grotesque movements and shabby clothing, they saw more real beauty there than in many a scented boudoir where seeming angels smile ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... as a moral monster, in which form she still treads the operatic stage, and this is the conception which mankind in general have of her. The lover of real poetry regards this romanticist's terrible drama of Lucretia Borgia as a grotesque manifestation of the art, while the historian laughs at it; the poet, however, may excuse himself on the ground of his ignorance, and of his belief in a myth which had been current since the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... as legitimate fields for wit and unrepressed jollity. Yet in the unbosoming of this cultivated "heathen" we see our fads and foibles held up as strange gods, and must confess some of them to be grotesque when ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... friends. Many of his pranks were mere whimsicalities, innocent pleasantries that hurt no one. He would spend three hours in illustrating a letter to a friend, filling the letter with gossipy trivialities and using six different kinds of ink to make it look grotesque. ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Grotesque uncertain shapes infest the dark And wings of bats are heard in aimless flight; Discordant voices cry and serpents hiss, No friendly star, no ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... complete ruin could be imagined. If a cyclone had swept over the barn it could not have more certainly leveled it. And, not only was it leveled, crushed down in the center by the great weight of the tank, but the boards and beams were broken into small pieces. Parts of them clung in long, grotesque splinters to the ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... great : granda. "-coat," palto, gravitoj greedy : avida, mangxegema. green : verda. "-house," varmejo. greengage : renklodo. grey : griza. "-hound," leporhundo. grill : kradrosti. grin : grimaci, rikani. grind : mueli; pisti; grinci. gristle : kartilago. groan : gxemi. grocer : spicisto. grotesque : groteska. grotto : groto. ground : tero. "-floor," teretagxo. groundsel : senecio. group : grup'o, -igi. grouse : tetro. grub : larvo. guarantee : garantii. guard : gardi, (milit.) gvardio. gudgeon : gobio. guess : diveni, konjekti. guide : gvidi. guillotine : gilotino. gulf ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... was inconceivable, and they had mourned together over the grotesque possibilities of life. "But you will save her," he had said at last. "You will save her! You will point out to her all she would be giving up—the absurdity, the really ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they ever had parents. It is quite the natural and proper thing, born as they were born,—it would never do for them to have any over-filial regard for us. Imagine Humphry weeping for my death, or yours! What a grotesque idea! And as for Rupert and Cyprian,—it is devoutly to be hoped that when we die, our funerals may be well over before the great cricket matches of the year come on, as otherwise they will curse us for having left ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... South Fork of the Price, is the equivalent of Echo Caon, and is equal or superior in everything except color. The brilliant red of the Echo cliffs is wanting. The towers and walls of Castle Caon are yellowish-gray. But their forms are incomparably various and grotesque—in some instances sublime. The valley of Green River at this point is a cheerless sage-brush desert, as it is further north. To be sure, this uninviting stream, a couple of hundred miles further south, having united with the Grande, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... veterans with flowers as they swung down the Avenue, both men and officers, until some were fairly hidden under their fragrant burden. There was laughter and applause; grotesque figures were not absent as Sherman's legions passed, with their "bummers" and their regimental pets; but with all the shouting and the laughter and the joy of this unprecedented ceremony, there was one sad and dominant thought which could not be driven from the minds of those who saw ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... it is true, a natural belief in deity, which we might think was implanted by his creator; but it is not found in all men, and in the lower races it assumes forms often so low and grotesque that we cannot imagine its origin to have been divine. Between the God of the Christian and the god of the red Indian there is, saving mere force, no affinity whatever. This we must frankly own to ourselves. The god of the ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... kitchen, where we often saw her. The place itself is weird and terrible—low ceiled, with the stone hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it. When Giovanna's mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Hercules, which spouted water to cool the air from a serpent's throat, still asserting its aquatic supremacy, under the shade of a fine old medlar-tree; and all this too in the garden of a London parish workhouse! [Picture: Hercules fountain] Not less surprising was the aspect of the interior. The grotesque workshop of the pauper artisans, said to have been [Picture: Workshop] Lord Shaftesbury's dairy, and over which was his fire-proof library, was then an apartment appropriated to ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... course, a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... 'The River Fight' and 'The Bay Fight,' which appear in his volume of collected works, 'War Lyrics,' his title to be considered a true poet does not rest upon these only. He was unequal in his performance and occasionally was betrayed by a grotesque humor into disregard of dignity and finish; but he had both the vision and the lyric grace of the builder ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... form of images is familiar. The rude and, to modern eyes, grotesque idols of the lower peoples gradually pass into the more finished forms of the civilized nations.[2010] Really artistic forms, however, were produced only by some Semites (Babylonians and Assyrians) ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They looked grotesque—unearthly—denizens of some underground pit. They were good-humoured and ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... of one book and a perfectly unconditional belief in it. Furthermore, as before said, Michael never corrected himself or preserved his sanity by constant intercourse with his fellows. He incessantly brooded, and the offspring of a soul like his, begotten on itself, is monstrous and grotesque. He questioned himself and his oracle further. What could Paul mean exactly? God could not curse him if he did no wrong. He could only mean that he was willing to sin and be punished provided Israel might live. It was lawful then to tell a lie or perpetrate any evil deed in order ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... the river, and then turned, still plunging, up a steep bank, when, finding that I must come off, I threw myself off on the right side, where the ground rose considerably, so that I had not far to fall. I got up covered with dust, but neither shaken nor bruised. It was truly grotesque and humiliating. The bear ran in one direction, and the horse in another. I hurried after the latter, and twice he stopped till I was close to him, then turned round and cantered away. After walking about a mile ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... said to be mightier than the sword, is enough to kill any one with a real sense of humour. Some of the literary productions which were to send the greatest of living men off the face of the earth are quite grotesque in their feminine, shrill advocacy of force towards the "eater of pigs"; the "Anti-Christ"; and the murderer of a kindly-disposed gentleman who was on an innocent visit to the frontier of France for the purpose of negotiating ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... unwonted colour would come back to his pale cheek, and the smile to his lips, and while the ramble and the sunshine lasted he would be all jest and gaiety, pelting me with dead leaves, chasing me in and out of the plantations, and telling me strange stories, half pathetic, half grotesque, of Dryads, and Fauns, and Satyrs—of Bacchus, and Pan, and Polyphemus—of nymphs who became trees, and shepherds who were transformed to fountains, and all kinds of beautiful wild myths of antique Greece—far more beautiful and far more wild than all the tales of gnomes and witches in my book ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... library table apparently in rapt contemplation of a pair of sixteenth century bronze inkwells, strange twisted shapes, half man, half beast, bearing in their breasts twin black pools. But his thoughts were far from their grotesque beauty—centered on vast schemes of destruction and reconstruction. The room was still, so quiet, in spite of its proximity to the crowded life of Fifth Avenue, that one divined its steel construction and the doubled and trebled casing of its many windows. The walls, hung with green Genoese ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... defined these theories, of which there are seven, traced their origin, comprehended their significance and bearings, and dissected their supporting pretensions, then the whole field of our theme lies in light before us; and, however grotesque or mysterious, simple or subtle, may be the modes of thinking and feeling in relation to the life beyond death revealed in our subsequent researches, we shall know at once where to refer them and how to explain them. The precise object, therefore, of the present ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Archbishop Trench, has set those of the original forth with a judicious enthusiasm which cannot be bettered.[10] The point is, how these merits, these effects, are produced. The piece is a crucial one, because, grotesque as its arrangement would probably have seemed to an Augustan, its peculiarities are superadded to, not substituted for, the requirements of classical prosody. The writer does not avail himself of the new accentual quantification, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... such problems before the miscellaneous public of our theatres. No doubt a few of the social reformers are sprinkled over the audiences. There are a few in the boxes as well as in the galleries who discern the realities and who hear the true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas. But with the overwhelming majority it is quite different. For them it is entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one will underestimate the shady influence of such voluptuous vulgarities ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning sense of her surroundings came with the sound ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... gorgeous curtained litter drawn by camels, and a number of musicians with raeitas, darabukas, the "key and bottle," and other Eastern instruments which may have been ancestors of the Highlanders' bagpipes. The street crowd followed, enchanted by the plaintive, monotonous notes, grotesque to newcomers from the west, but enthralling to those who have fallen under the spell of their ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... week, but the most dangerous of all, presented himself yesterday at one of the entrances of the Tuilleries. Decked out in a grotesque costume, his eyes flashing, his hat cocked over his ear, and addressing the most respectable people with unheard-of rudeness, he attempted to force his way past the sentry, and thrust himself, for what purpose God only knows, into the presence of the ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... it has narrow loopholes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over the low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and irregular, through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight. Some of those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the projections of the architecture. The churchyard is very small, and is encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church itself. In front of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of incalculable ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... their clothes; unless they die on the instant they have a way of tearing their coats open and gripping with their hands at their vitals, as though to hold the life in; they have a way of sprawling their legs in grotesque postures; they have a way of putting their arms up before their faces as though at the very last they would shut out a dreadful vision. Those contorted, twisted arms with the elbows up, those spraddled stark ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... his window jealously drawn. But at night his shadow, strongly projected on the curtain, was in incessant motion; and far into the morning hours a gigantic head and arms shifted and blended upon it in grotesque forms. At the other window of the workman's apartment the young girl often sat, book in hand, and moved her lips as if she were reading aloud. Her eyes were never seen to wander to the outer world with those longings for freedom and fresh air which are natural to the youthful heart, but were always ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Don't let go!" begged Dick of his pet, who swung to and fro, dangling like some grotesque pendulum over the side of ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... thirty thousand spectators, contained a semi-circle of marble seats built up against the cliff of the Acropolis, and was open to the sky. The large stage was built of marble and the front of it was carved with grotesque figures. The lower tiers of seats nearest the stage were marble chairs reserved for priests and other dignitaries. The names of the men who occupied the chairs were carved in the marble, and some of ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... mainly supplied arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... in copying a humorous picture from the last page of Harper's Weekly. It was an ambitious attempt on the part of so young a pupil, but he had succeeded remarkably well, reproducing with close fidelity the grotesque expressions of the figures ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... peculiar to French traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... casting-nets. It is customary for each to consider as his personal property all the fish he obtains. These gatherings afford much delight to the children, of whom a great number accompanied their elders in the prahus. Women and children were in holiday attire, and, in spite of the grotesque ornaments of big rings in the split, distended ear-lobes, the latter were unusually charming. They had bracelets of brass and silver around their wrists and ankles; some of them wore necklaces of antique beads in dull colors, yellow, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... fiddle, and that splashed sheets of white paper, more or less, with sepia, and the other was president of a local agricultural society, or was gifted with a bass voice that rendered Se fiato in corpo like a war whoop —Mme. de Bargeton amid these grotesque figures was like a famished actor set down to a stage dinner of pasteboard. No words, therefore, can describe her joy at these tidings. She must see this poet, this angel! She raved about him, went into raptures, talked of him for whole hours together. Before two ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of labour out of Nature, has rather enriched labour than that labour has enriched Carnegie and Krupp. Their wealth is not dead wealth; it produces wages and articles of use. The "Surplus-Value Doctrine" is a grotesque distortion of, and an unjustified protest against, the fact that manufacturers and other organisers and directors of labour ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... a pine box placed upon rude rockers, and he used it for a rocking-chair. His bare, fat legs hung out on one side of the box, and as he delightedly rocked back and forth, his grotesque little shadow waved to and fro on the wall, and mocked ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... utterances of the oboe is the melody of the funeral march in Beethoven's "Heroic" symphony, in which its tenderness has beautiful play. It is sometimes used effectively in imitative music. In Haydn's "Seasons," and also in that grotesque tone poem by Saint-Saens, the "Danse Macabre," it gives the cock crow. It is the timid oboe that sounds the A for the orchestra to ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of brutality, except as a formless menace born of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional coarseness of it was to be endured—if she chose to endure it; for the rest was empty of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... what I should do with my materials, denoting a kind of oral literature among the Chippewas and other tribes, in the shape of legends and wild tales of the imagination. The narrations themselves are often so incongruous, grotesque, and fragmentary, as to require some hand better than mine, to put them in shape. And yet, I feel that nearly all their value, as indices of Indian imagination, must depend on preserving their original form. Some little time since, I wrote to Washington Irving on the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... And this, again, was not inappropriate—it was typical of all the ways of the city. It was a city which had grown up by accident, with nobody to care about it or to help it; it was huge and ungainly, crude, uncomfortable, and grotesque. There was nowhere in it a beautiful sight upon which a man could rest his eyes, without having them tortured by something ugly near by. At the foot of the slope of the River Drive ran a hideous freight-railroad; and across the river the beautiful Palisades ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the same style, where you can see swillers and topers in three-cornered hats, distinguished by noses red, purple, or crimson; little women of Hundsruck, in velvet caps with long fluttering ribbons, some grave, some laughing, others queer and grotesque-looking; the hay-loft high up under the roof; stables, pigsties, cowsheds, all in picturesque confusion attract and confound your attention. It is a ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... after his arrival he was sitting on the shingle at Madame de Villegry's feet, both much amused by the grotesque spectacle presented by the bathers, who exhibited themselves in all degrees of ugliness and deformity. Of course Madame de Villegry did not bathe, being, as she said, too nervous. She was sitting under a large parasol and enjoying her own superiority over those wretched, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... face to the crowd, his features worked convulsively, but he could not speak. His grief was so grotesque, that the few who saw him laughed hysterically. He could not even go to Polly, his feet ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... other country where such vulgar and heartless curiosity, and even ridicule, is bestowed upon grotesque or unsightly types ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had a war-dance on deck, which was a most ludicrous scene. The chief and two braves sat upon the deck, beating violently a small drum and howling forth their war-song, while the others in full dress, painted in a grotesque style, leaped about, brandishing tomahawks and spears, and terminating each dance with a terrific yell. Some of the men are very fine-looking, but the squaws are all ugly. They occupied part of the second cabin, separated only by a board partition from our room. This proximity was any thing ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... write a story than compose a picture." The final statement may be taken for what it is worth, written as it was at a time of disillusionment. The first part of Ruskin's analysis is certainly true and has been thus expanded by his biographer, Sir E. T. Cook: "The grotesque and the German setting of the tale were taken from Grimm; from Dickens it took its tone of pervading kindliness and geniality. The Alpine ecstasy and the eager pressing of the moral were Ruskin's ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... was with his awkward armor, he began executing a double shuffle on the beach, the sight was so grotesque that the captain came near going into convulsions. But the exercise was too exhausting, and the mate speedily sat down on the shore and also began opening oysters. His ardor was somewhat dampened when he failed to discover anything in ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... guess they weren't so cold and rusty-brown when the old demon spit fire at them from the active volcano," said Eleanor, gazing aloft at the grotesque ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... allusiveness, partly owing to their sound, possess a remarkable flavour which is totally absent from those of Saxon derivation. Such a word, for instance, as 'pyramidally,' gives one at once an immediate sense of something mysterious, something extraordinary, and, at the same time, something almost grotesque. And this subtle blending of mystery and queerness characterises not only Browne's choice of words, but his choice of feelings and of thoughts. The grotesque side of his art, indeed, was apparently all that was visible to the critics ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... away from her, blushing. The electric-light from the street shone full in the room, which was wavering with grotesque shadows. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to the proscenium, but he is required to give animation to the background, and to be as easy and graceful as he may in his aspect and movements. The result is not satisfactory. He is more at home in less refined situations. He is prone to indulge in rather grotesque gestures, expressive of admiration of the brilliant decorations surrounding him, and profuse, even servile gratitude for the hospitality extended to him. He interchanges mute remarks, enlivened by surprising grimaces, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... surrounded her. Meanwhile her mother and I stood together, looking at each other by the light of the lamp, with an assumed composure which hid our true faces like a mask. In that horrible situation, the grotesque and the terrible, always together in this strange life of ours, came together now. On either side of us, the one sound that broke the sinister and threatening silence was the lumpish snoring of the sleeping ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... something indescribably weird and wild and grotesque in that prolonged cry of cackling, unnatural mirth. An Australian by my side said: "Well done! Exactly right!" and the Flemish children shrieked with joy, without understanding the meaning of the noise. Old, old songs belonging to the early Victorian age were given by the soldiers, who had ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... was as inarticulate as Cromwell. Like the great Protector he "lived silent," and like him he was often misunderstood. Stories which have been repeated by writer after writer attribute to him the most grotesque eccentricities of manner, and exhibit his lofty piety as the harsh intolerance of a fanatic. He has been represented as the narrowest of Calvinists; and so general was the belief in his stern and merciless nature that ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in his ulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. One candle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And when his chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and for some moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the swinging bell. Descending, he wondered long and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... gone forth in the woods to help the German lad look for the missing horse. Mrs. Carleton smiled as she reflected upon a certain absurdity which marked the whole business, for, look at it as she chose, there was something grotesque in the project of two youths setting out to hunt for a horse that had been wandering for days in a limitless wood. But the smile quickly gave way to the serious expression which not often left the face of the mother since that awful ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... other hand, what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed face, turned-up ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... their death with such melancholy swiftness, but leaving—two of them, at least—imperishable work behind them. The old blind father and the bereaved husband read the confused eulogy and criticism, sometimes with a sad pleasure at the praise, oftener with a sadder pain at the grotesque inaccuracy. Small wonder that it became impressed upon Mr. Bronte's mind that an authoritative biography was desirable. His son-in-law, Mr. Arthur Bell Nicholls, who lived with him in the Haworth parsonage during the six weary years which succeeded Mrs. Nicholls's ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... presents itself in all it's magnificence; and the Gothic towers, with which it abounds, greatly engage the attention of every spectator, as well by the loftiness of their spires, as by the variety of their pleasingly grotesque decorations. The fortresss of Fredericstadt, supported on one side by the batteries of one of the arsenals, defends the entrance of the harbour: where there is, also, another battery; and where, as at this period, in case of necessity, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... rather grotesque band to whom we are principally indebted for a vindication of outraged common sense and insulted humanity in this instance, and whose vigorous exposition of the absurdities of the prevailing system, in combination with other lights and sources of intelligence, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... artistic effects depend upon methods of verbal jugglery which cannot be explained without the help of numerous examples. The collection published by Takumi includes a good deal of matter in which a Western reader can discover no merit; but the best of it has a distinctly grotesque quality that reminds one of Hood's weird cleverness in playing with grim subjects. This quality, and the peculiar Japanese method of mingling the playful with the terrific, can be suggested and explained ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... two explorers when they walked inland with about eighteen most obliging and courteous natives—an open space with four hollowed trunks of trees surrounding two stones, the trees carved into the shape of grotesque human heads, and among them, a sort of temple, made of sloping bamboos and pandanus leaves meeting at the top, from whence hung a dead man, with his face painted in stripes of red and yellow, procured, it was thought, from the pollen of flowers. There was not enough ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... spacious chamber, which served for the purposes of the apodyterium (that is, a place where the bathers prepared themselves for their luxurious ablutions). The vaulted ceiling was raised from a cornice, glowingly colored with motley and grotesque paintings; the ceiling itself was paneled in white compartments bordered with rich crimson; the unsullied and shining floor was paved with white mosaics, and along the walls were ranged benches for the accommodation of the loiterers. This chamber did not possess ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Neptune and his court—including an outsize animated picture of a mermaid ballet, quite an eye-catcher. But the broad quartz windows showed merely a shifting greenish-blue of seawater, and the only live fish visible were in an aquarium across from the bar. Pacific Colony lacked the grotesque loveliness of the Florida and Cuba settlements. Here they were somehow a working city, ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... to Plate II. (Lecture IV.), by Sandro; Venus in her planet, the ruling star of Florence. Anything more grotesque in conception, more unrestrained in fancy of ornament, you cannot find, even in the final days of the Renaissance. Yet Venus holds her divinity through all; she will become majestic to you as you gaze; and there is not a line of her chariot wheels, of her buskins, or of her throne, which you ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest—some kind of an ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... in its old, sinister expression of feature, the baby lay exposed. The face was grotesque in its weazened fixity; the little legs were twisted, and the thin body lay crooked among its blankets. The big eyes stared into the horrified ones above them as if pleading for mercy. The sight ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... or, indeed, to any reputable and industrious immigrant, the notion of settling a family in Hester Street could not seem other than grotesque. It is now the filthy and swarming centre of a very low population. The Jewish pedlar par eminence lives there and thereabouts. Signs painted in the characters of his race, not of his accidental nationality, abound on every side. Here a synagogue occupies the story ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Although it was past the midday hour, hardly a soul was to be seen moving about; and the western sun lighted up the green spires of the churches and red-tiled pointed roofs of the houses, glinting from the peculiar eye-shaped dormer windows of some of the cottages with the most grotesque effect and making them appear as if winking at the onlooker. It seemed like a scene of a bygone age reproduced on the canvas of some Flemish artist; and, but that Eric and his mother were accustomed to it, they must have rubbed their eyes, like Rip Van Winkle ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... their guns supplied them with an abundance of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... every head turned squarely in my direction. Their eyes are closed to a mere black line; though this crack they are watching me, evidently thinking themselves unobserved. The spectacle is weird and grotesque. It is a new effect, the night side of the woods by daylight. After observing them a moment I take a single step toward them, when, quick as thought, their eyes fly wide open, their attitude is changed, they bend, some this way, some that, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... drift of his thought, or have disengaged his own conception from the tangled skein of elliptical and ungrammatical sentences in which he has enveloped it. The form of Campanella's poetry, though often grotesque, is always clear. Michael Angelo has left too many of his compositions in the same state as his marbles—unfinished and colossal abbozzi, which lack the final touches to make their outlines distinct. Under these circumstances, it can hardly happen that the translator should succeed ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... like that, when, for the gratification of a sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the stuff, you would risk everything. In excess it played hell with the nerves. That was why those eyes of hers.... Damn them! Why couldn't a man put them out of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the town. Thus we have a record of the cost of making a provisional altar to display Donatello's work at Padua—"per demonstrar el desegno ai forestieri."[46] No final definition of Gothic art, of the maniera tedesca is possible. Some of its component parts have been enumerated: rigidity, grotesque, naturalism, and so forth; but the definition is incomplete, cataloguing the effects without analysing their cause. Whether Donatello was influenced by the ultimate cause or not, he certainly assimilated some of the effects. The most obvious example of the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... phantom (half person, half allegory) which he has placed at the gates of Hell. I 170 concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... centuries on the lips of old wives, the narrative which has come down to us having done duty as a source of amusement in the fireside groups of preceding generations, may seem to some to afford slight matter for reflection, and may even appear so grotesque in its incidents as to be fitted only to excite a smile of wonder at the simplicity of those among whom such stories could obtain reception, and surprise at the fantastic imagination in which such tales could find their origin. Modern thought has, however, been busy asking ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... your study a little imp of darkness,—of intellectual darkness, we mean,—whose efforts to imitate the gentle interference of fatigue are as grotesque as they are vexatious, and who does not succeed in deceiving, however readily one may sometimes fall in with his humor? The heavy pen, the dull page, the wandering thoughts, sometimes interrupt the most successful currents of labor, in those morning hours, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... may even temporarily comfort, the body after labor of brain; they do not help it—not even in the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy stuff—or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the few at all ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... that I have no right to enrol myself as one of the disciples of Epicurus, but when I think of myself, spontaneously there comes to my mind the grotesque epithet which Horace applied to the Epicureans in his Epistles, a characterization which for my part I accept and regard as an honour: "Swine of the herd of Epicurus, Epicuri ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... years, the real, the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous, sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say, the necessary result of the intercommunion of divine ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... below, mingled with shouts and the stamping of feet, together with the feverish condition of the lad, kept him awake another hour; but at last he fell into a light, uneasy sleep, haunted by all sorts of grotesque, awful visions. ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... laughing or screaming when she heard into whose service she was to go. I don't think she hated Lucy—yet. But for a woman who loved a man to take a place with the woman the man loved must have struck her as the most grotesque of propositions. But what could she do? Loyal to me, and to my secret, she wasn't going to give me ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... menacing looking man than this emperor, with his averted looks and his haughty contempt for the world and mankind; and yet there was something about him which made it difficult to take him seriously, especially to an Alexandrian. There was a touch of the grotesque in the Gallic robe with a red hood in which this ominous-looking contemner of humanity was wrapped. It was called a 'Caracalla', and it was from this garment that Bassianus Antoninus ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... refrain from laughter, his rage was so grotesque. He was making a mountain out of a molehill. In a moment, he ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... the bed, and saw that the mysterious and awful change, which tells that the inexorable decree is gone forth, and the "arrow fastened," was fast settling on old Mabel's features. Yet there was nothing uncouth or grotesque in that shrivelled and swarthy face, because FAITH, which leads death captive, had shed over them a supernatural calm, which ennobled them with a solemn sweetness. Her poor old hand, so long withered and helpless, dropped ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... region with which he was but little acquainted. It abounded, however, he knew, in game, and he hoped that water, sufficient for the wants of the oxen and horses, would be found. Scarcely half an hour passed, that a herd of grotesque gnus, with the heads of bisons and horns of oxen, or of graceful quaggas, swift blesbocs, or light and elegant springbocs, did not pass in sight, in hundreds, or rather in thousands, across the plain. Although it was no easy matter to get up with them, still Hendricks was too ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... overwhelms the wretch; he does not confess, but he is confounded. And how many secondary personages, accomplices, friends, enemies, witnesses are grouped about the principal criminal! Some are terrible, frightful, gloomy —others grotesque. And you know not what the ludicrous in the horrible is. My last scene is the court of assize. The prosecutor speaks, but it is I who furnished his ideas; his phrases are embroideries set around the canvas of my report. The president submits his questions to the jury; what emotion! ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... European galleries are several noted paintings in which the cat appears more or less unsuccessfully. Breughel and Teniers made their grotesque "Cat Concerts" famous, but one can scarcely see why, since the drawing is poor and there is no real insight into cat character evident. The sleeping cat, in Breughel's "Paradise Lost" in the Louvre, is better, being well drawn, but so small as to ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... long I lay there I don't know. A dim light was burning. I was in a room. The ceiling overhead was worked in a grotesque pattern; I could not make it out. My clothes were in tatters and my hand was covered with blood. Something warm was trickling down my face. What was it? The air was still and sodden. Who was this man beside me? And what was this smell ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... projecting over the other, till the pile seemed completely to overhang the street. The entire front, except the upper story, which was protected by oaken planks, was covered with panels of the same timber, and the projections were supported by heavy beams, embellished with grotesque carvings. Three deeply-embayed windows, having stout wooden bars, filled with minute diamond panes, set in leaden frames, were allotted to each floor; while the like number of gables, ornamented with curiously-carved coignes, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... device should have existed, and, secondly, that these ledges were carved and ornamented. These misericords, as they are called, were usually curiously, even grotesquely carved. Some of these carvings were founded on natural objects, some were grotesque heads, others represented subjects with man and animals. There were pews for the nobility, but, apart from the few old and weak people who used the rough bench or two in the body of the ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... me now. I can see the crowding Ottawas, their bodies painted red and black, their nose pendants—a pebble hung on a deer-sinew—swinging against their greasy lips as they shouted plaudits or derision. But best I can see Pemaou, dancing between me and the sun like some grotesque dream fantasy. He was in full war bravery, his body painted red, barred with white stripes to imitate the lacing on our uniforms, and his hair feather-decked till he towered in height like a fir tree. I say that he was grotesque, but at the time I did not think of his appearance; ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... century, or rather in a likeness of such dress; for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacra—phantasms; and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness of the flitting wearer. Just as the male shape approached the female, the dark ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. It would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales, "The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... mixture of sagacity and instinct occurred to me one day as my people were pulling off the lining of a hot-bed, in order to add some fresh dung. From out of the side of this bed leaped an animal with great agility, that made a most grotesque figure; nor was it without great difficulty that it could be taken, when it proved to be a large white-bellied field-mouse with three or four young clinging to her teats by their mouths and feet. It was amazing that the desultory and rapid motions ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... up, like a calf, across the seas, I should cherish such a memory of my piteous looks in that coffer, and such an ugly animosity against him who had inclosed me in it, I should dread so greatly to see a sarcastic smile blooming upon the face of the malicious wretch, or in his attitude any grotesque imitation of my position in the box, that, Mordioux! I should plunge a good dagger into his throat in compensation for the grating, and would nail him down in a veritable bier, in remembrance of the false coffin in which I had been left to grow ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for a promising boy would be to start him as a local reporter and make him get his first experience of life in the collection of "city items." There is in all this the expression, though in a somewhat grotesque form, of a widespread popular feeling that nothing is worthy of the name of education which does not fit a man to earn his bread rapidly and dexterously. Considering with how large a proportion of the human race ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... unavailing cries and ignorant of answers to any. As the day wore on, and the voices grew hoarse, and hope declined, more violent bodily exercise was resorted to, and the shouting crowd danced (or, perhaps, as the margin says, 'limped,'—a picturesque and contemptuous word for the grotesque contortions around the altar), as if that might bring the answer. That again is a feature common to all heathenism. No wonder that Elijah's scorn broke forth vehemently at such a sight. Noon was the hour of the sun's greatest power, and, since Baal was ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... through the cement formation, working it into spires, pinnacles, towers and many other capricious objects. Many of these are of faultless symmetry, resembling the minaret of a mosque; others are so grotesque as to provoke merriment as well as wonder. One of this latter character we named "The Devil's Hoof," from its supposed similarity to the proverbial foot of his Satanic majesty. The height of this rock from its base is about ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... from real things, all he would need to know under the same circumstances. He should be encouraged to play Robinson Crusoe; to imagine himself clad in skins, wearing a great cap and sword, and all the array of that grotesque figure, down to the umbrella, of which he would have no need. If he happens to be in want of anything, I hope he will contrive something to supply its place. Let him look carefully into all that his hero did, and decide whether any of it was unnecessary, or might have been done in a better way. Let ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... whortle and meadowsweet, stumbling over peat-cuttings and the workings of forgotten tin-mines. An idiotic popular tune raced through his brain. He found himself trying to frame the words, but they broke into incoherent prayers, still to the same grotesque tune. ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... particular light cast upon them in their times, and it is quite possible that the truth may be entirely lost from want of power to recognize it under the disguise in which it comes. A certain motive, for instance, that is an overpowering one in a given period, subsequently appears grotesque, weak, or even powerless; the consequent action becomes incomprehensible, and the actor is contemned; and a simile that appeared most appropriate in the ears of the author's contemporaries, seems meaningless, or ridiculous, to ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... picturesque by-world, where there are many illuminated and splendid fragments of Nature's story. He who visits this section will first be attracted by an array of rock-formations, and, wander where he will, grotesque and beautiful shapes in stone will frequently attract ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... been un-politic to repulse the grotesque ape, and I said: "I will. I will even give you the preference over the Kaiser, who asked me the same ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... that the methods, or the opportunities, of naval biographers and historians of the past century have preserved to us little, in personal detail and anecdote, of a period the peculiarities of which, if not exactly picturesque, were at least grotesque and amusing. The humor of Smollett has indeed drawn in broad caricature some of the salient features of the seaman of his day, which was that of Howe's entrance into the navy; and those who are familiar with ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... with a sweep of his eagle-like eye, had scanned those huge, grotesque proportions, he threw up his hand with a gesture of surprise, and a look of recognition lighted up his handsome face. Whereupon, as if needing nothing more to tell him who had been the prime mover in the day's outrage, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... one nature out of two natures! Mysterious and extraordinary metamorphosis. She had brought her nature to his, and he his nature to hers, and they were to mingle and become one nature.... Absurdly and inappropriately his mind picked up and presented to him the grotesque words, "High Jinks and Low Jinks." A note of laughter was irresistibly ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the Devil (adorned with a crown, sceptre, and tail) standing on the top of a high conical rock, and our Blessed Lord at a little distance from him. The appearance and attitude of the Apostles are somewhat grotesque. One of the best is St. Philip (No. 39.), who is represented as a wrinkled, bearded old man, contemplating a crucifix in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... frightful, grotesque, repulsive, uncouth, clumsy, ghastly, hideous, shocking, ungainly, deformed, grim, horrid, ugly, unlovely, disgusting, grisly, odious, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... will be to note most the large, the grotesque, or the startling aspects of nature. In time these will be desirable as studies, but at first she must try smaller and limited sketches. They are as difficult, but do not change as do the grander scenes and objects. I knew a sick girl, who, bedfast for years, used to ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... returning to the sleeper after an unsuccessful attempt at dining, Darrell sank into his seat, and, leaning wearily back, watched with half-closed eyes the rapidly changing scenes through which he was passing, for the time utterly oblivious to his surroundings. Gigantic rocks, grotesque in form and color, flashed past; towering peaks loomed suddenly before him, advancing, receding, disappearing, and reappearing with the swift windings and doublings of the train; massive walls of granite pressed close and closer, seeming for one instant a threatening, impenetrable ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... the steamship is a Circumstance, the telegraph is a Circumstance. They were mere happenings; and to the whole world, the wise and the foolish alike, they were entirely trivial, wholly inconsequential; indeed silly, comical, grotesque. No man, and no party, and no thought-out policy said, "Behold, we will build railways and steamships and telegraphs, and presently you will see the condition and way of life of every man and woman and child in the nation totally changed; unimaginable changes of law and custom will follow, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... It was after midnight, and Stiffner lay dead-drunk on the broad of his back on the long moonlit verandah, with all his patrons asleep around him in various grotesque positions. Stiffner's ragged grey head was on a cushion, and a broad maudlin smile on his red, drink-sodden face, the lower half of which was bordered by a dirty grey beard, like that of a frilled lizard. The red handkerchief twisted ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... a strange creature, this little Maya of his. She had been born on Mars and, orphaned by some unknown disaster, had been cared for during her first years by the mysterious, grotesque native Martians. When they took her at last to one of the dome cities, she was sent to Earth for rearing. And now she was back on Mars as an undercover agent of the Earth government, seeking to ferret out the rebels known to be ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... on the keys with the lightness of a feather. They rose and flashed and twinkled, and ran along the keyboard with swift, steel-like touch. The door at the end of the room opened softly. A tall man entered. He looked inquiringly at the grotesque green-and-white figure seated before the piano, then his glance met his wife's, and he sank into a big chair by the door, a pleased look on his dark face. The younger child glanced at him shyly. He returned the look and smiled. ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... park, with a volume of Blackstone's Commentaries under his arm, on the fatal Monday morning, when Miss Gwilt's written engagement of marriage was placed in Midwinter's hands. Here again, in this, as in all other human instances, the widely discordant elements of the grotesque and the terrible were forced together by that subtle law of contrast which is one of the laws of mortal life. Amid all the thickening complications now impending over their heads—with the shadow of meditated murder stealing ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... rather dragged, off, she didn't know which, didn't care as long as she was off. The ground seemed to come up to meet her. Why didn't things stand still? Even the unsuspicious "Dolly" appeared to be performing grotesque antics. Mary took a step, just one. It was not necessary for her to take more to realize that she was very stiff. "Heavens!" She slowly gathered up her coat and hat, and limped painfully out of the Academy. Now she could realize that an amateur, in riding anyway, had ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... over the parchment, upon which the grotesque outline of a griffin began to grow, twisted round a very conventional tree, with the stem issuing from its mouth, and its elongated tail executing marvellous spiral curves. The illuminator was taken by surprise the next instant, ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... on to discuss the politics of Lockmanville, and to lay bare the shameless and grotesque corruption in a town where business interests were fighting. The trouble was, apparently, that the people were beginning to rebel—they were tired of being robbed in so many different ways, and they went to the polls to find redress. And time and again, after they ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... rarity. At each yard they advanced the wildness of the country increased, and although the landscape was hidden, its influence was felt. Paul Nicholas knew, as well as if he had seen them, that he was in the presence of grotesque, isolated boulders, wide patches of bare, desolate soil, gaunt trees, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... that begins life as a vine twining on another tree, which it finally strangles, using the dead trunk as a support until it is able to stand alone. When old it often covers a large space with gnarled and twisted trunks of varied shapes and sizes, thus presenting a weird and grotesque appearance. This tree was held in reverent awe by the primitive Filipinos, who believed it to be the abode of the nono, or ancestral ghosts, and is still the object ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... partner a talented young man who looked up to him, almost adored him, who was quite willing to be his man Friday. Fortunately, for all his adoration, Herndon had no desire to idealize his hero. He was not disturbed by his grotesque or absurd sides. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would come and take the broken thing ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... the end of the book: an uneducated man and full of failings, but a man always, and therefore to be forgiven by the reader only a little less readily than Esther herself forgives him. Mr. Hardy's "Alec D'Urberville" is a grotesque and violent lay figure, a wholly incredible cad. Mr. Hardy, by killing Tess's child, takes away the one means by which his heroine could have been led to return to D'Urberville without any loss of the reader's sympathy. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were set up Nbakim,—large, grotesque images carved of wood and hung about with cloth strips and gew-gaws. Every November in Creek Town (I was told by some authorities it was every second November) there was a sort of festival held. Offerings of food and spirits were placed ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... impulse, put his hand into Gawtrey's. The host shook it cordially, and, without saying another word, showed his guest into a little cabinet where there was a sofa-bed, and they parted for the night. The new life upon which Philip Morton entered was so odd, so grotesque, and so amusing, that at his age it was, perhaps, natural that he should not be clear-sighted as ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... annual of the year 1845. The copper-plate engravings of lovely ladies, who had flourished in that day, were yellow and spotted with mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties faded and commonplace. Even the little clusters of verses (in which the poet's feeble candle shed its sickly light upon the obscurities of the artist's meaning) had an old-fashioned twang; like music on a lyre, whose strings are slackened by the damps of ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... The idea of desolating the sad, proud, handsome Mrs. Peyton, whom he worshiped, and her kind husband, whom he was just about to serve, was so grotesque and confusing, that ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... The grotesque absurdity of all this is enough to wrinkle the face of a cab horse. Society and the murderer are both playing the hypocrite, and of course Society is the worse of the two, for it is acting deliberately and methodically, while the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... of great sweetness, nobility, and charm; but the modern reader soon grows weary of enchanted forests, haunted by giants, dragons, and other impossible monsters, of deserts where despairing lovers roam haggard and forlorn, of dwarfs, goblins, wizards, and all the wild and grotesque creations of the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... themes was dictated less by a careful search after what was most characteristic of each epoch than by his own strong predilections. He loved the picturesque, the heroic, the enormous, the barbarous, the grotesque. Hence Eviradnus, Ratbert, Le Mariage de Roland. He loved also the weak, the poor, the defenceless, the old man and the little child. Hence Les Pauvres Gens, Booz endormi, Petit Paul. He ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... of the blanket's edge and pulled it gently down. But the blanket would not come away. It was being clutched tightly. With a jerk he wrenched it down, then stumbled backwards to the floor, a grotesque and ludicrous figure, for the white silk mask of Jack o' Judgment confronted him and the hateful voice of ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... of rich promise life was but a few days since, and how all had changed even more swiftly and unexpectedly than the grotesque events of a horrid dream, he bowed his head in his hands and sobbed like a ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... license the ancient chronicler records, were rarely seen alone. They haunted parties of pomp and pleasure; they linked together the extremes of life,—the grotesque Chorus that introduced the terrible truth of foul vice and abandoned wretchedness in the midst of the world's holiday and pageant. So now, as they wheeled into the silent, squalid street, they heralded a goodly company of dames and cavaliers on ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for the first time, the secrets of the monastery poured out before the light of day. The appearance of some among this sable multitude, though venerable and dignified, could not prevent the infinite grotesque of the others from having its effect on the spectator. The monks and priesthood of France amounted to little less than a hundred and fifty thousand. All were now thrown up from the darkness of centuries before a wondering world. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the coronet and mantle of state, threw himself from his noble charger, and, kneeling on one knee, offered to hold the stirrup while Louis dismounted from his little ambling palfrey, the effect was almost grotesque. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... of the way, and then the fallen rider, being assisted, got up slowly and stood rubbing his arm. No serious injury seemed to be done to the man, and the couple presently turned their attention to the machine by the roadside. They were not in cycling clothes Hoopdriver observed. One wore the grotesque raiment for which the Cockney discovery of the game of golf seems indirectly blamable. Even at this distance the flopping flatness of his cap, the bright brown leather at the top of his calves, and the chequering of his stockings were perceptible. The other, the rear ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... sort of endlessness of imagination; in both every detail that man achieves in art is carefully completed and different from its neighbour; and in both there is an exuberance of the human soul: but with this difference, that something in the Spanish temper has killed the grotesque. Both districts have been mingled in history, yet it is not the Spaniard who has invigorated the Delta of the Rhine and the high country to the south of it, nor the Walloons and the Flemings who have taught the Spaniards; but each of these ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... of the pockets of the grotesque coat a piece of sheepskin, which he proceeded to cut into two strips with ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... this connection, and still more infrequent to find anything but the turkey, which is the usual bird of sacrifice. The figure from the Dresden Codex (Pl. 15, fig. 9) rests upon the usual bowl or jar, that from the Tro-Cortesianus (Pl. 15, fig. 8) is pictured upon a grotesque animal head, three Kan signs ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champaign head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides, With thicket overgrown, grotesque, and wild, Access denied; and overhead up grew Insuperable height of loftiest shade, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... collar practically identical to the one worn by the skeleton that had been materialized in the egg back in the laboratory, but the skeleton itself was obviously that of one of the rat-men. Could it be this grotesque horde of human-like rodents that was holding Joan captive in the Cave ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... through the Straits of Messina, so famous for being the terror of the ancients. An old pilot is just come on board, who reminds me more of the poet's description of old Charon than of a modern human being. I hope he is not come to ferry us across the Styx. The whole of his crew have the same grotesque appearance. We can now discern the famous AEtna disgorging columns of smoke. Some distance below its summit it appears covered with snow, whilst we are here melting with heat. It has indeed a most stately appearance; and the whole country of Sicily answers everything that has been ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... elaborate cookery and nice taste in wines; their interest in the cut and material of their clothes and the luxury of their bed coverlets: the extravagance of the furniture in their chapels, and even the grotesque architecture of their buildings. He especially censures the magnificent state in which the abbots live and with which they travel about, and he declares himself emphatically against that exemption of monasteries ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a relaxation from historical studies he would sometimes devour a bluggy story, and as he read would shout with laughter at its grotesque out-topping of probabilities. He tried his own hand at sensational yarns. I recall one of them, rich in gory incidents, with a villain who is constantly leaping from a G.W.R. express to elude his pursuers. Among his papers I found the manuscript of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... pipe back in her mouth and began to smoke fiercely. The candle wick burned long, and was topped by a little cap of fiery red that seemed to wink at us like an impish gnome. The most grotesque shadow of Peg flickered over the wall behind her. The one-eyed cat remitted his grim watch and went to sleep. Outside the wind screamed like a ravening beast at the window. Suddenly Peg removed her pipe from her mouth, bent forward, ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... night came a dark and grotesque shadow. It paused below the bridge, then it came on silently and passed almost without sound toward the captain's quarters. It was Blake. Dolores' heart was choking her. Her arms clutched Wapi, whispering for him to be quiet, ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... variety of green and red and yellow, and in some places so transparent that it seemed surprising that any person, much less a horse or sleigh, could have passed over it without breaking through; then there were in the distance arches and columns, and whole buildings and statues, of every grotesque form imaginable, at least so my imagination carved out the excrescences and masses of ice I saw piled up in a long vista before me. I did not stay long without shouting again, and once more the voices of my friends ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... his face daubed with grease and wine lees, sometimes swallowed up in a grotesque mask. A wretched, cracked earthen cup, or an old wooden shoe, hanging by a string to his belt, he uses to ask alms in the shape of wine. No one refuses him, and he pretends to drink, then pours the wine on the ground by way of libation. At every step, he ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... most sanguine expectations, half-a-dozen fine but grotesque-looking fish speedily rewarding his efforts. The idea of devouring them raw was rather repulsive, but as there was no possible means of cooking them, they had either to do that or go without breakfast; so, selecting the most tempting-looking, they cut it up, and, after making a wry face over ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... the Queen ever realized the full size of those tanks, or even saw the lids which Mr. Phillips had mentioned. The light was very dim. The situation, in spite of the grotesque appearance of the tanks, was exceedingly romantic. Long stalactites hung, faintly gleaming, from the roof. The water, strangely blue, mourned against the stones of the beach, sighed through the deep recesses of the cave. ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... and the bridges like slim white spars on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind there was a dull sound dripping about ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... Durga. And Siva and Durga themselves were built up in past ages out of aboriginal beliefs, though the cement holding their figures together is Indian thought and philosophy, which are able to see in grotesque rustic godlings an expression of ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... contrary. His great thick lips were compressed athwart his face in a grotesque expression of joy. The instincts of his wild race were busy within him. To them a flight of locusts is not an object of dread, but a source of rejoicing—their coming as welcome as a take of shrimps to a Leigh fisherman, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... they stood shivering, awaiting the command to "Go!" to run the gauntlet of all this sinister crowd, overwelling with long-repressed venom, seething with taunts and lewdness. At last a mounted officer gave the word, and, amid a colossal shout of glee from the mob, the half-naked, grotesque figures, with their strange Oriental faces of sorrow, started at a wild run down the Corso. The goal was the Castle of St. Angelo. Originally the race-course ended with the Corso, but it had been considerably lengthened to gratify a recent Pope who wished to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... for many years to a large congregation a worthy man of the name of Collins, who was one of the leading lights of the body which rejoiced in a John Foreman and a Brother Wells. People who live in London cannot have forgotten Jemmy Wells, of the Surrey Tabernacle, and his grotesque and telling anecdotes. One can scarcely imagine how people could ever believe the things Wells used to say as to the Lord's dealings with him; but they did, and his funeral—in South London, at any rate—was ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... long time the girls watched the scene with awe, and each, in imagination, saw an athletic figure begrimed with smoke, and sending out grotesque shadows into the obscurity, as the destroying element was met and fought in ways unknown to them, which, they felt sure, involved danger. Miss Hargrove feared that they both had the same form in mind. She was not a girl to remain long unconscious of her heart's inclinations, and she knew ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold. She chanced to look down at them. A strange memory came to her: words that she had heard Roscoe read in church. The thing was almost grotesque in its association. "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who bringeth ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gnawed by time; it has narrow loopholes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over the low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and irregular, through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight. Some of those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the projections of the architecture. The churchyard is very small, and is encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church itself. In front of the tower, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thrown one arm across his purple, bloated face. Only the weak, helpless, open mouth could be seen. His muscular hands were relaxed, and the whole prostrate figure was pathetic in its unconsciousness of will and grotesque unhumanness. Fate had been too strong for Tom Davis. His birth and all the circumstances of his useless life had brought him with resistless certainty to this level, and his progress in the future could only be an ever-hastening ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... of Mr. Jenkins, though she cast the idea from her quickly. Mr. Jenkins was not worthy of sharing a moment's thought with Francis Sales; his collar was made of rubber, his accent was grotesque; but the influence of the boarding-house was still on her when she ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... what fantastic caprices are ye the originators 137—what caricatures of the various features of our waking life do ye not exhibit to us, ludicrous and distorted indeed, but still preserving through their most extravagant exaggerations a wayward and grotesque likeness to the realities they shadow forth! And stranger even than your most strange vagaries, is the cool matter-of-fact way in which our sleeping senses calmly accept and acquiesce in the medley of impossible absurdities you offer to their notice. We conceive ourselves, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... seemed to do it from the heart, and to enjoy it more, we candidly confess that we preferred their style of dancing to the other. But the old gentleman in the list shoes was the most amusing object in the whole party; for, besides his grotesque attempts to appear youthful, and amorous, which were sufficiently entertaining in themselves, the young fellow in the pumps managed so artfully that every time the old gentleman advanced to salute the lady in the cloth boots, he trod with his whole weight on the old fellow's toes, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... paintings, yet something of its original architecture had been preserved and blended with modern embellishments. There were the stone-shafted casements and the deep bow-window of former times. The carved and panelled wood-work of the lofty ceiling had likewise been carefully restored, and its Gothic and grotesque devices painted and ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... remark alone. But his few words left on Marcella a painful impression, which renewed her compassion of the night before. This young fellow, just married, protesting against an over-exaltation of the affections!—it struck her as half tragic, half grotesque. And, of course, it was explained by the idiosyncrasies of that little person in a Paris gown now walking about somewhere with ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... consideration, the development of membranous appendages of the part of the face in which the nostrils open is one of the most curious peculiarities of a vast number of Bats, in many of which these singular nose-leaves almost rival the ears in size, while their structure often renders them most grotesque. We have two Bats thus adorned in Britain, namely, the Greater and the Lesser Horseshoe Bats, but most of the leaf-nosed species are inhabitants of warmer regions, and it is there that they run out into the most remarkable eccentricities of structure. In ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... walk, going down towards the ornamental water, where some children were sailing their boats. "That fellow is simply grotesque," he replied; "but how would you have sane people give any heed to that mysticism, that awakening of spirituality which is alleged by the same doctrinaires who started the bankruptcy of science cry, when after so brief an evolution it produces such insanity, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... him for his father's brother, would it be best to enlighten her? He remembered his experience at Yale, so he decided against it. It would be rude to contradict a lady; it would be criminal to mar this exquisite occasion with the grotesque story of his origin. Later, perhaps. So he ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... feet in width occupies the centre of the next stage, flanked by two blunt-pointed windows rather bare of glass. Above is an arcaded gallery of small pointed arches in pairs, also extending across the entire front. The balustrade, above, holds a number of grotesque creatures carved in stone. They may be gargoyles, but are not, however, in this case, of the spout variety, being some of those erections of a superstitious age which were so frequently added to a mediaeval ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... gazed up to? Already we have wellnigh forgotten, except when it is especially called to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it was not always with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginations to conceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. We find them grotesque. The solution of the problem of physical maintenance so as to banish care and crime, so far from seeming to us an ultimate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything like real human progress. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... feet the girl heard a crunching sound, a sort of a nibbling, as if some silent and very discreet terrier was at work upon the turf. She faltered back; here was no doubt another grotesque detail of this most unnatural episode. She did not run, because physically she was in the power of these events. Her feet chained her to the ground in submission to this march of terror after terror. As she stared at the spot ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... in the bark after grubs, or he would worship anything odd in the branches. Is Mr. Muller not unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into the midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship a tree if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical meaning, or if boilyas lived in its boughs, but whose practical way of dealing with the problem of its life was to burn it round the stem, chop the charred wood with stone axes, and use the bark, branches, and leaves ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... of black mittens in it. The grey Cathedral looked gravely down upon them as they passed, and Pennie looked up to where her own special monster perched grinning on his water-spout. The children had each chosen one of these grotesque figures to be their very own, and had given them names; Pennie called hers the Griffin. He had wings and claws, a long neck, and a half-human face, and seemed to be just poised for flight—as though at any moment he might spring away from his resting-place, ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... reel backwards and fall, with a queer grotesque movement, head over heels down the stone steps. The dull thud her body made as she fell on the half landing echoed up and down the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... length asked hoarsely. The idea of another victim came as some slight alleviation of his own grotesque case. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... the Orders in Council, and often under British convoy.[269] The fact was noteworthy, as bearing upon the contention of the United States Government soon after, that the Non-Intercourse Law was adequate security for the action of American merchant vessels; a grotesque absurdity, in view of the embargo experiences. That it is not consonant with national self-esteem to accept foreign assistance to carry out national laws is undeniable; but it is a step further to expect another nation to accept, as assured, the efficiency ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... England, as librarian to Howard, Earl of Arundel. He bequeathed to the Bodleian his Anglo-Saxon and Northern collections. Among these is a beautiful Latin Psalter (Jun. 27) of the tenth century, with grotesque initials and interlinear Saxon. This book has been called "Codex Vossianus," because Junius obtained it from his relative, Isaac Voss. Among these also is the unique Cdmon, a MS. of about A.D. 1000, which had been given ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... doggedly and with set lips, working over it until Miss Jane called her to breakfast; then, with a boldness born of despair, she entered the dining-room, where her aunts were already seated at table. There was a moment of silence after the grotesque figure was fully taken in; then came a moan from Jane and ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and caught a chub in Androscoggin. Or, crouched on the bank of a frog-pond, we tickled frogs with straws. Yes, and fun of the freshest we found it. Certain animals, and especially frogs, were created, shaped, and educated to do the grotesque, that men might study them, laugh, and grow fat. It was a droll moment with Nature, when she entertained herself and prepared entertainment for us by devising the frog, that burlesque of bird, beast, and man, and taught ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... allusions were made to Virginia. In the "Mask of Flowers," performed at White Hall upon Twelfth Night, 1613-14, one of the characters challenges another, and asserts that wine is more worthy than tobacco. The costumes were exceedingly grotesque and suggestive of the New rather than of the Old World. Kawosha one of the principal characters rode in, wearing on his head a cap of red-cloth of gold, from his ears were pendants, a glass chain was about his neck, his body ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... in the air, and his gloves extended in a most grotesque attitude, was immovable and rigid as stone. Not a muscle moved, and the Little Panjandrum, after staring at him a moment, ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... bad in his books; there is so much of it, and all so strong and staring. It looks at first sight as though his good and his bad alike were entirely conspicuous and unmistakable. His devouring passion for life, his grotesque romance, his truth and his falsity, these cover the whole space of the Comedie between them, and nobody could fail to recognize the full force of either. He is tremendous, his taste is abominable—what more is there to say of Balzac? And that much has been said so often, in varied ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... frame, placed close to the wall, and holding a stout wooden panel. In the centre of this, at the height of a man's chest, was a stuffed leathern pad, on which was painted a grotesque face, evidently intended for that of a negro, and above it was a dial bearing numbers that ranged from 1 to 300. The single pointer on this dial indicated the number 173, a figure at which ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted like a ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... winding its way along the tortuous course of a Rocky Mountain canyon, suddenly paused before the long, low depot of a typical western mining city. The arc lights swinging to and fro shed only a ghastly radiance through the dense fog, and grotesque shadows, dancing hither and thither to the vibratory motion of the lights, seemed trying to contest supremacy with the ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... sensation as he stepped through the inner doorway. A man faced him in a huge leather chair across the room. At least Dick thought he was a man. Grotesque in every way, his body was small while his head was twice as large as normal. He was light complexioned, with almost white hair thinly covering the top of his enormous head. His features were finely cut, with large aquiline ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... was never at fault in the face of a difficulty. Mr. Pickwick was to be got to Nupkins' in a sedan chair, a grotesque incident; but then, what to do with Tupman, also arrested? As both would not fit in an ordinary sedan, the sedan was made to fit them, and thus it was done. "It was recollected that there stood in the Inn yard an old sedan ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... to follow the grotesque proceedings, and utterly impossible to find a gleam of interest in them. One of the characters drank incessantly through two acts, and indulged in the luxury of what is politely called a "jag." We might have been pardoned for envying it. There are worse conditions, when it comes ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... and habits of the class to which he belongs, and bears with acquired philosophy the hardships and privations which fall to their lot. Like "Ragged Dick," he has a sense of humor, which is apt to reveal itself in grotesque phrases, or ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... marriage from the old-fashioned and grossly immoral standpoint of Melancthon and other theologians, and who consider a wife as the divinely ordained vehicle for the chartered intemperance of her husband, it will seem grotesque in the highest degree that a physiological inquirer should attempt to advise them how often to seek the embraces of their wives; but those who regard woman from the standpoint of a higher ethics, who abhor the notion that she should be only the vehicle for her husband's ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... giving them an insufficient alimentation when very young. They soon became rachitic from their deprivation of lime-salts and a great number perished, but those who survived were very highly prized by the Roman Emperors for their grotesque appearance. There were various recipes for dwarfing children. One of the most efficient in the olden times was said to have been anointing the backbone with the grease of bats, moles, dormice, and such animals; it was also said that puppies ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... enough to know that as a seducer he was the most perfect thing that the devil had succeeded in inventing in this progressive century. The prince was dressed out for the occasion in a sufficiently grotesque costume, which he wore with ironic gravity and cavalier ease. A black satin doublet, knee breeches, embroidered stockings, and shoes with gold buckles, formed the main portions of his dress, over which trailed a long brocaded open-sleeved robe ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... unconscious humor is so deliciously absurd that it will convulse the reader with laughter in nearly every line. There is no dialect in them, and their humor lies entirely in the peculiar views set forth, as well as the grotesque language in which they are expressed. No book so genuinely funny has been published in a decade, and the fun is in an entirely new vein. Alphonse's description of a ride in an "upstairs berth" of a sleeping car, should be read by ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... from the kettle, in earthen bowls, each containing the dinner of a single person. Montezuma was supposed to be absolute master of Mexico, and what they saw at this dinner was interpreted with exclusive reference to him as the central figure. The result is remarkably grotesque. It was their own self-deception, without any assistance from the Aztecs. The accounts given by Diaz and Cortes, and which subsequent writers have built upon with glowing enthusiasm and free additions, is simply the gossip of a camp of soldiers suddenly cast into an earlier form ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes. Here I had heard what he had heard, I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his words it was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened but what was about to happen, while to me the whole business was still confused and grotesque. As I drove home to my house in Kensington I thought over it all, from the extraordinary story of the red-headed copier of the "Encyclopaedia" down to the visit to Saxe-Coburg Square, and the ominous ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... at some grotesque carvings in one corner of the temple, still dimly visible, and called out to me to come and look at them also. Very reluctantly I joined her, and stood for a few minutes waiting, till she ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... merely a grotesque Bracken shadow, but in the course of geological ages it might harden down into something palpable. It is this possibility that leads Sir Ashley Eden to advise the Baboo to revert to its original type; but it is not so ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... writer's or the artist's way of expressing what is in his mind, but this is Style in the more general sense, and does not admit of being reduced to laws apart from those of Vision and Sincerity. A man necessarily sees a subject in a particular light—ideal or grotesque, familiar or fanciful, tragic or humorous, he may wander into fairy-land, or move amid representative abstractions; he may follow his wayward fancy in its grotesque combinations, or he may settle down amid the homeliest details of daily life. But having chosen he must be true to his choice. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Never in my life had I seen anything so grotesque as this woman. To begin with she was more than ordinarily stout and unwieldy—indeed, she appeared like a veritable mountain of flesh; but what was so disturbing to my mind was that she was nothing ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... pole by a man who is concealed under a large white cloth. There is a contrivance for opening and shutting the jaws, and the figure pursues and bites every body it can lay hold of, and does not release them except on payment of a fine. It is generally accompanied by some men dressed up in a grotesque manner, who, on reaching a house, sing some extempore verses requesting admittance, and are in turn answered by those within, until one party or the other is at a loss for a reply. The Welsh are undoubtedly a poetical people, and these verses often display a good deal ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... Hebrew dramatists are pure to coldness. These dramas began to flourish in the eighteenth century; Luzzatto was by no means an unworthy imitator of Guarini. Sometimes the syncretism of ideas in Hebrew plays is sufficiently grotesque. Samuel Romanelli, who wrote in Italy at the era of the French Revolution, boldly introduces Greek mythology. It may be that in the Spanish period Hebrew poets introduced the muses under the epithet "daughters of Song." But with Romanelli, the classical machinery is more clearly ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... appears to have been intended to represent a bishop, another seems like the Virgin and Jesus; a third appears to be Saint John the Evangelist; the others are too much mutilated to be known. Over each arch attached to the cornice, surrounding the building, there were three grotesque heads. The entire height of the cross, from the lowest base to the top of the vane, is thirty-eight feet. It is constructed of stone, and is situated in an open area, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human nature. Perhaps a little to her disappointment, she had soon discovered how grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was. She had returned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the war and had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known women whose names, in the public imagination, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... wretched procession of prisoners had been marched to the Camp gaol. Behind the demolished barrier huts smouldered as heaps of blackened embers; and the ground was strewn with stark forms, which lay about—some twenty or thirty of them—in grotesque attitudes. Some sprawled with outstretched arms, their sightless eyes seeming to fix the pale azure of the sky; others were hunched and huddled in a last convulsion. And in the course of his fruitless search for friend and brother, an old instinct ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... talent I could sketch that scene now from memory. It must ever abide in my mind, distinct in every detail. The sky overcast with cloud masses, a dense mist rising from the valley, the pallid spectral light barely making visible the strange, grotesque shapes of rocks, trees and men. Before us was a narrow opening, devoid of vegetation, a sterile patch of stone and sand, and beyond this a fringe of trees, matted with underbrush below so as to make good screen, but sufficiently thinned out above, so that, from our elevation, we ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... then, and so empty now! A grotesque and dreadful suspicion took me. While Trewlove tortured himself to my model, was I, by painful degrees, exchanging brains with him? I laughed; but I was unhinged. I had been smoking too many cigarettes ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... themselves, with "curious harness, as in saddles and bridles, cruppers, and breast-plates, covered with precious clothing, and with bars and plates of gold and silver." And though it is hazardous to stigmatize the fashions of any one period as specially grotesque, yet it is significant of this age to find the reigning court beauty appearing at a tournament robed as Queen of the Sun; while even a lady from a manufacturing district, the "Wife of Bath," makes the most of her opportunities to be seen as well as to see. Her "kerchiefs" were "full fine" ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... his loss is aggravated by the spectacle that his remains present, for they are abominable to see. Death has bestowed a grotesque look and attitude on the man who was so comely and so tranquil. With his hair scattered over his eyes, his mustache trailing in his mouth, and his face swollen—he is laughing. One eye is widely open, the other shut, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... with much justice, that one of the most remarkable of the decrees that issued from this palace, was that which authorized the meetings of the Conards, a name given to a confraternity of buffoons, who, disguised in grotesque dresses, performed farces in the streets on Shrove Tuesday and other holidays. Nor is it a little indicative of the taste of the times, that men of rank, character, and respectability entered into this society, the members of which, amounting to two thousand five hundred, elected ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... did not include a word Bill had uttered; nevertheless, his mangled lip writhed about the pipe-stem in grotesque grin. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... that he counted to subdue you; keep this carefully in your mind; in order to let you give him an easy throw, he will present you at need grotesque arguments, and so soon as he sees you confident, simply satisfied with the excellence of your replies, he will involve you in sophisms so specious that you will fight in vain ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... hope in him of attaining an end. Once kill this hope and his movements become senseless, spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling from a height. To struggle with the inevitable has something childish in it. To implore the law of gravitation to suspend its action would no doubt be a grotesque prayer. Very well! but when a man loses faith in the efficacy of his efforts, when he says to himself, "You are incapable of realizing your ideal; happiness is a chimera, progress is an illusion, the passion for perfection is a snare; and supposing all your ambitions ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thoughts would roll across her heart like a crushing weight, and she knew that no thirst for tea, no hunger for flour-bread, no shivering in thin garments, would ever drive her to part with it. For the grotesque, carven thing was the very birthright of her boy. Every figure, hewn with infinite patience by his sire's, his grandsire's, his great-grandsire's, hands meant the very history from which sprang the source of red blood in his young veins, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... troupe, and are notorious for kidnapping and pilfering. Their principal pastimes are drinking, dancing, and music. . . . They are invariably attended by half a dozen of bears and monkeys that are broke in to perform all manner of grotesque tricks. In each company there are always two or three members who profess . . . modes of divining, which procure them a ready admission ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... was to be murdered. And then you were to get the concern cheap from my executors, and to float me dead since you could not float me living. What folly, Ravengar! What stupendous folly! Even if the fanciful and grotesque scheme had succeeded as far as my death, it could not have succeeded beyond ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... had stood at the grave-side, his eyes wandering from that long elm box with the silver plate and the wreath of flowers, to the mourners on the other side—her father in his broadcloth, his heavy, smooth face pulled in lines of grotesque sorrow; her mother, with her crimson, tear-stained cheeks, her elaborate black, her intolerable crape, and her jet-hung mantle. Even these people had been seen by him up to then through a haze of love; ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... a disagreeably grotesque colouring to the government of Henry VIII to see how his matrimonial affairs are mixed up with those of politics and religion. Queen Catharine Howard, whose marriage with him marked also the preponderance of the Catholic principle, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... ordinary newspaper to find that the famous writer's folly is shared by many weaker souls; and the effect on the mind of a shrewd and contented man is so startling that it resembles the emotion roused by grotesque wit. The whole story of the ages tells us dismally what happens when unwise people choose to claim the measure of liberty which they think good; but somehow, though knowledge has come, wisdom lingers, and the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... imported from India. The participants are dressed in grotesque fancy costumes, and are obliged to race holding umbrellas, toy balloons, or some other absurdity. They are in great ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams, one cheek all bushy as if with a swollen flame, the other denuded and sunken, with the untouched long moustache on that side asserting itself, lonely and fierce. And while he stared thunderstruck, with the gaping scissors on his fingers, I ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... Tanfield, a great judge in those times. The latter was buried "at twelve o'clock in the Night" in the church of Burford; and there is a very handsome aisle there and an immense monument to his memory. The Tanfield monument, though somewhat ugly and grotesque, is a wonderful example of alabaster work. The cost of erecting it and the labour bestowed must have been immense. It was this knight who built the great house of which the present ruins form part, and the date would probably be about ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... composition surpassed his knowledge of the world; but that too was far from perfection. Schiller's style in the Robbers is partly of a kind with the incidents and feelings which it represents; strong and astonishing, and sometimes wildly grand; but likewise inartificial, coarse, and grotesque. His sentences, in their rude emphasis, come down like the club of Hercules; the stroke is often of a crushing force, but its sweep is irregular and awkward. When Moor is involved in the deepest intricacies of the old question, necessity ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... seem almost grotesque to make so heavy a complaint as this, and then to put forward as chief offender our ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... world of men and that of the gods, the "Island of the Double," "Land of the Shades," where the living came into close contact with the souls of the departed. It was inhabited by the Dangas, tribes of half-savage dwarfs, whose grotesque faces and wild gestures reminded the Egyptians of the god Bisu (Bes). The chances of war or trade brought some of them from time to time to Puanit, or among the Amamiu: the merchant who succeeded in acquiring and bringing them to Egypt had his fortune made. Pharaoh ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... conclusion of Queen Elizabeth's portrait, which he has faithfully copied from Speed, in the passage where she humbled the Polish Ambassador, I admire. I can even allow that image of Rapture hovering like an ancient grotesque, though it strictly has little meaning: but there I take my leave—the last stanza has no beauties for me. I even think its obscurity fortunate, for the allusions to Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, are not only weak, but the two last returning again, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... seemed even to move, as if the garden were alive with creeping, hurrying figures, and amused herself tracking them until she traced them to the palm tree or cactus bush that caused them. One in particular gave her a long hunt till she finally ran it to its lair, and it proved to be the shadow of a grotesque lead statue half hidden by a flowering shrub. Forgetting the hour and the open windows all around her, she burst into a rippling peal of laughter, which was interrupted by the appearance of a figure, imperfectly seen through the lattice-work which divided her balcony from the next ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... John indicated his approval with an upward leer as Lablache rose from his chair, and a grotesque pursing of his lips and his forefinger at the side of his nose. Then he, too, struggled to his feet, and, with unsteady hand, poured out two stiff ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... In the choice and design of his ornaments, the architect should endeavor to be grotesque rather than graceful (though little bits of soft flower-work here and there will relieve the eye): but he must not imagine he can be grotesque by carving faces with holes for eyes and knobs for noses; on the contrary, whenever he mimics ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... with reference to other things. He has no idea of what is possible and what is impossible; these words in fact would have no meaning for him, since he is not aware of any laws by which events are governed. His imagination, accordingly, is not under any restraint; he hits upon all kinds of grotesque theories, and, having no critical faculty to test them, he repeats them and seriously believes them. The stories of the nursery, in which there are no impossibilities, in which a man may visit the sun and the winds in their homes and find them at their broth, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... themselves to tears, when looking at these grotesque, yet lifelike pictures; but scarcely one knew the name of their author, M. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... not help the double emphasis; to him it seemed a grotesque turning of the tables, a too poetically just ending to that misspent day. It was all he could ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... what it meant. At the further end of it I saw a head, and a—a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough for him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... died of their culture, or of a reflection of it. At the first nobody had cared a straw about artistic excellence. The homely or grotesque accomplishments of the village found their way surprisingly on to a public platform, and were not laughed to scorn; anyone who could sing a song or play a musical instrument—it mattered not what—was welcomed and applauded. But how could it go on? The people able to do ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... grimy from their work among the smoke and the gases. And through the grime the sweat had run down like little rivers making courses for themselves in the soft dirt of a hillside. They looked grotesque enough, but there was nothing about them to make me feel like laughing, I can tell you! And they all grinned amiably when the amazed and disconcerted Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour came tumbling ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... possesses the rare gift of portraying all the grotesque little joys and sorrows and scruples of this very small girl with a pathos that is peculiarly genuine ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... about to leave us, one of the Brumer Islanders, standing on a large catamaran alongside, put himself into a grotesque attitude, and commenced beating with his hand upon a large tin can which someone had given him, at the same time going through some of the motions of a dance. He seemed to be a most amusing vagabond, for, upon our drummer being set to work in the chains, after joining ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... smiled his disbelief, and that smile, twisting his blood-smeared countenance, was grotesque and horrible. "I left him to guard our backs and give me warning if any approached," he informed her. "I knew him for too great a coward to be trusted in the fight; so I gave him a safe task, and yet ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... creature, worthy of a Callot's fantastic pencil. (Jacques Callot (1592-1635), the French engraver and painter, famed for the grotesque nature of his subjects.—Translator's Note.) If you come across it in the bramble-bushes, it sways upon its four stilts, it wags its head, it looks at you with a knowing air, it twists its mitre round and ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... me, Mr. Isbister, is one of the problems most constantly before my mind. We happen to be—as a matter of fact, there are no very trustworthy connections of ours. It is a grotesque and ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... unpleasing. The clothes and wraps which the men and women wore were of various gay colours, and were, in most cases, embroidered quite skilfully with representations of flowers, fruits, wild beasts, and individuals of grotesque appearance. Every one was crowned with ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
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