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More "Monstrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Speaking," he said, "in name of over two hundred people who live in district affected by the Bill, I ask your Lordships to reject it." This too much even for House of Lords. That alleged luxury of two hundred people should weigh against convenience of the population of London was a little monstrous. BRAMWELL kept his countenance admirably. ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... crude Calvinism, as preached in certain parts of the north, is nothing less than monstrous. The good God, beneficent Father of us all, is unrecognizable when eternal reprobation is represented as the inevitable fate of the vast majority of His children. In time, no doubt (and the sooner the better), the results of modern theological thought will penetrate into the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... whoever considers what a vast number of prejudices and false opinions are everywhere embraced with the utmost tenaciousness, by the unreflecting (which are the far greater) part of mankind. There was a time when the antipodes and motion of the earth were looked upon as monstrous absurdities even by men of learning: and if it be considered what a small proportion they bear to the rest of mankind, we shall find that at this day those notions have gained but a very inconsiderable footing ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... answer, that it is right that barbarism should subserve civilization. I assert that barbarism is wrong, and civilization is RIGHT; that the former conduces to the misery and the latter to the happiness of mankind. Barbarism—with its pagan idolatries, its monstrous superstitions, its devil-worship, its false religious rites, its heathen orgies, its cruelties, its cannibalism—is wrong. Who will deny this? Who are its apologists and advocates? Let them stand forth and show the right of barbarism! ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... Challenge, etc.," he jerked out. "Mind, sir, you're responsible! wholly responsible! Dents, damages, delays! What's it all mean, sir? These—these monstrous creations "—he brandished the bricks, and M'Adam started back—"wrapped, as I live, in straw, sir, in the Cup case, sir! the Cup case! No Cup! Infamous! Disgraceful! Insult me—meeting—committee—every one! What's it mean, sir?" He paused to ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... monstrous scheme succeeds, there will be no more prayer in the villages of the devout Maronites, no more submission to God in the mountains of Armenia, no more simplicity of faith among the shepherds of Chaldea, no ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... extinction. Is not this war the penalty which inexorable justice exacts from America, North and South, for the enormous guilt of cherishing that frightful iniquity of slavery for the last eighty years? The leaders of this revolt propose this monstrous thing,—that over a territory forty times as large as England the blight and curse of slavery ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... even in the ten persecutions[745], of such severity as that which the protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholicks. Did we tell them we have conquered them, it would be above board: to punish them by confiscation and other penalties, as rebels, was monstrous injustice[746]. King William was not their lawful sovereign: he had not been acknowledged by the Parliament of Ireland, when they appeared ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... such a scene, beneath the dark forest canopy, with here and there a few struggling sunbeams, to dissipate the gloom. See the shrewd yeomen, haggling with their scarlet- coated customers, abating somewhat in their prices, but still dealing at monstrous profit; and then complete the picture with circumstances that bespeak war and danger. A cannon shall be seen to belch its smoke from among the trees, against some distant canoes on the lake; the traffickers shall pause, and ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... truth, we like a great deal better than they deserve. He is prejudiced to the point of perversity, and gullible almost to sublimity, uncritical even for an eminently uncritical age, accepting and retailing any and every monstrous invention, the more readily apparently in proportion to its monstrosity. For all that—despite his prejudices, despite even his often deliberate perversion of the truth, it is difficult to avoid a certain kindliness for him. To the literary ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... glimpse of grace. True, they had plundered and eaten the faithful and shed innocent blood in oceans, but they hated the children of Mahound worse than the children of Christ. On the eve of Christmas-tide four envoys had come from their Khakan, monstrous men with big heads that sprang straight from the shoulder, and arms that hung below the knee, and short thin legs like gnomes. For forty weeks they had been on the road, and they brought gifts such as no eye had seen before—silks ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... day would no longer love, having become part of this monstrous, lovely earth, of that cold, whiffling air. To be no longer able to love! It seemed incredible, too grim to bear; yet it was true! To become powder, and the wind; no more to feel the sunlight; to be loved no more! To become a whiffling noise, cold, without one's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... nervous tension, bordering on delirium, the least shock was an agony to him. The creaking of a plank terrified him. His father's breathing took on fantastic proportions. It seemed to be no longer a human breathing, and the monstrous sound was horrible to him; it seemed to him that there must be a beast sleeping there. The night crushed him; it would never end; it must always be so; he was lying there for months and months. He gasped ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... "get over the monstrous queerness of it all. Here's a woman that's got to be saved, and she's so infernally obstinate we can't save her. When I think of it at night, I swear I'm a fool not to complain of the fellow in spite of her, and ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... star, and within that a black scarabaeus. The white background of the walls threw into relief the angular figures on the frieze, scenes from old Egyptian life: games, marriages, feasts and battles, painted in the crude colors of early art. Between were paneled pictures of the gods, monstrous and deformed deities, half men, half beasts; and the dado, done in black, pictured the funeral rites of the Egyptians, with explanatory passages from the ritual of the dead. Rudely-sculptured bas-reliefs and intaglios, torn from ancient mastabas, were ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... than whom none stands higher in British India, and that in terms of eulogy of the Inspector's activity in Christian work. How can we explain such a state of affairs? Just as we would explain the religiousness of early days of America and England associated with the monstrous cruelty of the slave traffic. There is often in connection with great human wrong great moral confusion, and without judging the individuals living under such conditions, we can say emphatically, those conditions ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... with rapidity. If we do not eject Evil it will eject the good from us. Use the implanted power to cast out this creeping, advancing evil. Sometimes a wine-grower has gone into his cellars, and found in a cask no wine, but a monstrous fungus into which all the wine had, in the darkness, passed unnoticed. I fear some Christian people, though they do not know it, have something like ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... "I must tell you that I gladly descend to bandy words with you; your monstrous impudence is a claim to rank I cannot ignore. But a lackey who has himself ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... a little sorry fellow, and their mother an old Irish woman. They have had four children of this bigness, and four of ordinary growth, whereof two of each are dead. If, as my Lord Ormond certifies, it be true that they are no older, it is very monstrous. So home and to dinner with my wife and to pipe, and then I to the office, where busy all the afternoon till the evening, and then with my wife by coach abroad to Bow and Stratford, it being so dusty weather that there was little pleasure in it, and so home and to walk in the garden, and thither ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... devised a plan to frighten the obstinate Frenchman, but the crude masquerade arranged for that purpose provoked nothing but amusement. A large canoe came floating slowly down the river, and when it drew near the ships the Frenchmen beheld three black devils, garbed in dogskins, and wearing monstrous horns upon their heads. Chanting the hideous monotones of the medicine men, they glided past the fleet, made for the shore, and disappeared in the thicket. Presently, Cartier's two interpreters issued from the wood and ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... entertain the idea of imposing upon future generations, through the extraordinary sanctions of the Constitution, their views upon any special subject of ordinary legislation. Such a proceeding would have seemed to them far more monstrous, and far less excusable, than that tyranny of George III and his Parliament which had given ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... sailor." Such in brief suggestion was Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple—"a huge mastodon, whose moral perceptions were all colossal and monstrous." ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... how it may, it is a disastrous occurrence. If Government should persist in the appointment, they would be beaten by a great majority, and the House of Commons would vote him out; if it is given up, it is a monstrous concession to the violence and power of the House of Commons, for however objectionable the appointment may have been, it is not so outrageous as to call for the interference of Parliament with the King's undoubted prerogative, and on ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... the rear end which serve to guide the projectile in its flight. These usually have a hole through the center through which the bullet passes and can thus be used with the regular service ammunition. This whole class, embracing everything from the small "pineapples," fired from the rifle, to the monstrous "aerial torpedoes," are ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... in the abstract, as common to all men in particular (so that though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our fingers, yet none of them could perceive him), and yet distinct from every one, as if he were some monstrous Colossus or giant. Yet for all this ignorance of these empty notions, they knew astronomy, and were perfectly acquainted with the motions of the heavenly bodies, and have many instruments, well contrived and divided, by which they very accurately ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... lives of countless friends and wives—in other words, if the British army wins what our infamous Press would call a "glorious victory"—then all that is evil in the life of the nation is encouraged and justified. It is then that the diplomatists who lied and schemed to bring on the monstrous event, that all the politicians who exploit and foster the nation's madness and misery to enhance their own reputations, that those who batten on the slaughter, and that those who glorify the carnage at a safe distance and fight the enemy with their lying tongues, are ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... her voice rang out clear and sweet as a bell. 'You know why I have sent for you?—to give you back these things, the sign of a bond which ought never to have been between us. How dared you—how dared you offer them to me, after your monstrous cruelty to that poor girl from whose death-bed I have ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... of a painful truth! What if this keen analyst of other men's ideas—she dared not finish the thought. With a sluggish movement the music uncoiled itself like a huge boa about to engulf a tiny rabbit. The simile forced itself against her volition; all this monstrous preparation for a—rabbit! In a concert-hall the poetic idea of the tone-poem was petty. And the churning of the orchestra, foaming hysteria of the strings, bellowing of the brass—would they never cease! Such an insane chase after a rabbit! Yes, she said ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... of Edinburgh, where we certainly owe some gratitude to the opponent for consenting to place himself in a position so ludicrous as that which he has occupied. But at the same time we are compelled to say, on general grounds of prudence and of justice, that it is a monstrous thing that communities should be disturbed with contests so absurd as these, which deserve to be censured in the old Parliamentary language ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... walked to the other end of the room, and stood under a Venetian mirror—it shone like a monstrous jewel above her head—looking at him, her hands clenched, her eyes flashing through the tears that had ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... fitchew, and such like, which Cardan includeth under the word Mustela: also of the otter, and likewise of the beaver, whose hinder feet and tail only are supposed to be fish. Certes the tail of this beast is like unto a thin whetstone, as the body unto a monstrous rat: as the beast also itself is of such force in the teeth that it will gnaw a hole through a thick plank, or shere through a double billet in a night; it loveth also the stillest rivers, and it is given to them by nature to ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... to him no history in the world had more reality in it. He used to say the Cid Ruy Diaz was a very good knight, but that he was not to be compared with the Knight of the Burning Sword who with one back-stroke cut in half two fierce and monstrous giants. He thought more of Bernardo del Carpio because at Roncesvalles he slew Roland in spite of enchantments, availing himself of the artifice of Hercules when he strangled Antaeus the son of Terra in his arms. He approved highly of the giant Morgante, because, although of the giant ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... introduce the story of Ganymede. And so befel it, O king, that men imitated all these things, and became adulterers, and defilers of themselves with mankind, and doers of other monstrous deeds, in imitation of their god. How then can an adulterer, one that defileth himself by unnatural lust, a slayer of ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... less than a year after he had assumed his post in London, the American Minister, Charles Francis Adams, at a time of depression and bitterness wrote to Secretary of State Seward: "That Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect way possible to verify its judgment, will probably be the verdict made against her by posterity, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... decoration as one understands it in Spanish cathedrals. The tone of the walls and floor is a pinkish brown, and the whole church has a warm glowing effect from its richly-coloured stone. I could have spared most, if not all, of the overladen rococo monuments to the Electors of Mainz, with their monstrous records of impossible perfections; but my companion (a German lady) thought them beautiful. The whole church struck one as rather ill-kept; perhaps the red stone floor had something to do with it. ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... miserable life, and to watch over it as though it were precious, and I cannot, je ne puis pas, control myself. That is, I could," he continued again after a minute's silence, "but this is too hard work for me, a monstrous work, when I am alone. With others, under special circumstances, when you are going into action, I am brave, j'ai fait mes epreuves, because I am vain and proud: that is my failing, and in presence of others. . . . Do you know, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... The monstrous demand of twenty shillings an acre for crown-lands, has not only had the effect of deterring capitalists from embarking in so hopeless a speculation, but has grievously wronged the existing land-owners, by raising the price of labour. When land ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... dragons fiercer, the giants huger, the fighting more terrible, and the slaughter more bloody. The popular appetite, which craved for more and more excitement with every successive stimulant, could only be fed by inventions so monstrous that it is a wonder the stomach of the readers of romances of chivalry did not reject the nauseous aliment. Yet there is no evidence of any decline in the production of these books up to the date of the appearance of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... protruding above the water. From its active and unsteady motions, Jack knew it was making up its mind to attack us; so he urged us vehemently to paddle for our lives, while he himself set us the example. Suddenly he shouted, "Look out! there he comes!" and in a second we saw the monstrous fish dive close under us and turn half-over on his side. But we all made a great commotion with our paddles, which, no doubt, frightened it away for that time, as we saw it immediately after circling round ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... right of the public, which is our right, for we are a part of the public, to this Point, is as clear as day, and I am only astonished at the impudence of Mr. Effingham in pretending to deny it. I dare say his French daughter has put him up to it. They say she is monstrous arrogant!" ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Large-flowered Wake-Robin, or White Wood Lily (T. grandiflorum). Under favorable conditions the waxy, thin, white, or occasionally pink, strongly veined petals may exceed two inches; and in Michigan a monstrous form has been found. The broadly rhombic leaves, tapering to a point, and lacking petioles, are seated in the usual whorl of three, at the summit of the stem, which may attain a foot and a half in height; from the centre the decorative flower ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... public, incontestable proof of the little friendship and regard the King of Prussia has for His Majesty and His Royal Family, and for the whole British nation, will, I hope, open the eyes of the people who are blind to that Prince's monstrous faults, if any such are still left amongst us, and I doubt not but it will save His Majesty the trouble of sending Sir C. Hanbury Williams or any other ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... they come again. One fallow field he pointed out to me Where but the day before a peasant ploughed, Dreaming of next year's fruit, and there his plough Stood now mid-field, his horses commandeered, A monstrous sable crow ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... landed on the shores of France he discovered his mistake. He had only to give his real name, "the Marquis de St. Evremonde," which he was obliged to do if he would help Gabelle, and the title was the signal for rude threats and ill treatment. Once in, he could not go back, and he felt as if a monstrous net were closing around him (as indeed, it was) from ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... that fat, corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about it, one that belonged among western mining camps or among the half savage dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact that it lived on a corn farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer, "something monstrous in Nature." ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Dieu! It is my third attempt. Always the same—hideous, monstrous, unearthly! It is she, and yet it ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... this ancient legend, "all was darkness and water, and therein were generated monstrous animals of strange and peculiar forms. There were men with two wings, and some even with four, and with two faces; and others with two heads, a man's and a woman's on one body; and there were men with the heads and horns of goats, and men with ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... times I fancy that my brain is bursting bounds. What is there more natural than that a married woman should have children? But to me that natural order seems so monstrous that it well-nigh maddens me. Yet a thing cannot be at the same time in the order of nature and a monstrosity. No brain can withstand that. What does it mean? I understand that those whom fate means to crush are crushed by some great, overwhelming ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... taint over all matters of art and taste, under the vicious influence of the "first gentleman of Europe," whose own artistic preferences bore witness, quite as much as the more serious events of his life, how little he deserved the name. Hideous Chinese pagoda pavilions, with grotesque and monstrous decorations, barbarous alike in form and in color; mean and ugly low-roomed royal palaces, without either magnificence or simplicity; military costumes, in which gold and silver lace were plastered ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... under this Spit that in H.M.S. Britomart, a monstrous shark was caught, about twenty feet long, in which were found the bones of some very large animal, possibly those of a bullock, that had been carried out to sea by some current. Steering North-North-West we deepened the water in eight miles to 32 fathoms, and after rounding ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... always slight the work that I cannot understand their ever having any heart in. Often they do slight it, and they insist unsparingly upon the scanty privileges which their mistresses seem to think a monstrous invasion of their own rights. The habit of oppression grows upon the oppressor, and you would find tender-hearted women here, gentle friends, devoted wives, loving mothers, who would be willing that their domestics should remain indoors, week in and week out, and, where they are confined ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... Intemperate Zeal, Bigotry and Persecution for any Party or Opinion, how praiseworthy soever they may appear to weak Men of our own Principles, produce infinite Calamities among Mankind, and are highly Criminal in their own Nature; and yet how many Persons eminent for Piety suffer such monstrous and absurd Principles of Action to take Root in their Minds under the Colour of Virtues? For my own Part, I must own I never yet knew any Party so just and reasonable, that a Man could follow it in its Height and Violence, and at ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... true. Otah returned from Far End and immediately called Council, even as Kurho was calling Council. Little had been gained, little proven; the perilous thing was still there, that monstrous means of death that might come in a moment of temper or reprisal to either tribe. Alas, such weapons were not easily ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... touched a book in your life. Better in my opinion to be the careless butterfly of society than the fanatic. I never expected to live to see my only child so blind to common-sense as to wish to follow such a monstrous theory as you have described. Money! Why, it is the power and possibility of the world. But what good are words? If you cannot see the folly and unsoundness of it at a glance, it is useless for me ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... store-room, and, going straight to the corner where some smoked hams and bacon were hanging, took a monstrous ham from its hook, then, muttering, "Crackers, too, crackers, too," opened the cracker box and drew ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... wonderful, A discourse relating to a strange monstrous serpent or dragon, lately discovered, and yet living to the great annoyance and divers slaughters both of men and cattle by his strong and violent poyson, in St. Leonard's forest, and thirtie miles from London, this present month of August, ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... the face always seemed to me astonishingly fine. Pray, Sir, do you know that picture?" "Perfectly, it partakes of the sublime and is amazingly fine." "Your portrait of Cosmo has the expression of a resolute, determined man, and I think it conveys well the idea of the monstrous parent, who could with his own hand destroy his only surviving son after discovering he had murdered his brother. What a horrible piece of business! The father of two sons, one of whom murdered the other, ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon the roads and pronounced a failure—one monstrous Palaeoferric creature was visible on a French high road as early as 1769—but by the dawn of the nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By 1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion and ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... it becomes necessary to explain to persons who have not had the happiness to be in business the whole drama of bankruptcy, so as to make them understand how it constitutes in Paris a monstrous legal farce; and also how the bankruptcy of Cesar Birotteau was a signal ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... to foot to the colour of the street mud—the living danger and disgrace of English civilization. As Amelius eyed him, he drew the girl away a step or two. "You've got a gentleman this time," he said to her; "I shall expect gold to-night, or else—!" He finished the sentence by lifting his monstrous fist, and shaking it in her face. Cautiously as he had lowered his tones in speaking, the words had reached the keenly sensitive ears of Amelius. Urged by his hot temper, he sprang forward. In another moment, he would have knocked ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... would consider the true cause Why all these fires, why all these gliding ghosts, Why birds and beasts,from quality and kind; Why old men, fools, and children calculate;— Why all these things change from their ordinance, Their natures, and preformed faculties To monstrous quality;—why, you shall find That Heaven hath infused them with these spirits, To make them instruments of fear and warning Unto some monstrous state. Now could I, Casca, Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night; That thunders, lightens, ...
— Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... of new adventures, From his lodge went Pau-Puk-Keewis, Came with speed into the village, Found the young men all assembled In the lodge of old Iagoo, Listening to his monstrous stories, To his ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... immediately coincided. "I own," said he, "the gentleman surprized me very much, when he talked so absurdly about puppet-shows. It is indeed hardly to be conceived that any man in his senses should be so much mistaken; what you say now accounts very well for all his monstrous notions. Poor gentleman! I am heartily concerned for him; indeed he hath a strange wildness about his eyes, which I took notice of before, though I did not ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... prey it tried; And in its black mouth, ranged about, Its teeth in prickly rows stood out; Its tongue was like a sharp-edged sword, And lightning from its small eyes poured; A serpent's tail of many a fold Ended its body's monstrous span, And round itself with fierceness rolled, So as to clasp ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... He has been bitten!" exclaimed the horrified Mustad, almost knocking the young woman off her feet in his rush towards his master; but one of the others had perceived the monstrous cobra, and, clubbing his gun, he beat the life out of it with one blow, before it could glide away into the jungle. It looked as if this part of the country was specially ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... associates was the condition from which his true friends had least to fear. Finding entreaties unavailing, the wretch delivered himself to the suggestions of his malice, and he vowed to be bloodily revenged on her inflexibility. The sentence was executed. That character must indeed be monstrous from which the execution of such threats was to be dreaded. The event sufficiently showed that our fears on this head were well grounded. This event, however, was at a great distance. It was reported that the felons, of whom he was one, mutinied on board the ship in which they had been embarked. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... wild cattle, does, deer, stags, bears, turkeys, partridges, parrots, quails, woodcock, wild pigeons, and ringdoves. There are also beaver, otters, and martens. The cattle of this country surpass ours in size. Their head is monstrous, and their look is frightful, on account of the long, black hair with which it is surrounded, and which hangs below the chin. The hair is fine, and scarce inferior to wool. The Indians wear their ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... temper of criticism has special dangers, and needs to have special safeguards, is but too true. Even, however, if we find that it has its excesses, we may forgive much to the merits of a reaction against a system which has raised monstrous floods of sour cant round about us, and hardened the hearts and parched the sympathies of men by blasts from theological deserts. There is a point of view so lofty and so peculiar that from it we are able ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... producing another monstrous crime of Nero's, also inaccurately dated. In the full august assembly, Nero discovered enthroned, not unmajestic in deportment, yet effeminately chapleted, and holding a lyre: suppose him just returned ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... meaning, not alone from the word employed as an adjective, but from the subject of remark; for, were we to attach the same meaning to the same word, wherever used, we could not receive correct or definite impressions from the language of others—our inferences would be the most monstrous. A great mountain and a great pin, a great continent and a great farm, a great ocean and a great pond, a great grammar and a great scholar, refer to things of very different dimensions and character; or, as Mr. Murray ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... reached a starry height Majestically calm? No monster, drear And shapeless, glares me faint at night; I am not in the sunshine checked for fear That monstrous shapeless thing is somewhere ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... banal statement, and Theydon knew it, but he blurted out the first crazy words that would serve to cloak the monstrous thought which leaped into his brain. And a picture danced before his mind's eye, a picture, not of the fair and gracious woman who had been done to death, but of a sweet-voiced girl in a white satin dress who was saying to a fine-looking ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... legislation in violent terms. "By this act," said he, "you dissolve their connection with the Government of the United States, blot them out of existence as freemen, and degrade them to the condition of negro commonwealths. We have this monstrous proposition: to declare martial law in ten States of this Union; and in making this declaration, we, in my judgment, step upon the mangled ruins of the Constitution; for the Constitution plainly gives this power neither to the executive ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,—misty, monstrous, gale-driven ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua- pu. These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... away they flew at twelve or thirteen knots. The second boat was making for the bull, which seemed very uneasy, and was swimming at a great speed round and round the remaining cows and calves, with his head high out of the water as if to guard them from danger, when the monstrous creature again sounded and the boat-header instantly turned his attention to a cow, which lay perfectly motionless on the water, apparently too terrified ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... collapse. The burning of that wretched Manuscript has really been a sore business for me. Nevertheless that too shall clear itself, and prove a favor of the Upper Powers: tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new! This monstrous London has taught me several things during the past year; for if its Wisdom be of the most uninstructive ever heard of by that name of wisdom, its Folly abounds with lessons,—which one ought to learn. I feel (with my burnt manuscript) as if defeated in this campaign; ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of the murder. The King himself—the hero, sage, and philosopher, the prince who had always liberality on his lips and who affected a horror of capital punishments—was frightened at this dreadful protest, on the part of the wretches whom he had kidnapped, against his monstrous tyranny; but his only means of remedying the evil was strictly to forbid that such criminals should be attended by any ecclesiastic whatever, and denied ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the origin of sin, and her subjection in consequence, planted in the early Christian Church by Paul, has been a poisonous stream in Church and in State. It has debased marriage and made both canon and civil law a monstrous oppression to woman. M. Renan sums up concisely a mighty truth in the following words: "The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock—the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology." His teachings about woman are no longer a hidden rock, however, for, in the light ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... morally, he assured me that he would give me a written character of the very best description, whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're willing, though lazy; you would pull, if you had the strength of a flea; and, though a monstrous coward, you don't run away." My own demurs to these harsh judgments were not many. The idiocy I confessed; because, though positive that I was not uniformly an idiot, I felt inclined to think that, in a majority of cases, I really was; and there were more reasons for thinking so than the reader ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... prodigious noise he hears, Which suddenly along the forest spread; Whereat from out his quiver he prepares An arrow for his bow, and lifts his head; And, lo! a monstrous herd of swine appears, And onward rushes with tempestuous tread, And to the fountain's brink precisely pours, So that the giant's join'd by all the boars. Morgante ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... constitution; but he feared that our nearness to France, and our zeal for liberty, would expose us to some danger. Why he should have cherished these fears is hard to say; for to him the French Revolution was "a wild attempt to methodize anarchy," "a foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature."[19] Surely if British and French principles were so utterly different, we were in no more danger of infection from the Jacobins than ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... winged and creeping night-wanderers. But to exclude them entirely proved impossible: through a dozen invisible chinks they would find their way to me; also some entered by day to lie concealed until after nightfall. A monstrous hairy hermit spider found an asylum in a dusky corner of the hut, under the thatch, and day after day he was there, all day long, sitting close and motionless; but at dark he invariably disappeared—who knows on ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... mistakes, we drive away the wretch who was our idol of yesterday; we take back from her the golden veils of poesy, which, on the morrow, we again cast on the shoulders of some other unknown, who becomes at once an aureola-surrounded idol. That is what we all are—monstrous egoists—who love love for love's sake—you understand me? We sip the divine liquor from the first cup that comes to hand. 'What matter the bottle, so long as we draw intoxication ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... more and more numerous and finally filled up the entire landscape, cube-shaped like houses, flat like flagstones, propping up, overhanging, and became intermingled with each other, as if they were the ruins, unrecognisable and monstrous, of some vanished city. But the wild chaos they exhibited made one rather dream of volcanoes, of deluges, of great unknown cataclysms. Frederick said they had been there since the beginning of the world, and would remain so till the end. Rosanette turned aside her head, declaring ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... most Christians are not aware that Sabbath, or "Sawbath," means Saturn's day, the "Shiyar" of the older Arabs. And to complete its degradation "Sabbat" in French and German means a criaillerie, a "row," a disorder, an abominable festival of Hexen (witches). This monstrous absurdity can be explained only by aberrations of sectarian zeal, of party ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... soon troops get to know the worth of a leader; just as a pack of hounds knows by instinct when it is properly handled. Outsiders may argue about this or that general, and analyse his tactics, and never very likely get much nearer the truth (for there is a monstrous lot of luck one way or the other in all manoeuvres, and the ones often succeed that didn't ought to, and vice versa); but once you are under a man, you don't need to argue; you know. We all know that Ian Hamilton, with his pleasant ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... independently of its bias toward himself. He told himself that he had been let off fairly easily, though he winced considerably under the adulation of the Daily Mercury, and found himself breathing most freely when least was said about him. The day of his triumph in the Mercury he made monstrous cowslip balls, and thought that the world had never been sufficiently congratulated upon possessing ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... by gaslight, the fog of late November wrapping the town as in some monstrous blanket till the trees of the Square even were barely visible from the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... left the room and silently locked the door on Eve. It was a monstrous act, but Mr. Prohack had slept too well and was too fully inspired by the instinct of initiative. He hurried downstairs, ignoring Brool, who was contemplating the grandeur of the entrance hall, ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... have swarmed through the ages, as parasites upon some huge animal. The mass of humanity, considered as a whole, separated from these restless and stinging parasites, observed through the perspective of history, tradition and science, resembles nothing so much as some monstrous dull-brained and gloomy animal, alternately dozing and raging through the centuries, now as if stupefied in its own bulk or then as if furious with the madness of brute power. In fact, though mankind have achieved the dignity of a history ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... which he carried. Then straightway they looked and chose close by a spot that pleased them and bade their comrades sit upon the sand in two lines; nor were they alike to behold in form or in stature. The one seemed to be a monstrous son of baleful Typhoeus or of Earth herself, such as she brought forth aforetime, in her wrath against Zeus; but the other, the son of Tyndareus, was like a star of heaven, whose beams are fairest as ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... are all in his hands. What can you mean? Come to the signorina herself instantly. Agostino, you now conduct Count Medole to her, and save him from the shame of subscribing to the monstrous calumny. I beg you to go with our Agostino, Count Medole. It is time for you—I honour you for the part you have taken; but it is time to act according ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Dreamless it must long have been, for the shadows of ranch house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house were long to the east when next I observed them. But I fought to this wakefulness through one of those dreams of a monstrous futility that sometimes madden us from sleep. Through a fearsome gorge a stream wound and in it I hunted one certain giant trout. Savagely it took the fly, but always the line broke when I struck; rather, it dissolved; there would ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... and accompanied by suggestions of impracticable remedies, are denied or disputed in counterstatements by interested officials, so that the Colonial Minister is bewildered, and can form no correct judgment from such conflicting statements. I hold it to be impossible that the monstrous absurdities and violations of every principle of good government which exist throughout these western colonies could be tolerated an instant, were their consequences known and believed by those in power, or were they laid ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... authorized to solicit a French protectorate of LOUIS NAPOLEON,—to such incredible baseness has slave 'independence' sunk,—and, as we write, much discussion is waged whether England will take in ill part our arrest of a man charged with such a monstrous mission! Let England imagine herself dependent on such a protectorate for her cotton, and the thought may possibly occur that it would have been better to have sided at once openly and squarely with the North. But John Bull is strangely changed in these ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mind beyond an overwhelming desire to put a bad fright into his roommate in payment for what he considered a monstrous act of duplicity. It would serve Travail right if, once he entered the secondary plane of the shell, he would be forced to stay there a while. A good scare would cause him to ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... colour happened to be what this remedy restores it to. Any way, she now wanted to know if I thought it was right for Aunt Mollie to continue to reside there in that house between now and the time when they would be lawful man and wife. I said no; I didn't think it was right. I thought it was a monstrous infamy and an affront to public morals; but mebbe we better resolve to ignore it and plow a straight furrow, without stopping to pull weeds. She sadly said she ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... the days gone by. The Maid was radiant as the sun, The Ape was a most unsightly one, The Ape was a most unsightly one— So it would not do— His scheme fell through, For the Maid, when his love took formal shape, Express'd such terror At his monstrous error, That he stammer'd an apology and made his 'scape, The picture of a ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... "A monstrous impression. Adjust it. Four pounds a quarter is the sum. You will have no needs. It errs upon the side of liberality—I desire ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... writers; in 1710 the remark is now applicable to its author. Gildon's further descent as a critic is evident eight years later in his Complete Art of Poetry. He is now a slave to the French doctrine of the rules. He confesses himself the less ready to pardon the "monstrous absurdities" of Shakespeare, as one or two plays, such as the Tempest, are "very near a regularity." Yet he acknowledges that Shakespeare abounds in beauties, and he makes some reparation by including a long list of his finer passages. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... proceeded on horses, who are used to the way, to the mountain of the Chartreuse. It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on one hand is the rock, with woods of pine-trees hanging overhead; on the other, a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent, that sometimes is tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... or, better still, that that queer specimen of humanity sitting under his cherry-tree, down there, should be smitten with paralysis. He confessed that this last seemed the most hopeful outlook, then laughed at himself for his monstrous wishes. He seized his hat and ran downstairs. He would go out and explore the village. He must do something, he warned himself, or he would be in danger of rushing into the street and lacerating the first man he met, just for the sake of sewing ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... right, why is the real child excluded from a just hearing in the world of letters as he has in the world of fact? For instance, what has the lovely little ragamuffin ever done of sufficient guilt to consign him eternally to the monstrous penalty of speaking most accurate grammar all the literary hours of the days of the years of his ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... and to Chappell, which being most monstrous full, I could not go into my pew, but sat among the quire. Dr. Creeton, the Scotchman, preached a most admirable, good, learned, honest, and most severe sermon, yet comicall.... He railed bitterly ever and anon against John Calvin and his brood, the Presbyterians, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... would preserve their laws and constitution, there was an absolute necessity for denying, at least for abolishing it. The revolution alone, which soon succeeded, happily put an end to all these disputes: by means of it, a more uniform edifice was at last erected: the monstrous inconsistence, so visible between the ancient Gothic parts of the fabric and the recent plans of liberty, was fully corrected; and, to their mutual felicity, King and people were finally taught to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... rapidly verifying, and that which was disbelieved as prophecy, was daily becoming history. If a remedy for these ills was not found in the increased representation of the people which would take place at the ensuing elections, they would become too monstrous to be borne; and when it was recollected that the division of opinion was marked by a geographical line, there was reason to fear that the union would be broken ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... at the beginning of her Autobiography, referring to the vivid character of tactile sensations in early childhood, remarks, concerning an early memory of touching a velvet button, that "the rapture of the sensation was really monstrous." And a lady tells me that one of her earliest memories at the age of 3 is of the exquisite sensation of the casual contact of a cool stone with the vulva in the act of urinating. Such sensations, of course, cannot be termed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... me their Aigle for full Freedom no more pants, And the Senator, he mutthers ov "degraded immigrants." Says they can't "assimilate" us; faix, the wurrud sounds monstrous foine, But Oi fancy that it's maning is, "We ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... conclude that all the members of the vertebrate kingdom are derived from some fishlike animal. The belief that animals so distinct as a monkey, an elephant, a humming-bird, a snake, a frog, and a fish, etc., could all have sprung from the same parents, will appear monstrous to those who have not attended to the recent progress of natural history. For this belief implies the former existence of links binding closely together all these ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... at seven. After an early interval of happy lightness, there came suddenly and heavily the crushing sense of his predicament. How monstrous it was that one instant of time, one ill-considered action, one poorly-chosen word could clamp a repellent burden on a man for the rest of ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... thee the shores, and sounding Seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery. The North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could not go with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of Abraham Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern men. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... at night, in the courtyard. We shall manage to get all our men on duty, tomorrow evening. Our sergeant is a good fellow and, if he guesses anything, will hold his tongue; for I have heard him say, more than once, that it is monstrous that you should be ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... one, in the year 1551, in a city of Savoy, a man who was a monstrous curser and swearer, and though he was often admonished and blamed for it, yet would he by no means mend his manners. At length a great plague happening in the city, he withdrew himself [with his wife and a kinswoman] into a garden, where being again admonished ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... darted forward, seized three-year-old Johnny and Harry in his arms, stuffed one head-first, the other legs-first, into the monstrous pack. ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... O monstrous piece of extravagance!—for how can the Sun (his Deity set apart) 'clutch' without hands?—and as for 'the emerald girdle of the rose'—I know not what it means, unless Sah-luma considers the green calyx of the flower a 'girdle,' in which case ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... moving ridge of waters, after careering forwards with a front high in proportion to the impulse behind, and for a length of time regulated by the degree of abruptness in the rise of the shore, at last dashes its monstrous head with a noise extremely like ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... had promised himself to send Croisilles away as gently as possible, in order to avoid all scandal, his prudence could not resist the vexation of his wounded pride. The interview to which he had to resign himself was monstrous enough in itself; it may be imagined, then, what he felt at hearing himself ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... story by heart, laughed with their father at the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon paying a toll of two dollars at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... except that she still bobbed her old head up and down in a strange unearthly manner. She had about ten cards in her hand which she held motionless. Her eyes seemed to be fixed in one continued stare directly on the face of her foe. Her lower jaw had fallen so as to give a monstrous extension to her cadaverous face. There she sat apparently speechless; but still she bobbed her head, and still she held ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... 'this is monstrous. It is only the vile selfishness of men that makes it possible. They are not giving a thought to the women, yet you are the real sufferers. Now I know what you meant when you said that women don't have their place in the world. If they did, this ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... pulpit, and might be conceived as haunted by it at his heels, but Willoughby was in the mood to abhor comic images; he hated the perpetrators of them and the grinners. Contempt of this laughing empty world, for which he had performed a monstrous immolation, led him to associate Dr. Middleton in his mind, and Clara too, with the desireable things he had sacrificed—a shape of youth and health; a sparkling companion; a face of innumerable charms; and his own veracity; his inner ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ploughboy on a cart-horse, and his navy of a fishing boat. But, on the whole, he was happy. He passed his days either in trimming his vines or hunting, and his evenings in poring over mildewed parchments or books of heraldry, hunting up long pedigrees, and puffing a monstrous meerschaum till the atmosphere was as dense as the interior of a smokehouse. The lady Mathilde embroidered from ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... my children; Death thinks twice of it before carrying off a Mayor of Paris," said he, with monstrous composure. "And if, after all, my district is so unfortunate as to lose a man it has twice honored with its suffrages—you see, what a flow of words I have! —Well, I shall know how to pack up and go. I have been a commercial traveler; I am experienced in such matters. Ah! my ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port wine, snow white, vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. The sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time, and water, and air into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs—men and women of the old time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... I hadn't done anything of the sort. It's simply monstrous how one's words get twisted. All I had ever done was to mention to him—casually, just as an interesting item of information, one day in New York when we were watching the six-day bicycle race—that at the age ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... young folks at their fun. It'll do him good and them good and me good, and do everybody good." Saying which the deacon got inside his warm fur coat and started towards the barn to harness Jack into the worn, old-fashioned sleigh; which sleigh was built high in the back and had a curved dasher of monstrous proportions, ornamented with a prancing horse in an impossible attitude, done in bright ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... their obedience in this manner: "May the sun split us through the middle; may we be devoured by crocodiles; may our women not show us favor or affection"—if they should fail to keep their oath. Sometimes they took the pasambahan, which was, to draw the figure of any wild and monstrous animal, and ask to be torn to pieces by that animal if they broke their contract or agreement. Sometimes they lit a candle, and declared that, just as the candle, so might they be melted, if they did not fulfil their promise. Now this is somewhat better, but not, their perjuries; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... them the cities crumble, the woods shrivel and fall, the farms fade out of Picardy, even the hedgerows go; it is bare, bare desert. He had been sure of Paris, he had dreamed of Versailles and some monstrous coronation, he had thought his insatiable avarice would be sated. For he had plotted for conquest of the world, that boundless greed of his goading him on as a man in the grip ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... rule the strong, the few the many, the intelligent the fools. Through him survive those whom the struggle for existence should have eliminated. He substitutes the unfit for the fit. He dislocates the economy of the universe. Under his shelter take root and thrive all monstrous and parasitic growths. Marriage clings to his skirts, property nestles in his bosom. And while these flourish, where is liberty? The law ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... strange scene terrified, not so much by what I saw, as by an instinct I had that this man's dreadful wreck was only a sign of that great and abiding horror which lay like a shadow all over the land; just as in the fable the glimpse of one monstrous foot was sufficient to warn the spectator that a giant came along. Which feeling in my mind was rather confirmed than dispelled when I came to learn, as I soon did, that Mr. Rising's sad condition was brought about by the ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... his eye, armed with the magnifying glass, follows the slow manoeuvres of the terebinth louse, whose proboscis "cunningly distils the venom which causes the leaf to swell and produces those enormous tumours, those misshapen and monstrous galls, in which the young ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... little white manse on the Cairn Water lived not unhappily with her husband for four years, and was then laid with her own people in the monstrous new family vault where her father lay in state. She left two children behind her—a boy of two and an infant girl of a ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... Union of South Africa, is the son of an old South African missionary. He was member of the Union Parliament when this law was passed and was one of the few senators who had the pluck to vote against it after condemning it; and it is monstrous to suggest that these pious and learned men could conspire to denounce a law just for the pleasure of denouncing it. And to our untutored mind it seems that if it be true that all these good men are working for the spread of Christ's Kingdom in South Africa, then ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... him, for, rushing down amongst the reeds and canes, writhing and bounding in the most extraordinary way, beating, whipping the tall leaves, tying itself up in knots and then throwing itself out nearly straight, came what to me seemed to be a most monstrous serpent. ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... Barabas! Sham'st thou not thus to justify thyself, As if we knew not thy profession? If thou rely upon thy righteousness, Be patient, and thy riches will increase. Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness; And covetousness, O, 'tis a monstrous sin! ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... war on the slumgullion, and the lemonade began to have words with the blueberries. The fudge was a power unto itself and made war on all the rest. Hinpoha tried to get up and get something to relieve herself, but she was so dizzy she couldn't stand. A great monstrous biscuit was sitting on the pit of her stomach, squeezing the breath out of her, and she sank back on the pillow. Sahwah finally heard her groan and got up and brought her some hot water, which settled the dispute ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... having accepted his hospitality, to turn round at the end and insult the man in his own house? This seemed to Brown, J. P., a monstrous and astounding performance. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its slander. Dickens's letter spares me the necessity of characterizing, by the only word which would have been applicable to it, a tale of such incredible and monstrous absurdity as that one of the masterpieces of its author's genius had been merely an illustration ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... a fire of hatred that will never go out. It is one of those deeds that make one despair of the future of the human race, a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed." Poland and the occupied parts of France ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... Kyklops, also called Polyphemus—a monstrous one-eyed giant. He was the son of Poseidon. It was due to his prayer for revenge that Odysseus was kept so long wandering on ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... impressively, with George and Honoria, and Richard Coeur de Lion, and most of the characters from "Ivanhoe," sobbing round his bed. There was a Blondel variant too, with George imprisoned in a high tower; and a monstrous conglomerate tale in which most of the heroes of history and romance played second fiddle to George, whose pre-eminence, though occasionally challenged by Achilles, Sir Lancelot, or the Black Prince, was regularly vindicated by ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... plain, bald (unadorned) 849; homely; ordinary, unornamental^, inartistic; unsightly, unseemly, uncomely, unlovely; unshapely; sightless, seemless^; not fit to be seen; unbeauteous^, unbeautiful; beautiless^, semibeautiful; shapeless &c (amorphous) 241. misshapen, misproportioned^; monstrous; gaunt &c (thin) 203; dumpy &c (short) 201; curtailed of its fair proportions; ill-made, ill- shaped, ill-proportioned; crooked &c (distorted) 243; hard featured, hard visaged; ill-favored, hard-favored, evil-favored; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... at it an instant, through tears, amazed and incredulous. Surely some one was playing a monstrous joke upon her today. Soon she would come upon the strings and false bottoms and wigs and masks of the game. But the office boy's contemplation of her distress was real. Something must be done. The whole machine of things could not indefinitely hang thus suspended, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... to Eunice. Miss Ringtop was at least ten years older than I, far from handsome (but you remember her face,) and so affectedly sentimental, that I, sentimental as I was then, was sick of hearing her talk. Her hallucination was so monstrous, and gave me such a shock of desperate alarm, that I spoke, on the impulse of the moment, with great energy, without regarding how her ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... fish in the rivers of Eire', there were animals in her coverts. Wild and shy and monstrous creatures ranged in her plains and forests. Creatures that one could see through and walk through. Long we lived in ease, and we saw new animals grow,—the bear, the wolf, the badger, the deer, and ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... his chapel before day or battle broke, (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.) The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year, The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear. He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark, They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark; And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... Moreover, what I hear is nothing new. With such like decorations I have been adorned in my own country by those same honorable and truthful men, i. e., by the men whose own conscience convicts them of wrong-doing, and who are trying to put their own monstrous doings off on me, and to glorify their own shame by bringing shame to me. But you will deign, blessed Father, to hear the true case from me, though I am but an uncouth ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... out of his mouth when from the earth arose a form that seemed at least ten feet high. It was clothed in white, and from its head projected two monstrous horns, which were pointed towards us in a threatening manner. I could discern no features, but a huge mass of white bones were visible where the face should have been, and I thought that I could hear them rattle as the beast, ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... bear was upreared on a great rocky outcrop about three hundred yards away, and the opalescent light of the morning magnified him in the boy's eyes, until he was the largest beast in the world. Monstrous and sinister he stood there, unmoving, gazing at the strange creatures in the little camp. He seemed to Will a symbol of this vast and primeval new world into which he had come. Remembering his glasses he took them and brought the great grizzly ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... lavished outrage, has been for modern Germany the most religious of men. 'God-intoxicated,' as Novalis said, 'he has seen the world through a thick cloud, and man has been to his troubled eyes only a fugitive mode of Being in itself.' In that system, in fine, so shocking and so monstrous, that 'hideous chimera,' Jacobi sees the last word of philosophy, Schelling the presentiment of ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... of a tree above his head swayed a huge python, one of those reptiles that are able to crush a man's bones in their coils. A few yards away crouched a savage panther, its glaring red eyes fixed full on the helpless Claus. One of those monstrous spotted spiders whose sting is death crept stealthily toward him over the matted leaves, which shriveled and turned ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... to face with death, and seemed completely crushed. Bowed, upon his knees, his face half hidden in his hands, from time to time convulsive sobs escaped him, as he tried to fix the thoughts that chased each other through his mind like the shapes of a monstrous dream. Night was in his soul, but every now and then light flashed across the darkness, and over the gloomy background of his despair passed gilded figures fleeing from him with smiles of mockery. In his ears buzzed voices from the other world; he saw a long procession ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of the wall of gun and rifle-fire where another set of human beings were giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the same pattern on both sides of the wall. Their children were ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the boat, and a broader one surmounting them. The sails were colored brown, and appeared like leather or skins, but were really cloth. At a distance, the vessel looked like, or at least I compared it to, a monstrous water-insect skimming along the river. If the sails had been crimson or yellow, the resemblance would have been much closer. There was a pretty spacious raised cabin in the after part of the boat. It moved along lightly, and disappeared between ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... them, never thinking there was one among them so stupid as to carry a gun to fight a ghost with; for how can you shoot a ghost, when it has neither flesh nor blood? It was impossible to suspect any one of being such a monstrous blockhead; so I was rather disagreeably startled at hearing the crack of a gun, and feeling the tingling of a bullet whizzing past my ear. You nearly made me into a real ghost, friend Beppo; for I assure you, you are a capital shot. Ever since that memorable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... I am without reason afraid of them. I think of the demons as being like monstrous bats. But that is ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... analogy for it in the vegetable and not in the animal world we must go to the forests of the tropics and not to the northland woodlands. In the great swamps at the mouth of the Amazon the naturalist Bates describes a monstrous liana, the "Sipo Matador" or Murdering Creeper, that far more fitly than the oak tree of the north typifies John Bull and the place he has won in the sunlight by the once strong limbs ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... which is not evidence at all. He will swallow an undated, unlocalised legend of Coleridge, reaching Coleridge on the testimony of rumour, and told at least twenty years after the unverified occurrences. Nay, the psychologist will never dream of procuring contemporary evidence for such a monstrous statement as that an ignorant German wench unconsciously acquired and afterwards subconsciously reproduced huge cantles of dead languages, by virtue of having casually heard a former master recite or read aloud from ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to say to my friends who are disposed to look upon money as the most valuable of all things, that if you marry according to my instructions you will marry the conditions which produce money. To marry for money, or to marry a person who possesses a fortune for no other reason, is a monstrous wrong, ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... subaltern, who chanced to be at that moment in attendance upon her. "It's worse than that; it's a monstrous shame! She's only nineteen, you know; and he is twenty ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... is a philosophy of Pan-theism—no "me," no "you," no "it." It is a mystical story, with a storm scene in which is painted a picture that reminds one strongly of "The Fall of the House of Ushur,"—with the frankly added words, "On him were marks of hoofs of a monstrous goat that ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... biggest of them all are the catfish. These are monstrous creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot—scaleless, slick things, with corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskers dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads. Six and seven feet long they grow to be and to weigh two hundred pounds or more, and they ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... (thus leaving us to keep the change), than that we should think to pay him for his incorruptible with our corruptible. There would, no doubt, be a subtle element of absurdity in a poet consenting to pay his tailor for a suit with a sonnet, while it would obviously be beyond all proportion monstrous for a tailor to think to buy a sonnet with a suit. Yet a poet might, perhaps, be brought to consider the transaction, if he chanced to be of a ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... authority do you bring this monstrous charge?" demanded Mr. Stanton, more boldly. "How happens it that you ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... governing circles of both parties. But the clamour of British Columbia was in the air, and her suggestions, hotly opposed by the Company, had been brought before the House of Lords by another peer. In the discussion which followed, the Duke of Newcastle declared that "it seemed monstrous that any body of gentlemen should exercise fee-simple rights which precluded the future colonization of that territory, as well as the opening of lines of communication through it." The Minister's idea at the time ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... best of these great fanes, wonderful as they are. Here, recalling them, one could venture to criticise and name their several deficits:—a Wells divided, a ponderous Ely, a vacant and cold Canterbury, a too light and airy Salisbury, and so on even to Exeter, supreme in beauty, spoilt by a monstrous organ in the wrong place. That wood and metal giant, standing as a stone bridge to mock the eyes' efforts to dodge past it and have sight of the exquisite choir beyond, and of an east window through which ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... voice stuck in his throat; his arms fell powerless by his sides, and his feet seemed rooted to the ground; and though the fierce revulsion of his wrath presently aroused his torpid senses, he yet could scarcely breathe, so intense was his anguish. Thirsting for vengeance as terrible as his monstrous wrong, but having no weapon at hand, he returned to his chamber as stealthily as he had quitted it, in search of a dagger, with which he would wash out the stain cast upon his honour in the blood of the guilty pair, and then massacre his whole household; but he had no ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... take away the edge from truths, stated as Cato knew how to state them. There is very much of what is called Agricultural Science, nowadays, which is—rubbish. Science is sound, and agriculture always an honest art; but the mixture, not uncommonly, is bad,—no fair marriage, but a monstrous concubinage, with a monstrous progeny of muddy treatises and disquisitions which confuse more than they instruct. In contrast with such, it is no wonder that the observations of such a man as Cato, whose energies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... animalism somewhat developed, the little brain somewhat sharpened, by her career on the musical-comedy stage. Now there were signs of change. A glimmering notion of the duty of sacrifice entered her head. She carried it out by appearing one day, when Septimus was taking her for a drive, in the monstrous nightmare of a hat. It is not given to breathing male to appreciate the effort it cost her. She said nothing; neither did he. She sat for two hours in the victoria, enduring the tortures of the uglified, watching him out of the tail of her eye and waiting for a sign of recognition. At last ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... the chariot of the sun. She saw, too, the winds that are the Desert's best-loved children: Health with shining eyes and a skin of bronze: Passion, half faun, half black-browed Hercules: and Liberty with upraised arms, beating cymbals like monstrous spheres of fire. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... and Lord Holt stated the principle: "If a man takes upon him a public employment, he is bound to serve the public as far as the employment extends, and for refusal an action lies." /3/ An attempt to apply this doctrine generally at the present day would be thought monstrous. But it formed part of a consistent scheme for holding those who followed useful callings up to the mark. Another part was the liability of persons exercising a public employment for loss or damage, enhanced in cases of bailment by what remained of the rule in Southcote's Case. The scheme has ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... there is a very pretty custom. Each family has one evening in the week when it stays at home and receives friends. Tea, with a little bread and butter and cake, served in the most informal way, is the only refreshment. The rooms are full, busy, bright,—everything as easy and joyous as if a monstrous supper, with piles of jelly and mountains of cake, were waiting to give the company ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms most clearly to the ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... congress. One article of this oath was to take arms in defence of their country, if called upon by the voice of the congress. To this Colonel Wanton and others flatly refused their assent; to take arms against their sovereign, they said, was too monstrous an impiety. I asked them if they had lived at the time of the revolution whether they would have been revolutionists—their answers were at first evasive, circuitous, and unintelligible, but, by fixing them down precisely to the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... for minds cowardly and base, as the vulgar of most nations, and forasmuch as they are easily rendered by men who can render nothing else, they are often trusted in by the herd of painters incapable and profane, as in that monstrous abortion of the first room of the Louvre, called the Deluge, whose subject is pure, acute, mortal fear; and so generally the senseless horrors of the modern French schools, spawn of the guillotine: also there is not a greater test ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... art, within whose breast The glowing thoughts disdain ignoble rest; Whose soul is laboring with a monstrous birth Of winged words, to scatter through the earth Of thee I ask, What hast thou done of that thou hast to do? Art silent? Then I say, Until thy deeds are many let thy ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... nook and crevice of the oyster village. There was not a family into which it did not intrude, nor a home circle whose sanctity it did not ruthlessly invade. It scraped along the great mossy rock; and lo! with a monstrous scratchy-te-scratch, the mother-oyster and the father-oyster and hundreds of other oysters were torn from their resting-places and borne aloft in a very jumbled and very frightened condition by the impertinent machine. Then down it came again, and the sick little oyster was among the ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... other things most real and manifest, the truth of which they suppose as certain, in all the serious affairs of life, and which, nevertheless, as well as Thou, escape our feeble senses? O misery! O dismal night that surrounds the children of Adam! O monstrous stupidity! O confusion of the whole man! Man has eyes only to see shadows, and truth appears a phantom to him. What is nothing is all; and what is all is nothing to him. What do I behold in all nature? God. God ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... alluded to a crab which lives on the cocoa-nuts; it is very common on all parts of the dry land, and grows to a monstrous size: it is closely allied or identical with the Birgos latro. The front pair of legs terminate in very strong and heavy pincers, and the last pair are fitted with others weaker and much narrower. It would at first be thought quite impossible for a crab to open a strong ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... into good society, was taken by them, dressed as the Count de St. Germain, into several houses in the Rue du Marais. He imitated the Count's peculiarities admirably, and found his auditors open-mouthed to believe any absurdity he chose to utter. NO fiction was too monstrous for their all-devouring credulity. He spoke of the Saviour of the world in terms of the greatest familiarity; said he had supped with him at the marriage in Canaan of Galilee, where the water was miraculously turned into wine. In fact, he said he was an intimate friend of his, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... observation post. Over the Kereves Dere, and beyond, upon the sloping shoulders of Achi Baba, the curtain became a pall. The sun climbed higher and higher. All that first mirage of beauty had disappeared, and there was nothing but the monstrous shapes of bursting shells, giants of smoke that appeared one after another along the Turkish lines. All through the morning the cannonade ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... darkness. At times it seemed to him that it was the end of the world and that he was the last one left alive. Still the wind increased. Hour after hour it increased. By what he calculated was eleven o'clock, the wind had become unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing, a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite and pass on—a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... "Your monstrous dulness shows the state of your mind. This is what comes of getting entangled with women. You need to ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... letting in that monstrous draught, man; but sit down. You'll find the bottle on the table and a glass on ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... destined, for the future, to steal on my attention, irresistibly and darkly, in all my lonely hours. Already, the fatality denounced against me in Mannion's letter had begun to act: already, that terrible confession of past misery and crime, that monstrous declaration of enmity which was to last with the lasting of life, began to exercise its numbing influence on my faculties, to cast its blighting shadow ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... usual conspiracy, but still a regular conspiracy I call it—between Papa and Mamma to make me marry that stick of a Connemara. What is there in him, I should like to know, to make any girl admire or love him? And yet half the girls in London would be glad to get him, for all his absurdity. It's monstrous, it's incomprehensible, it's abominable; but it's the fact. For my part, I must say I do like a little originality. And whenever I hear Papa, and Uncle Sussex, and Lord Connemara talking at dinner, it does seem to me too ridiculously absurd that they should each have a separate voice in Parliament, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... merrily and madly Danced at Hiawatha's wedding, Danced the Beggar's Dance to please them. Now, in search of new adventures, 20 From his lodge went Pau-Puk-Keewis, Came with speed into the village, Found the young men all assembled In the lodge of old Iagoo, Listening to his monstrous stories, 25 To his wonderful adventures. He was telling them the story Of Ojeeg, the Summer-Maker, How he made a hole in heaven, How he climbed up into heaven, 30 And let out the summer-weather, The perpetual, pleasant Summer; How the Otter first essayed it; How the Beaver, Lynx, and ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... for the damned in mediaeval writings. The public at large thought hell none too bad for one who revolted against God and Holy Church. No, the heretics were persecuted because heresy was, according to the notions of the time, a monstrous and unutterably wicked thing, and because their beliefs threatened the vested ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... ghost. If such the mode, what can we hope to-night, Who rashly dare approach without a sprite? No dreadful cavern, no midnight scream, No rosin flames, nor e'en one flitting gleam. Nought of the charms so potent to invite The monstrous charms of terrible delight. Our present theme the German Muse supplies, But rather aims to soften than surprise. Yet, with her woes she strives some smiles to blend, Intent as well to cheer as to amend: On her own native soil she knows the art To charm the fancy, and to touch the heart. If, ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... were glad, indeed, when the wall of the fissure leaned at length so far from the perpendicular that we were able to scramble up it. We found ourselves upon a levelish little meadow of grass. In the centre of it there grew a monstrous and gigantic live-oak, between two of whose roots there glittered a spring. On all sides of the meadow, except on that toward the river, were superimpending cliffs of quartz. Along the base of these was a dense ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... that all the members of the vertebrate kingdom are derived from some fishlike animal. The belief that animals so distinct as a monkey, an elephant, a humming-bird, a snake, a frog, and a fish, etc., could all have sprung from the same parents, will appear monstrous to those who have not attended to the recent progress of natural history. For this belief implies the former existence of links binding closely together all these forms, now so ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... asked one or two of the men, whose dull brains had not quite as yet grasped the full meaning of this monstrous scheme. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... had got their axes ready to cut them away, should such occur. At length a tremendous sea came roaring towards our weather bow. The ship struggled as if to avoid it, but she pitched headlong into the deep hollow just before her, and a monstrous sea, lifting its head half way up to the foretop, came right down on our deck, sweeping up to the main hatchway. Horner and several of the men shrieked out with terror, believing that their last moments were come. I ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... here, were it not for the monstrous excises which are impos'd upon all sorts of commodities, both for belly and back." (HOWELL, Letter from ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... tell me there can be no longer the slightest doubts of Wallenstein's intention. Ever since the death of the king he has been negotiating privately with me, but I could not believe that he was in earnest or that such monstrous treachery was possible. How could I suppose that he who has been raised from the rank of a simple gentleman to that of a duke and prince, and who, save the fortunes which he obtained with his wives, owes ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... in their presence." Some of these Desert louts are very familiar and insolent, and require sharp answers to keep them at a distance. I must not forget to mention, the Rais put my passport en règle for Soudan. A more monstrous piece of absurdity could not be attempted against the virtue of the free and simple-minded children of The Desert. Such documents are only fit for our elevated Christian civilization, for countries like Naples, France, and Austria, the hot-beds of spies ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... reintroduced the single figure into art (the Source, and the Odalisque, for example). For color he had no fancy. "In nature all is form," he used to say. Painting he thought not an independent art, but "a development of sculpture." To consider emotion, color, or light as the equal of form was monstrous, and to compare Rembrandt with Raphael was blasphemy. To this belief he clung to the end, faithfully reproducing the human figure, and it is not to be wondered at that eventually he became a learned draughtsman. His single figures and his portraits show him to the best advantage. He had ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... he spoke, a worn unrolled His monstrous volumes from the mould; They chose him for the referee, And on the pleadings ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... 'Tis monstrous strange, and yet it is true, In this reformation we should have such luck; That crosses were always disdain'd by you, Who before pull'd them down, should now set ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... Should a monster, something abnormal in strength and subtlety and wickedness, something which menaced all the good in the world, be allowed to exist? Gordon argued that it should not. He was driven to it by years of fruitless struggling against this monstrous creation in the shape of man. He had seen such suffering because of him; his whole life had been so turned and twisted this way and that way because of him, that he himself had in the end become abnormal, and mentally askew, with ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... which cannot have escaped the notice of the least observant, must surely lead the reflective man or woman to doubt the value of educational methods that have led to no better result. It is monstrous to think of years spent in grinding out syntax rules, mathematics, Latin, French, geography, science, history, composition, and a dozen other branches of knowledge, in order to develop a taste for sensational rags, middle-class magazines, and ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... to descend from shelf to shelf, where the rock had been blasted away so as to form a flight of the roughest of rough steps of monstrous size, while, trembling ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... than that of many another man, had found him out. He had done wrong. He admitted it, but this monstrous judgment on him was out of all proportion to his offence. And, like some malignant infectious disease, retribution would fall, not on him alone, but on those nearest him, on his innocent mother and sister. It was ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... himself by the ease with which he made this monstrous threat, but it seemed to have a soporific influence on his companion, for he muttered an "aw gwan" and subsided ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... in the unguessed riddle of the Sphinx. It is not a fable; it is a truth. There is a problem to be solved, and that monstrous creature knows it! The woman's face, the brute's body—Spiritualism and Materialism in one! It is life, and more than life; it is love. Forever and forever it teaches the same wonderful, terrible mystery. We aspire, yet we fall; love would fain give us ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... copy of Mr. Collier's fac-simile in sheet No. II., and alongside of that I have placed the impossible E in the Ralegh signature, and the almost exactly similar E which occurs in the emendation End, vice 'And,' in the Bridgewater Folio. By means of this monstrous letter we are enabled to trace the chain of forgery from the Perkins Folio through the Bridgewater Folio, to the perpetration of the abomination at the foot of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... all happened yesterday, and I only found it out last evening after prayer meeting', and it ain't ten o'clock in the forenoon yet, I calkerlate I ain't done anything so very monstrous," said that individual, in an ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... might stand before them free. The king spoke to him, too, in a kind and encouraging manner. "Forget your countrymen," said he. "They are gone. Henceforth you shall be one of us. We will take care of you. And now," he continued, "tell us what this monstrous image means. Why did the Greeks make it, and why have they ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... came a stir, a creak, and then the sound of feet lighting softly on the floor. A tiny figure appeared on the edge of the shadows beyond the dying fire. The light fell upon furry gray feet; and Alwin's first thought was that a monstrous cat had dropped down. Then the flames leaped higher, and showed a furry cloak and a furry hood, and from its fuzzy depths protruding, a sharp yellow beak for a nose, and a hairy yellow peak for a chin. Of eyes, ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... terra!" as Lingo says. What! this purest of Patriots is immoral? What! "the Poet of all circles" is "the advocate of lust"? Monstrous! But who can doubt Byron? And his Lordship, in a subsequent passage, does not hesitate to speak still more plainly, and to declare, in plain round terms (we shudder while we copy) that Moore, the Poet, the Patriot "Moore, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... been forbidden to establish himself in Kingsmill! Why had they not taken her into council? She would have faced the man, and have overawed him; he should have been made to understand the gross selfishness of his behaviour. Never had she heard of such a monstrous case— ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... such a kitchen became at once an impudent mockery. When this farther room was reached, it proved to be even worse than the kitchen. It was shut up for the night—had been shut up apparently for a week—and was in the possession of the cats of the town, and the flies of Egypt. Two monstrous hounds entered with us; and the cats fled hastily by a window which was slightly open at the top, spitting and howling with fear when they missed the first spring, and came within the cognisance ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... nothing of the cause of natural phenomena, nor do they desire to be informed of them, conceived thunder to be a spirit dwelling in the mountains, and now and then sallying forth to make himself heard. Some of them imagined it to proceed from the crowing of a monstrous turkey-cock in the heavens; others ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... anxiety of authorship addresses to the unknown reader, I advance but this one; that he will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly. The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... aroused himself apparently from his noonday rest, and was stretching himself, wondering who the bold intruder could be who had ventured into his domains. I gazed at the lion, and the lion gazed at me. I know I did not like the appearance of the monstrous brute. My rifle was loaded with ball, but still I dreaded lest, should I fire and not kill him outright, he might yet attack me. I therefore, keeping my face towards him, slowly retired, hoping earnestly that he would go to sleep ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... "that troop of gay dolphins, in the smooth sea beyond the island. You saw the shark, with its glaring eyes, opening its monstrous jaws, as it rose near the pretty creatures, ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... and yet persistent, wrestling hard with the terrible Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who is often marching away to seiges of Milan, reducing strong rogues and deeply wronging the church (whose forged documents are all purely genuine). Then what a hubbub there is in the church! Monstrous anti-popes, one of whom, Victor, dies, and a satanic bishop Henry of Liege consecrates another, Pascal, and the dismal schism continues. Then our lord Alexander returns to Rome, and the Emperor slaughters the ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... Stuarts had been to the Whigs. If, as the Whigs taught, those who paid the taxes were entitled to a voice in the government, then the manufacturing districts ought to send representatives to Parliament. It seemed monstrous that places like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham had no one in the House of Commons to plead for the needs of their inhabitants. The manufacturer wanted Parliamentary representation because he hoped through ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... repudiated as a monstrous and malicious calumny the common view that his programme was to march on Athens and to dethrone the King. His movement was directed against the Bulgars, not against the King or the Dynasty: "We are neither anti-royalist nor anti-dynastic," he declared, "we are simply patriots." ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... who laid before Lady Southdown the great advantages which might occur from an intimacy between her family and Miss Crawley—advantages both worldly and spiritual, he said: for Miss Crawley was now quite alone; the monstrous dissipation and alliance of his brother Rawdon had estranged her affections from that reprobate young man; the greedy tyranny and avarice of Mrs. Bute Crawley had caused the old lady to revolt against ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... possibility for him, a stranger, who was nothing to her but a superficial acquaintance, to achieve anything in the way he most desired. The Captain would be completely justified in rejecting every uncalled-for interference with his affairs as a piece of monstrous impudence; and then, too, in what way could he hope to ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... of Scripture. Mr. Godwin is a mixture of the Stoic and of the Christian philosopher. To break the force of the vulgar objections and outcry that have been raised against the Modern Philosophy, as if it were a new and monstrous birth in morals, it may be worth noticing, that volumes of sermons have been written to excuse the founder of Christianity for not including friendship and private affection among its golden rules, but rather excluding them.[A] Moreover, the answer to the question, "Who is thy neighbour?" added ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... recollecting that his friend the count was returned to his lodgings in the same house, he resolved to visit him; for he was none of those half- bred fellows who are ashamed to see their friends when they have plundered and betrayed them; from which base and pitiful temper many monstrous cruelties have been transacted by men, who have sometimes carried their modesty so far as to the murder or utter ruin of those against whom their consciences have suggested to them that they have committed some small trespass, either ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard. My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people laugh. I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else —eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days, Tom Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens, your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my entire life have I listened ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... task of emancipating the crown from parliamentary interference. But popular suspicion had been aroused by Charles's secret dealings and James's open professions; and Titus Oates, who knew something about real plans for the reconversion of England, inflated his knowledge into a monstrous tale of a popish plot. The Whigs, as the opposition party came to be called, used it for more than it was worth to damage the Tories under Danby. The panic produced one useful measure, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, many judicial murders, and a foolish attempt ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... Pickwick is specially shown in the case of Jingle, whom he pursued with an animosity that was almost frantic. One would think it was some public enemy he was hunting down for the public good. Poor Jingle had really done nothing so monstrous, after all. He had "chaffed" Dr. Slammer, "run off" with the spinster aunt—nothing so uncommon in those days—had been consigned to the Fleet for non-payment of his debts, and there showed penitence and other signs of a good heart. His one serious offence ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... law of God, neither can it be.[36] Its intoxication blinds men, and shuts their eyes to the light of divine revelation. They arrogate to themselves the exclusive privilege of learning and clear understanding: but the skepticism, the pitiful inconsistencies, and monstrous extravagances, which characterize their writings and discourses, make us blush to see so strong an alliance of ignorance and presumption; and lament that the human mind should be capable of falling into ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... "There's a monstrous injustice being practiced, systematically and cruelly, against thousands of homeless people who come to this country in innocent hope every year. They come here believing it's the great big open-handed West they've heard so much about, carrying everything with them ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... reasons best known to himself, had left his clerical duties in his native city of Vera Cruz and taken service with Captain Brand. One of the reasons for leaving—and rather abruptly, too—was for thrusting a cuchillo into the heart of his own father, who had reported him to his superior for his monstrous licentiousness. The padre, however, always declared that he was actuated entirely by filial duty in killing his old parent, to save him the pain and disgrace which would have followed the exposure of his son! He still clung, though excommunicated, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Chorlton, with all her village life upon her, and her utter ignorance of the monstrous world of Maisie's own past experience, came like a breath of fresh air. Was it Pomona though?—or was it the tea? Reserve gave way to an impulse of informal speech:—"My dear, you have ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... getting into it. In a moment more, the skiff pushed off and rowed toward the steamer. A sailor stood on a sort of platform abaft the wheel house to throw the men in the skiff a rope when they came near. The engine was stopped, and the monstrous steampipe commenced blowing off the steam, which, being now no longer employed to work the engine, it would be dangerous to keep pent up. The steam, in issuing from the pipe, produced a dense cloud of smoke and ...
— Rollo on the Atlantic • Jacob Abbott
... she was well informed about affairs of State. Is it possible to suppose that such a woman would shut herself up in her home to weave wool, when, with her talent, her energy, her experience, she could be of so much service to her son and to the State? We do not need to attribute to Agrippina a monstrous ambition, as does Tacitus, in order to explain how the Empire was ruled during the first two years, by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina; it was a natural consequence of the situation created by the premature death of Claudius. Tacitus himself is forced to recognise that the ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... afraid that crude Calvinism, as preached in certain parts of the north, is nothing less than monstrous. The good God, beneficent Father of us all, is unrecognizable when eternal reprobation is represented as the inevitable fate of the vast majority of His children. In time, no doubt (and the sooner the better), the results of modern theological thought will penetrate into ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Letters and Remonstrances from the Scottish Committee of Estates to the reconstituted English Parliament, severely criticising the general state of affairs in England, and complaining especially of the monstrous insolence of the Army in possessing themselves of the King, and the expulsion at their instance of the eleven Presbyterian leaders from the Commons. Were not these acts, though done in England, outrages on Scotland as well, and against the obligations of the Covenant? The England with ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... an overturned barrel of water. In rags, a beast of a person lies gulping food Like a cigarette butt on the yellow sun. Two skinny goats stand in broad green spaces On pegs, and their ropes sometimes tighten. Invisible behind monstrous trees Unbelievably at peace the huge ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... attractive to a thirsty Soul. A red man, dressed strangely in the feathers of a raven, stood hard by, and loudly invited all passers-by to partake of this refreshment. I was about to excavate a portion of the monstrous strawberry (being partial to that fruit), when my guide held my hand and whispered in a low voice that they who accepted the invitation of the man that guarded the strawberry were lost. He added that, into whatever paradise I might stray, I must beware of tasting any of the food ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... cab without extra charge. Nothing exceeds my scorn for the English taxi-driver who demands another ninepence for an additional passenger, even though only a child—nothing except my scorn for the cowardly official who conceded this monstrous imposition. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... stood the unearthly tread smote the floor. My eye caught something in motion; it was about the size of Goliah's foot—it was grey, heavy, and flapped with a dead weight from one step to another. As I am alive, it was the most monstrous grey rat I ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... cruelties. The which when Patrick heard, taught by the Divine Spirit, he knew that the vessel of evil was hardened in reprobation, prepared in no wise for correction, but rather for perdition; and thus he prayed unto the Lord: "O Lord God, as thou knowest this vulpine man to be monstrous in vice, do thou in a monstrous mode cast him forth from the face of the earth, and appoint an end unto his offences!" Then the Lord, inclining his ear unto the voice of his servant, while on a certain time the ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... they are altogether grand, massive, and imposing. The general proportions of the bulls are good, the limbs are accurately drawn, the muscular development is well portrayed, and the pose of the figure is majestic. Even the monstrous forms of human-headed bulls have a certain air of quiet dignity, which is not without its effect on the beholder; and, although implying no great artistic merit, since they are little more than reproductions of Assyrian models, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... this view remain just the same; the sequence, and the purposiveness in this sequence, remain untouched, only that the Greeks saw in the rational and purposive in nature the realisation of rational progressive thoughts, not the bloody survivals of a monstrous gladiatorial combat in nature. The Darwinians appear to me to resemble the Roman emperors, who waited till the combat was ended, and then applauded the survival of the fittest. The idealist philosophy, be it Plato's or Hegel's, recognises in what ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the name of air. The inhabitants of the higher Alpine chalets, with their flocks and herds, and the grasses which support these, do the same; while the chamois rears its kids in air rarer still. Insect life, moreover, is sometimes exhibited with monstrous prodigality at ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Gulliver coming wading through the water towards their ships, the Blefuscan sailors all jumped overboard and swam ashore in a terrible fright. Never before had any of them seen or dreamt of so monstrous a giant, nor had they heard ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... fellow, lean; and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque. ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... These monstrous decrees were carried into effect—at a time when France reigned supreme in the domain of intellect, poetry, and the arts—in the days of Racine, Corneille, Moliere—of Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Fenelon. ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... be denied that civilization, by the many false practices which it has introduced, by the facilities which its very complexity affords to the concealment of crime, and by the monstrous systems of corruption which fashion, caste, and conventionality are enabled to shelter, is the direct means of rendering many individuals miserable in the extreme; but these are the necessary incidents to its struggles to advance under the dominion ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... made large enough for the enormous pendants which were peculiar to their order, and which gave them, with the Spaniards, the name of orejones. *29 This ornament was so massy in the ears of the sovereign, that the cartilage was distended by it nearly to the shoulder, producing what seemed a monstrous deformity in the eyes of the Europeans, though, under the magical influence of fashion, it was regarded as a ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... and the Christianity in which they are called upon to believe, into which they are invited to enter, really is. The lecturer goes up and down the land and in the face of mighty audiences he denounces Christianity. He declares it to be unintelligible and absurd, to be monstrous and brutal. And when you ask what it is that he is thus denouncing, what it is that he is thus convicting over and over again, you find that it is something not simply which makes no part of Christianity, but ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... would be little comfort for me away from the chimney corner—which has never been my favourite post, by the way. Caliban and Agnes, the cook, a kindly Normandy woman, did their best for me and for the ravenous gang of workmen that laboured (in the slight intervals between their meals!) at the monstrous, many-mouthed iron tube in the cellar; while I chafed and scolded at the delays, unwilling to leave the men, weary of my dear Island now its chief jewel was gone, irritated by the tramping feet and tuneless ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... find the editing by Committee feasible. The friction was incessant, the waste of time monstrous. The second number cost him even more headaches than the first, and this, although the gallant Gluck abandoning his single-handed emprise fortified himself with a real live compositor and had arranged for the paper to be printed by machinery. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... woman endued with every quality of modesty and not less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of the most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled. A monstrous fine bit of cowflesh! I'll be sworn she has rendezvoused you. What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad's bud, immensely so, said Mr Lynch. The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater hospice. Demme, does not Doctor O'Gargle chuck the nuns ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of remarkable longevity, monstrous births, &c. will suffice to shew the nature of this Chapter. It must be admitted that its contents are unimportant except as matters of curious speculation, and as connected with the ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... the Kraken has been referred to imperfect and exaggerated accounts of monstrous Polypi infesting the northern seas; how far may not the Cuttle-fish have given rise to this fiction? In hot countries (our readers will remember that in a late paper, Mirror, vol. xvii. pp. 282-299, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... Now floats the monstrous beast, o'ercome with pain, Whose scaly flanks upon the waves expand; And now descends into the deepest main, Scowers at the bottom, and stirs up the sand. The rising flood ill able to sustain, The cavalier swims forth, and makes for land. He leaves the anchor fastened in his tongue, And grasps ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... indefeasible, and never could be parted with. The claim appears to have caused some sensation among the crown lawyers. It was certainly unfounded and injudiciously asserted. Lord Liverpool pronounced it monstrous; and it probably increased the suspicion and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... apartment only a portion of this obscure light. The hearse destined to convey the remains of my dear mother to their last, long resting-place, was drawn up at the door. I saw it looming through the fog, with its tall, black shadowy plumes, like some ghostly and monstrous thing. A hitherto unknown feeling of dread stole over me. My life had been all sunshine up to the present moment—the sight of that mournful funeral array swept like a dark cloud over the smiling sky, blotting out all that ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... Monstrous things are done in Paris. The future of a province depends on the mere signature of men who (through intrigues I have no time to explain to you) often stop the execution of useful and much-needed work; in fact, the best plans are often those which ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... benefit to the sister sciences as to itself. For, when questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the proving that the Maestricht "homo diluvii testis" was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which had been never before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the last half-century, the whole choir ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... there is nothing before you but ruin," said the archdeacon, now moved beyond all endurance. "Ruin both for you and Eleanor. How do you mean to pay the monstrous expenses of this action?" ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... and one of the guests happened to have a particularly large nose, the fool said out loud: 'What a terrible nose that gentleman has got!' So all the family pretended not to hear, and were rather uncomfortable, and when the fool saw that, he said: 'How I lied when I said that gentleman's nose was monstrous; now I come to look at it I really think it's rather a small nose!' Well, of course, no one could help laughing after that, and they all went off into peals of merriment, even ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... fruitfull shore of muddie Nile, Upon a sunnie banke outstretched lay, In monstrous length, a mightie Crocodile, That, cram'd with guiltles blood and greedie pray Of wretched people travailing that way, Thought all things lesse than his disdainfull pride. I saw a little Bird, cal'd Tedula, The least of thousands ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... to obtain supplies from the natives. Savage irony was all they received; a handful of corn and a piece of bread were offered in exchange for swords and muskets. The Indians came against them in numbers, frightfully dressed, and bearing their okee in the form of a monstrous idol, stuffed with moss, and hung with chains and copper. But they were received with a volley of pistol-shot. The omnipotent okee fell to the earth, and with him several of his worshippers. The rest fled to the woods, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... are growing queer, Nay, threaten to be furious; I'll scan their paltry bills next year, At present I'm not curious. Such fellows are a monstrous bore, So I and Harry Grosvenor To-morrow start for Gallia's shore, And leave ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... far as the eye could reach fifty miles, looking southward from the highest white peak. Filling ravines and gulches, and dropping from the walls of canyons in white shroud-like drifts, fashioning the dividing ridge into the likeness of a monstrous grave, hiding the bases of giant pines, and completely covering young trees and larches, rimming with porcelain the bowl-like edges of still, cold lakes, and undulating in motionless white billows to the edge of the distant horizon. Snow lying everywhere on the California Sierra, and still falling. ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... is by no means extinct in the modern European world, should be set aside from time to time in favour of merit. He is aware how deeply the greater part of mankind resent any interference with the order of society, and therefore he proposes his novel idea in the form of what he himself calls a 'monstrous fiction.' (Compare the ceremony of preparation for the two 'great waves' in Book v.) Two principles are indicated by him: first, that there is a distinction of ranks dependent on circumstances prior to the individual: ...
— The Republic • Plato
... bordering on delirium, the least shock was an agony to him. The creaking of a plank terrified him. His father's breathing took on fantastic proportions. It seemed to be no longer a human breathing, and the monstrous sound was horrible to him; it seemed to him that there must be a beast sleeping there. The night crushed him; it would never end; it must always be so; he was lying there for months and months. He gasped for breath; he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... a myth will maintain itself, how it will continue to deceive, to dupe, and blind even the comparatively intelligent to its monstrous absurdities. A free Republic! And yet within a little over thirty years a small band of parasites have successfully robbed the American people, and trampled upon the fundamental principles, laid down by the fathers of this country, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of vigor, agility, and courage,—strange exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result of harmony. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... proved the promise made, Lucy appealing to a parent pray'd; But all opposed the event that she design'd, And all in vain—she never changed her mind; But coldly answer'd in her wonted way, That she "would rule, and Lucy must obey." With peevish fear, she saw her health decline, And cried, "Oh! monstrous, for a man to pine! But if your foolish heart must yield to love, Let him possess it whom I now approve; This is my pleasure."—Still the Rector came With larger offers and with bolder claim; But the stern lady would attend ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... educating period for small maids of six, that long-ago time of bitter party hatred. Though only a short half-dozen years crowned her fair cropped head, and she lisped still in an adorable baby way, Hope Carolina was very wise—"monstrous wise," the black people said. She did not understand the meaning of "renegade" exactly,—the Radical Judge was a renegade too,—but she knew all about Reconstruction. It was what made them, the black people, so sassy, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... another monstrous crime of Nero's, also inaccurately dated. In the full august assembly, Nero discovered enthroned, not unmajestic in deportment, yet effeminately chapleted, and holding a lyre: suppose him just returned from Elis, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... colony. His life then, by his own admission, had been disreputable. Who does not know that vices which may be treated with tenderness, almost with complaisance, while they are kept in the background, became monstrous, prodigious, awe-inspiring when they are made public? A gentleman shall casually let slip some profane word, and even some friendly parson standing by will think but little of it; but let the profane word, through some unfortunate accident, find its way into the newspapers, ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... mate's challenge with a series of snarls rising in volume. There was a tearing, scrambling sound from within. Then Shann fired at the jack-in-the-box appearance of a monstrous head, and Thorvald released ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... of boys and youths in all their glorious flower? is there no one that cares that the growing man may be upright and virtuous, and that the nobility of his nature may not be warped and corrupted, either through want of a guardian or by the depravity of those he associates with? Is it not monstrous and thankless to say so, seeing that we enjoy the divine bounty, which is dealt out to us richly, and never abandons us in our straits? And yet some of these same straits have more necessity than beauty. For ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... the carriage was a very large dog, but possessing a grace and a swiftness of motion unusual to his size. He was not only beautiful, but also intelligent-looking. His coat was of dark brown, and smooth as sealskin, showing every muscle of his body. His broad square head and monstrous jaw reminded the beholder of a tiger. His ears were close-cropped, which gave a compactness to his head that brought into prominence his great changeable eyes: eyes that the Davenports afterwards found so fiery sometimes that they reflected red lights; at other ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... in the depths of that huge blind Incoherence! With amazement, not with measurement, men look on the Immeasurable; not knowing its laws; seeing, with all different degrees of knowledge, what new phases, and results of event, its laws bring forth. France is as a monstrous Galvanic Mass, wherein all sorts of far stranger than chemical galvanic or electric forces and substances are at work; electrifying one another, positive and negative; filling with electricity your Leyden-jars,—Twenty-five ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... technique of thinking, and that I was no more capable of managing my own brain than mending a watch. For the first time in my life I was really thinking eagerly and intensely, and that seemed to me so monstrous that I said to myself: 'I am going off my head.' A man whose brain does not work at all times, but only at painful moments, is often haunted by the thought ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... his word or no; and without encountering anything worth mentioning, came to the place where the spirits on their passage to the other world were obliged to decide by lot the station in which every one was to act there. Here was a monstrous wheel, infinitely larger than those in which I had formerly seen lottery-tickets deposited. This was called ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... meant also my making money. That was the complete understanding—here in London, and while you were at my house. You know it as well as I do. And I refuse to suppose that you seriously intend to sit there and pretend that you meant to give me nothing but an armful of waste paper. It would be too monstrous!" ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... death of Christ is a satisfaction not only for guilt, but also for eternal death, according to Hos. 13, 14: 0 death, I will be thy death. How monstrous, therefore, it is to say that the satisfaction of Christ redeemed from the guilt, and our punishments redeem from eternal death, as the expression, I will be thy death, ought then to be understood, not concerning Christ, but concerning our works, and, indeed, not concerning the works commanded ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... Honorinde, to whom fate had given for a husband the greatest hunter in the world. This man would have willingly passed his life in the woods, where he hunted, night and day, what we call, in hunter's parlance, 'big game.' Having won the victory over a monstrous boar, he cut off the head himself, and this quivering and bleeding mask he went to offer to his lady in a basin. The young woman was in the first month of her pregnancy. She was filled with repugnance and fright at the sight of this still-threatening ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... from Far End and immediately called Council, even as Kurho was calling Council. Little had been gained, little proven; the perilous thing was still there, that monstrous means of death that might come in a moment of temper or reprisal to either tribe. Alas, such weapons were not easily ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... have fled the city. Their monstrous crimes are the theme of universal execration. But I reported them many months ago, and Gen. Winder was cognizant of their forgeries, correspondence with the enemy, etc. The Secretary of War, and the President himself, were informed of them, but it was thought ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... suddenly that they started up with a spasmodic jerk which nearly threw the old fellow from his perch. By a desperate effort, however, he maintained his seat, but his broad-brimmed hat went flying from his bald head and rolled to the ground, scattering in its fall his snuff-box, spectacles and a monstrous red bandanna handkerchief. This little episode called forth a peal of laughter from the by-standers, in which the ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... whether designedly or undesignedly propagated, that he was a man of divine extraction; and revived a report equally absurd and fabulous with that formerly spread respecting Alexander the Great, that he was begotten by a huge serpent, whose monstrous form was frequently observed in the bedchamber of his mother, but which, on any one's coming in, suddenly unfolding his coils, glided out of sight. The belief in these miraculous accounts was never ridiculed by him, but rather increased ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... twelve months labored actively and successfully to strengthen the Protestant cause in Scotland, he revisited Geneva, where he remained till 1559. During his residence in Geneva, he published his "First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous Government of Women"—a treatise which was levelled against Mary of England, but which gave serious offence to Elizabeth. From April, 1559, when he once more and finally set foot on Scottish earth, till his decease, which took place November 24, 1572, the reformed church was ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... and friends of the family, to whom the young painter tried to get access, in the hope of interesting, if it were possible, in his love affairs, one of these souls absorbed in money and trade, to whom a genuine passion must appear a quite monstrous speculation, a thing unheard-of. Nothing meanwhile, was altered at the sign of the Cat and Racket. If Augustine was absent-minded, if, against all obedience to the domestic code, she stole up to her room to make signals by means of a jar of flowers, if she ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... delighted, while the basket was filled with these articles, then passed over to Nathaniel, who was going home with Mrs. Brooks. It was amusing to watch Nathaniel, with the monstrous burden in his hands trying to help Mrs. Brooks down the front steps; for Aunt Madge was not enough of a fine lady to send the pair ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... shade overspread the lawn, the flowers, the old vine-clad stone house. In the music of the singing birds, in the murmur of the running water, he heard an ominous sound. Quiet beauty—sweet music—innocent laughter! By what monstrous abortion of fate did these abide in ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... of the history is everywhere interrupted by the insertion of innumerable laws, with regard to the greater part of which it is impossible to see any reason for their being inserted where they are." The dislocation of the narrative by these monstrous growths of legislative matter is not, as Goethe thinks, to be imputed to the editor; it is the work of the unedited Priestly Code itself, and is certainly intolerable; nor can it be original; the literary form of the work at once shows this. It is still possible to trace how the legal matter ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the most curious effect upon her mind, almost greater than the other. She had shown no faith in him, but he had faith in her. Reckless and guilty as he was, he had not doubted her. He had put it in her power to convict him not only of the worst accusation that was brought against him, but of a monstrous trick to prove his alibi, and a cruel wrong to her compelling her to uphold that as true. She was able to expose him, if she chose, as no one else could do; but he had not been afraid of that. This second thought, which burst upon Elinor without any ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... word Mi-she- mi-ki-nock in the Chippewa language. That is, "Mi-she" as one of the adnominals or adjectives in the Ottawa and Chippewa languages, which would signify tremendous in size; and "Mikinock" is the name of mud turtle—meaning, therefore, "monstrous large turtle," as the historians would have it. But we consider this to be a clear error. Whereever those annalists, or those who write about the Island of Mackinac, obtain their information as to the definition of the word Michilimackinac, I don't know, ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... and the fame of his prowess in arms vied with, the glory of his virtue, and made his name a terror to all evil-doers the wide world over. In Lybia there was, in those days, a city called Silena, near whose walls lay a great lake, inhabited by a monstrous and fearsome dragon. Many a redoubted knight had fallen in conflict with this terrible beast; none had obtained the least advantage over it; and now for a long time it had laid waste and ravaged all the country round, no man daring to attack or hinder it. Every day for many a long ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... cabin they met Carrie, for whom Estelle was both sister and mother. The little shanty slanted on the side of a swell like a little boat sliding up a monstrous mid-ocean wave. Around it lay a little garden inhabited by a colony of chicken-coops—"All my own making," Estelle said. "Oh, of course, sister held the nails and bossed, but I did it. I like it, too. It's more fun than working red poppies on tidies—that's ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... it was deserved, and Mr. Robert Vyner would have been the first to admit it. His monstrous suspicion was daily growing less monstrous and more plausible. It became almost a conviction, and he resolved to test it by seeing Joan and surprising her with a few sudden careless remarks of the kind that a rising K.C. might spring upon a particularly difficult witness. ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... and up out of the ghastly fog edging the German Empire, silhouetted, monstrous, against the daybreak, soared a Laemmergeyer, beating the livid void with enormous, ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... definitely figure to his mind. From among the trees on either side he caught broken and incoherent whispers in a strange tongue which yet he partly understood. They seemed to him fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... honoured with the transaction of your legal affairs or not. But I do care on other grounds. And I do implore you to believe that I am speaking to you more as a friend than as a lawyer;—that I am speaking to you as the whole city would speak, and will speak when it hears of this—this incredible—this monstrous notion,—when I entreat you to think yet further on ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Larolles, "why, don't you know it was the very night of the grand private masquerade at Lord Darien's? I would not have missed it for the whole universe. I never travelled in such an agony in my life: we did not get to town till monstrous late, and then do you know I had neither a ticket nor a habit! Only conceive what a distress! well, I sent to every creature I knew for a ticket, but they all said there was not one to be had; so I was just like a mad creature—but about ten or eleven o'clock, a young lady of my ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... of nature. By numbers the origin and the substance of all things could be explained [244]. Numbers make the mystery of earth and heaven—of the gods themselves. And this part of his system, which long continued to fool mankind, was a sort of monstrous junction between arithmetic and magic—the most certain of sciences with the most fantastic of chimeras. The Pythagoreans supposed the sun, or central fire, to be the seat of Jupiter and the principle of life. The stars were divine. Men, and even animals, were held to have within ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he resigns voluntarily or not; but, end how it may, it is a disastrous occurrence. If Government should persist in the appointment, they would be beaten by a great majority, and the House of Commons would vote him out; if it is given up, it is a monstrous concession to the violence and power of the House of Commons, for however objectionable the appointment may have been, it is not so outrageous as to call for the interference of Parliament with the King's undoubted prerogative, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... the sea, and, hasty, put on board The spoils and female captives. Half the host, With Agamemnon, son of Atreus, stay'd Supreme commander, and, embarking, half Push'd forth. Swift course we made, for Neptune smooth'd The waves before us of the monstrous Deep. At Tenedos arriv'd, we there perform'd Sacrifice to the Gods, ardent to reach Our native land, but unpropitious Jove, Not yet designing our arrival there, 200 Involved us in dissension fierce again. For ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... altogether the same as that of those at St. Georges, or in the abbatial church of the Trinity at Caen. There are indeed monsters among them, but they are of unfrequent occurrence; and, if the expression may be allowed, they are not equally monstrous. Nor are they of a description to appear to bear any reference to mythology, or to history. On the contrary, the sculpture on them is for the most part of great beauty; and the patterns display a fertile, and an elegant, if not a classical, taste on the part of the architects. ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... consider, after an action so shameful, thou must obscure thyself in some remote corner of the world, where honesty and honour never are heard of: no, thou canst not shew thy face, but it will be pointed at for something monstrous; for a hundred ages may not produce a story so lewdly infamous and loose as thine. Perhaps (fond as you are) you imagine the sole joy of being beloved by him, will atone for those affronts and reproaches you will meet with in the censuring ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... answered she, "I am sure you know what I mean; but you must know I have a prodigious monstrous great favour to beg of you: now pray don't refuse me; I assure you if you do, I shall be ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... expected to see stalls and milking machines and hay he saw an expanse of metal floor and monstrous machinery. The barn door which had been a rickety wooden slab from the outside was a gleaming sheet of metal from the inside. It glided silently shut and left no joint or seam to show where ...
— Double Take • Richard Wilson
... companion of thy fireside, Help and joy of all thy lifetime." On the floor a child was sitting, And the babe this tale related. "There appeared within this dwelling, Came a bird within the castle, From the East came flying hither, From the East, a monstrous eagle, One wing touched the vault of heaven, While the other swept the ocean; With his tail upon the waters, Reached his beak beyond the cloudlets, Looked about, and eager watching, Flew around, and sailing, soaring, Flew away ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... would pay the bill himself. Whereupon Harry dismissed the matter then and thereafter from his thoughts, and, like a light-hearted good fellow as he was, gave himself no more trouble about his board-bills. Philip paid them, swollen as they were with a monstrous list of extras; but he seriously counted the diminishing bulk of his own hoard, which was all the money he had in the world. Had he not tacitly agreed to share with Harry to the last in this adventure, and would not the generous fellow ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gazed in surprise at the stranger,—Candia's stranger. Their number was augmenting. A few occupied the embankment shaded with acacias; others crowned the promontory rising abruptly from the rocks. Here and there, on the monstrous bowlders, a tiny boat lay sparkling like gold at the foot of the detached crag, so lofty that it gave the effect of the ruins of some Cyclopean tower, confronting the immensity ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... invention, has deluged the West and South with blood. Murder's prime minister hangs in every man's belt. Colonel James Bowie's awful knife is a twin of this monstrous birth. In long years of dark national shame our country will curse the memory of the "two Colonels." They were typical of their different sectional ideas. These men gave us the present coat of arms of San Francisco: the Colt's ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... for he didn't dare to turn; The sea would have thrown the ship like a mustang noosed with a rope; For the monstrous waves were leapin' high astern, And the shelter of Seven Island Bay was the ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... present system of the officering and personnel of the army and navy of these States, and the spirit and letter of their trebly-aristocratic rules and regulations, is a monstrous exotic, a nuisance and revolt, and belong here just as much as orders of nobility, or the Pope's council of cardinals. I say if the present theory of our army and navy is sensible and true, then the rest of America ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... why Pina acted as she did, though they could not possibly excuse her evil conduct in the eyes of righteous persons like the Senator and others of his class, who would have thought it a monstrous and unnatural thing that a noble Venetian girl should fall in love with a music-master, though he were the most talented and famous ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... not a question of right, 't is one of expediency," replied the bondsman. "A year at court, Miss Janice, would teach you that in this world 't is of monstrous importance to know when ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... has ever been a chief chapter of human life. False religions are the only ones known to two thirds of the human race, even now, after nineteen centuries of Christianity; and false religions are perhaps the most monstrous, complicated and thorough-going specimens of humbug that can be found. And even within the pale of Christianity, how unbroken has been the succession of impostors, hypocrites and pretenders, male and female, of every possible variety of ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... to get the car safely back to his father's garage before the family returned from New York on the afternoon train. Now that his excitement had cooled into sober second thought, he marveled that he had been led into committing such a monstrous offense. He must have been mad. Often he had begged to do the very thing he had done and his father had always refused to let him, insisting that an expensive touring car was no toy for a boy of his age. Perhaps ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... and the canoe was propelled by means of short paddles, the men sitting with their faces in the direction in which they were going. The heads of many of the canoes were curious, in some cases it was the figure of a man with a face as ugly as can well be conceived, with a monstrous tongue thrust out of the mouth, and white shells stuck in ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... are, and on her hands in one way or another, she carves and chisels, and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue. She may succeed so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great, sad, monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the monument at once of her success and her failure, the object of her compassion, the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form into which her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not of sympathy. Perhaps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... as he swung back the barriers at last, and his 'beauties' came forth. Seven or eight monstrous brutes, hounds of a kind unknown to me: fulvous and sleek of coat, tall on their legs, square-headed, long-tailed, deep-chested; with terrible jaws slobbering in eagerness. They leaped around and up ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... this, do we delay and give way to weakness and train up so monstrous a tyrant against our own selves? Is it not disgraceful that our forefathers, brought up in slavery, felt the desire for liberty, but we who have lived under an independent government become slaves ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... desire to see for myself the highest embodiment of English law where it lurked—a huge and bloated personification of all that was monstrous and discouraging to suitors—in the secret place of thunder, just behind the altar of sacrifice, forever spinning the web that for hundreds of years hath enmeshed and overspread the mightiest empire upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... wuz a shtrapping young fellow about eighteen, Oi wuz sailin' aboord a trader. Wan day we were layin' becalmed, as we air now, off Turk's Island. While we were quietly sittin' on the bulwarks, we saw a monstrous shaark off our starboard beam. The ould mon at the toime was snorin' away in his cabin, an' it was a foine chance to have a little fun. We out wid the shaark hook and havin' baited it wid a temptin' piece av junk, attached ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... of women to whom he preached in this city: "To her husband a wife owes the duty of unqualified obedience. There is no crime that a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving him or applying for that monstrous thing, a divorce. It is her duty to submit herself to him always, and no crime he can commit justifies her lack of obedience. If he is a bad or wicked man she may gently remonstrate with him, but disobey him, never." Again, addressing his audience at St. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... attention, however, to Big Waller. He "caught" that gigantic Yankee in every conceivable action and attitude. He photographed him, we might almost say, with his legs apart, the hatchet high above his head, and every muscle tense and rigid, preliminary to a sweeping blow. He "took" him with a monstrous pile of logs on his brawny shoulder; he portrayed him resting for a moment in the midst of his toil; he even attempted to delineate him tumbling over one of the logs, and hurling a shoulder-load upon the ground; but he failed utterly in the last ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... there at Prosopis—so shalt thou smite them. Farewell. I will seek out the Hathor if in any way I can come at her, and tell her all. But of this I warn thee, the hour is big with Fate, and soon will spawn a monstrous birth. Strange visions of doom and death passed before mine eyes as I ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... (q.v.) treaty, which gave her the monopoly of slave- hunting for the Spanish colonies and an opening for contraband trade. In the river Plate region, where the dissensions of Spaniards and Portuguese afforded another opening, English traders smuggled. The Spaniards, with monstrous fatuity, refused to make use of the superb waterways provided by the Parana and Paraguay, and endeavoured to stifle all trade. England's main struggle was with France. It was prolonged by her entanglement in European disputes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... open it, when "Wonderful cures," "Consumption," "Scrofula," "Indigestion," and "Fits," greeted our eyes on every page. Illustrated, too! Here was represented a man apparently dying, and near by a figure that would appear to be a woman were it not for two monstrous wings on its back, throwing obstacles in the way of death in the shape of a two-quart bottle of sarsaparilla syrup. Presumptive man in a brown linen coat, to suppose that we, just on the eve of a pleasure excursion, are troubled with such complaints, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... exaggerated account of the whole affair will be spread over the whole country, and we will be equally suspected by our own people. Those who spread useless falsehoods about us will gladly have a foundation for a monstrous one. Didn't Camp Moore ring with the story of our entertaining the Federal officers? Didn't they spread the report that Miriam danced with one to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" in the State House garden? What will they stop at now? O! if I ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... this chaos of incandescent nature, sent in a flame of deep blue sky and sea. It lay there calmly, like some phantasmagoric flower, some monstrous rose that swoons away, with upturned face, in ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to say that, upon the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior we may be to the great Cause and Ruler of things, we have more of love in our nature than He has? The thought is monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition of another and a better world, I do not see. As to my departed brother, who leads our minds at present to these reflections, he walked all his life pure among many impure. Except a little hastiness ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... on a little cricket, digging holes in the ground, when he heard a sudden noise. He started up, and saw a strange, monstrous head looking at him over the garden wall. He jumped up, and ran as fast as ...
— Rollo at Work • Jacob Abbott
... will be just a fortnight; time enough for naughty girls, and long enough for two letters, faith. Congreve and Delaval have at last prevailed on Sir Godfrey Kneller to entreat me to let him draw my picture for nothing; but I know not yet when I shall sit.(26)—It is such monstrous rainy weather, that there is no doing with it. Secretary St. John sent to me this morning, that my dining with him to-day was put off till to-morrow; so I peaceably sat with my neighbour Ford, dined with him, and came home at six, and am now in bed as usual; and now it is time to have another ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... indignation and scorn upon Roland's face was simply beyond description when he heard this barefaced and monstrous request. ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... alone. And what a foolish god was that who taught the stupid Gentiles that we drank the blood of a murdered child at our Passover feast! Why, I, who was only a child, knew better. And so I hated and feared and avoided the great white church in the Platz, and hated every sign and symbol of that monstrous god who was kept there and hated my own person, when, in our play of a Christian funeral, I imagined my body to be the corpse, over which was carried ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... instance of the monstrous exaggerations of this ancient Munchausen, take the following:—"I am a liar if I have not seen in Java, a single shell in which three men might completely hide themselves, and all white!" He also states himself to have met with whole nations of giants, twenty-fie feet high; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... were so monstrous that they carried with them their own refutation. It was too often the custom in the middle ages to overwhelm an enemy with incredible charges for it to be fair to accuse the enemies of Hubert of any excessive malignity. The substantial innocence of Hubert ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... afternoon. She had come upon errands for her mother connected with a timorous refurbishment; and as she did these, in and out of the department stores, she had an insistent consciousness of the Sheridan Building. From the street, anywhere, it was almost always in sight, like some monstrous geometrical shadow, murk-colored and rising limitlessly into the swimming heights of the smoke-mist. It was gaunt and grimy and repellent; it had nothing but strength and size—but in that consciousness of Mary's the great structure may have partaken of beauty. Sheridan ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... been torn from unfinished houses, iron railings from the magnificent gateway; trees were cut down, street sheds demolished; carts, carriages, and omnibuses were being triumphantly dragged from hiding-places to the monstrous pile. There were not very many men at work, but those who were engaged, labored like beavers. Blouses and broadcloth were about equally mixed. A few men armed with cutlasses, muskets, and pistols appeared to act as leaders; ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... said. "In my free and unrestricted spirit I moved deep into the substance of that world, below all the total ruin, far below. And there was a monstrous machine, near the molten core, almost infinitely older than the feeding one far above it. And it, too, had been left in a stratum where all else was destroyed. I could see it had once produced the ooze from which came the life from which in turn come the beings by whom the machine above ...
— Sweet Their Blood and Sticky • Albert Teichner
... on foot it is useless to attempt a description. Beards of awful size, moustaches of every shade and length under a foot, phizzes of all colors and contortions, four-story hats with sky-scraping feathers, costumes ring-streaked, speckled, monstrous, and incredible, made up the motley crew. There was a Northern emigrant just returned from Kansas, with garments torn and water-soaked, and but half cleaned of the adhesive tar and feathers, watched closely by a burly Missourian, with any quantity of hair and fire-arms and bowie-knives. There were ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... England.—The presence of the Irish members at Westminster is on the face of it a gross and patent injustice to Great Britain. It is absurd, it is monstrous, that while the Irish Parliament and the Irish Parliament alone settle whether Mr. Healy, Mr. M'Carthy, Mr. Redmond, or Mr. Davitt is to be head of the Irish government, and England, though vitally interested in the character of the Irish Executive, is not to say a ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... with the devil; and that to him they seemed more worthy of pity than of punishment? Hereupon I answered that I had not indeed read any such book (for say, who can read all that fools write?), but that the appearances here and in all other places proved that it was a monstrous error to deny the reality of witchcraft, inasmuch as people might then likewise deny that there were such things as ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... certain Indians of Vancouver Island, there once lived "a monstrous old woman with wolfish teeth, and finger-nails like claws." She used to entice away little children whom she afterwards ate up. One day a mother, who was about to lose her child thus, cried out to the spirits to ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... take care that your behaviour is widely advertised," he said. "You have brought a most monstrous charge against me, and I shall proceed against you for slander. The truth is that you are not equal to the job I intended giving you and you are finding an ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... grant you, is at first sight mysterious enough," Henshaw returned, his keen eyes fixed on Morriston. "But even that does not reconcile me to the monstrous improbability of my brother, Clement, taking his own life. I knew him too well ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... Bill and the three mids confirmed the wreckers in their belief that they were saving something of grand value; for, in fact, had the block of sandstone been a monstrous nugget of gold, the boy slaves could not have been ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... plan in mind beyond an overwhelming desire to put a bad fright into his roommate in payment for what he considered a monstrous act of duplicity. It would serve Travail right if, once he entered the secondary plane of the shell, he would be forced to stay there a while. A good scare would cause him ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... rejected the proper instruments and forms of life, he must make a living out of the charitable curiosity excited by his very unfitness. {94} And asceticism of this prudential type tends always to be both empty and monstrous; empty because it denies life, and monstrous because life is not really denied, but only ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... quite as stout as Miss Greeb had reported. A gigantically fat woman, she made up in breadth what she lacked in length. Yet she seemed to have some activity about her, too, for she opened the door personally to Lucian, who was quite amazed when he beheld her monstrous bulk blocking up the doorway. Her face was white and round like a pale moon; she had staring eyes of a china blue, resembling the vacant optics of a wax doll; and, on the whole, appeared to be a timid, lymphatic ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... why suppose anything so monstrous; men do not ill-treat children. It is only women, who adore them, that kill them and ill-use them accordingly. She will be my little benefactress, God bless her! I may love her more than I ought, being yours, for my home is ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... understanding reached her. She began to understand that her country, threatened to the life, had flung its line those thousands of miles across the sea to stand and hold Hindenburg and Ludendorff and all their Kaisers, Kings, Dukes, and Crown Princes, their Krupp and Skoda monstrous engines, and their monstrous other engines of men made into armies. Through the long haze of misted sea-miles and the smoke of land-miles she perceived that brown line of ours, and knew it stood there that Freedom, and the Nation ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... April 2, 1711, took note of the severance which had taken place between sign and trade, and of the absurdity that the sign no longer had any significance. After satirizing first, the monstrous conjunctions in signs of "Dog and Gridiron," "Cat and Fiddle" and so forth; and next the absurd custom by which young tradesmen, at their first starting in business, added their own signs to those of the masters under whom ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... scarce know what I said. I declared it monstrous, and not to be thought of for a moment; and then she went on in her fashion that would wile a bird off a bush, declaring that no doubt the proposal was a shock, but if I would turn the matter over, I should see it was for the dear child's advantage. Belamour dotes on her, and after ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spread from bight to bight, and crag to crag; and above there were sheets of eruptive flame and great rumblings, and mighty arcs of fire spanning the whole heavens, and gripping them as with the glittering jewelled hand of some monstrous keeper of the skies whose mutterings came to us below. Or the scene changed again, and it was as though elves of the zenith had brought their golden caskets above the firmament, and there had burst them open, so that all the jewels of the light rained upon ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... whole; from the nave of one of the pyramids there hang, on the tops of four buttresses, festoons of chains, in length altogether 548 feet, made of stone. Each garland, consisting of twenty links, is made of one piece of stone 60 feet long; the links themselves are monstrous rings 32 inches in circumference, and polished as smooth as glass. One chain is broken, and hangs down from the pillar. In the neighbourhood of the pagodas there are usually tanks and basins lined with cement, or buildings attached for the purpose of lodging ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... course increases a torpedo's chance of striking by giving it a larger target. Moderate size, no overloading with armour, speed, good coal supply, and as many quick-firing guns as can be mounted—that is my idea of the best type of warship at present. The policy of building monstrous ships is doubtful, when they can be sunk by a torpedo-boat. Under such conditions, it seems to me that ease and rapidity of manoeuvring is of more advantage than gigantic weight of ordnance and armour, because after all the torpedo's attack is directed against a part which ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... Europe, some months after, we found the same whale within a few leagues of the same spot, floating dead upon the water; it measured above half a mile in length. As we could take but a small quantity of such a monstrous animal on board, we got our boats out, and with much difficulty cut off his head, where, to our great joy, we found the anchor, and above forty fathom of the cable, concealed on the left side of his mouth, just under his tongue. [Perhaps this was the cause of his death, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... 'Dat's what de people call me 'round here.' Marse Tom say: 'My name is Woodward. I am on my first political legs, and am goin' 'round to see and be seen, if not by everybody, certainly by de most prominent and 'fluential citizens of each section.' Then de old man say: 'Git down. Git down. You are a monstrous likely man. I'll take you in to see Pinky, my wife, and we'll see what she has to ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... friendly admiration, had been his antagonists, and Pope would naturally accept their view of his merits. And, moreover, Pope's great ally of this period had a dislike of his own to Bentley. Bentley had said of Warburton that he was a man of monstrous appetite and bad digestion. The remark hit Warburton's most obvious weakness. Warburton, with his imperfect scholarship, and vast masses of badly assimilated learning, was jealous of the reputation of the thoroughly trained and accurate critic. It was the dislike of a charlatan for the excellence ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... their names—that is to say, whose grease is imposed on people for blacking; then there were the executioners, and the puffers of bad wares. In the midst of all the merriment, as it must have been, that was going on, shot up from a pit a stem, a tree, a monstrous flower, a large toadstool, and a cupola. These were the Utopian productions of the honoured assembly, the entire amount of their offerings to the world during the past year. Sparks flew from these various objects; they were the thoughts and ideas which had been borrowed or stolen, which now took ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... threw them on the ground. I went back for more, and having scattered them about and piled up a few for a pillow, was about to throw myself on this quickly-formed couch when I saw, just under the stone, what I at first took for a stick, but which then beginning to move, exhibited itself to me as a monstrous rattlesnake, with its body coiled up and its head erect, its fierce eyes glittering, and its forked tongue moving rapidly to and fro as if eager to bite me. I had disturbed it from its slumbers, and it was naturally ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... Point in the fog we sensed that we had risen and fallen over several rises. Every now and then we felt hard slippery snow under our feet. Every now and then our feet went through crusts in the surface. And then quite suddenly, vague, indefinable, monstrous, there loomed a something ahead. I remember having a feeling as of ghosts about as we untoggled our harnesses from the sledge, tied them together, and thus roped walked upwards on that ice. The moon was showing ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... city of Thorn and in her father's house. She called me often to ride beside her, Helene being on my other side, while the Lubber Fiend, who had saved all our lives, gambolled about and came to her to be petted like a lapdog of some monstrous sort. He licked his lips and twisted his eyes upward at her in ludicrous ecstasy till only the whites were visible whenever the Princess laid her hand on his head. So that it was as much as the archers of the guard could do to hide ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... congratulation on misfortune and disgrace. I cannot concur in a blind and servile address, which approves and endeavors to sanctify the monstrous measures which have heaped disgrace and misfortune upon us. This, my lords, is a perilous and tremendous moment! It is not a time for adulation. The smoothness of flattery cannot now avail; cannot ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... and immediately the shadow of deep sorrow covered their faces. It was a thing monstrous, possessing none of the forms familiar to the eye, yet not devoid of a hint of some new unknown form. On a thin tortuous little branch, or rather an ugly likeness of one, lay crooked, strange, unsightly, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... highest philosophy. It is the divine voice which speaks in our hearts, though it has caught some accretion of human passion and superstition. The popular versions are false and debased; the old versions of the Atonement, for example, monstrous; and the belief in the everlasting torture of sinners, a hideous and groundless caricature. With much that such men have said I could, of course, agree heartily; for, indeed, it expresses the strongest feelings ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... to pray for my miserable life, and to watch over it as though it were precious, and I cannot, je ne puis pas, control myself. That is, I could," he continued again after a minute's silence, "but this is too hard work for me, a monstrous work, when I am alone. With others, under special circumstances, when you are going into action, I am brave, j'ai fait mes epreuves, because I am vain and proud: that is my failing, and in presence of others. . . . Do you know, let me spend the night with you: ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... niche, there struggled a convulsive bulk, like some monstrous worm, too large for the bore, yet writhing. Bare feet kicked him in violent rebellion, and a muscular knee jarred squarely under his chin. He caught a pair of naked ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... so. Before the Pantheon, the mayor of an arrondissement sits on a platform, writing down the names of volunteers. Whenever one makes his appearance, a roll of drums announces to his fellow-citizens that he has undertaken to risk his valuable life outside the ramparts. It really does appear too monstrous that the able-bodied men of this city should wear uniforms, learn the goose-step, and refuse to take any part in the defence within shot of the enemy. That they should object to be employed in a campaign ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... fine old-fashioned furniture. Polishing of stairs and floors was a joy to her. We tramped in and out in muddy boots. We scattered tobacco ashes. We opened bedroom windows, even on wet nights, and rain came in. We used monstrous and unheard-of quantities of water. Yet no sooner had one guest departed than Madame ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... to bear on every corner of its solitary galleries, before he reports 'all right.' Suspicious of the Elgin marbles, and not to be done by cat-faced Egyptian giants with their hands upon their knees, Inspector Field, sagacious, vigilant, lamp in hand, throwing monstrous shadows on the walls and ceilings, passes through the spacious rooms. If a mummy trembled in an atom of its dusty covering, Inspector Field would say, 'Come out of that, Tom Green. I know you!' If the smallest ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... a boat in the lake, made of red sandal wood. It had a mast of fine amber, and a blue satin flag: there was only one boatman in it, whose head was like an elephant's, and his body like that of a tiger. When the boat was come up to the prince and Mobarec, the monstrous boatman took them up one after another with his trunk, put them into his boat, and carried them over the lake in a moment. He then again took them up with his trunk, set them ashore, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... Larches forgets. These head-dresses, monstrous as they are, are not exposed to the objection of being inconsistent with the habits of life of those who wore them, as so many of the fashions of later periods and of the present day are. There were no such vehicles as she is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... "It's a monstrous house though," she went on a minute later. "You'll never be able to do all there'll be to do now, unless you have help. Let alone the work, you never can manage to lift your aunt by yourself. I reckon you'll have to ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... year before, the agreement was made with Erskine, the President did not pretend that the orders in council included blockades; and that it was remarkable that he should forget his own declaration regarding the monstrous spoliation of a few months before by the French, under the Rambouillet decree, and yet remember this British order of blockade of four years before, which everybody else had forgotten. Indeed, so completely had ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... of the direct temptation of the evil one could lead you to entertain so monstrous a doctrine, as that ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... that the wood afforded, it had been untrodden for many years. Giant ceiba trees reared themselves two hundred feet into the air. Lianas hung in festoons from the boughs like monstrous boa constrictors. Parrots flew squawking from branch to branch, and humming birds and butterflies of many hues and gorgeous beauty darted like bright arrows among ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... ourselves in a hall so vast, so enormous, so immeasurable, that the eye could not reach its limits. Files of monstrous columns stretched far out of sight on every side, between which twinkled livid stars of yellowish flame; points of light which revealed further depths incalculable in the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the bitter memories of the angler. The fish that break away are monstrous animals; imagination increases their bulk, and fond desire paints them clean-run and bright as silver. There are other chances of the angler's life scarcely less sad than this. When a hook breaks just as the salmon was losing strength, was ceasing to struggle, and beginning ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... that had been his father's, and which now he meant to make his own. There were candles on the table, the dresser, and the mantelshelf. He lit them all, and the room changed from a place of shadows and monstrous shapes to a gentleman's bedchamber,—somewhat sparsely furnished, but of a comfortable and cheerful aspect. A cloth lay upon the floor, the windows were curtained, and the bed had fresh hangings of green and white Kidderminster. Over the mantel ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... various requests which the anxiety of authorship addresses to the unknown reader, I advance but this one; that he will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly. The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ideas, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hatred[53] of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, overgrew, and overshadowed your love of me. There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there was no room for both passions in the same soul: they cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... child her bosom loses its form, her beauty its freshness. Woman is made for motherhood. Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the loss of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps. Behold the family, the human law; everything that departs from this law is monstrous. ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... all kinds of game,—wild cattle, does, deer, stags, bears, turkeys, partridges, parrots, quails, woodcock, wild pigeons, and ring-doves. There are also beaver, otters, and martens. The cattle of this country surpass ours in size. Their head is monstrous and their look is frightful, on account of the long, black hair with which it is surrounded and which hangs below the chin. The hair is fine, and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... one of the guests happened to have a particularly large nose, the fool said out loud: 'What a terrible nose that gentleman has got!' So all the family pretended not to hear, and were rather uncomfortable, and when the fool saw that, he said: 'How I lied when I said that gentleman's nose was monstrous; now I come to look at it I really think it's rather a small nose!' Well, of course, no one could help laughing after that, and they all went off into peals of merriment, even ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... testified that they had always found him good-natured and correct, but considered his intellect somewhat below the average grade. A few months subsequently he died in jail of consumption. Regarded from the ordinary moral stand-points, this was a strange, an unaccountable, a monstrous act, and we are unable to take the first step towards a solution of the mystery. Looking, however, at the material conditions of his affections, his propensities, his impulses,—his cerebral dynamics,—we get a clew, at least, to the secret. His father was an habitual drunkard, and a frequent inmate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... but become a teacher and benefactor of his kindred races; and become an agent in carrying civilization and Christianity to a benighted continent. That any one will be turned aside from so noble a mission by the delusive dream of conquest and empire in the Western Hemisphere is an absurdity too monstrous and mischievous to be believed. Yet 'the Committee's Report' was accepted, and adopted, and endorsed by a 'National Convention;' and is published and sent ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... little. So even William—Uncle William—regarded this monstrous thing as an insignificant matter of everyday experience. Maybe he expected it to occur frequently—every night, or so. Doubtless he did expect it to occur every night, or so. Indeed! Very well. As if she were going to show now ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... if the fellow be a knave, Provided that the razors shave; It certainly will be a monstrous prize." So home the clown, with his good fortune, went, Smiling in heart and soul, content, And quickly soaped himself ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... ceased to smile; Assured that fluent speech and flow'ry vest Disguised the troubles of a man distress'd; - But now our Quacks are gamesters, and they play With craft and skill to ruin and betray; With monstrous promise they delude the mind, And thrive on all that tortures human-kind. Void of all honour, avaricious, rash, The daring tribe compound their boasted trash - Tincture of syrup, lotion, drop, or pill; All tempt the ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... good night here, Hartley,"—the Banker's voice was unnatural and wavering. "I can't discuss it with you. It's got to be proved," he spoke more heatedly. "What have you got? Only the word of a stinking native. I tell you it's monstrous." He stopped and clutched Hartley's arm, and seemed as though ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... of the head by his good fortune. He imagined that because he was monstrous he was great. That made him arrogant and presumptuous. He, too, loved Zoe. Thus it came about that a rivalry was established between Sampey and the Wild Man of Milo. How was it with Zoe? Which loved she?—or loved she either? Observing and reflecting, she dreamed. As it was eyes only that she saw, ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, and YOU, and THEY, are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally devoid of the ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... infidelity—was quite a familiar one; and that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the Italian Commedia ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the seven league boots, the way you get over ground. And just after I've gone and made away with a monstrous supper, too," he managed to say, between gasps. "Let me get my breath, and I've got something to ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... are at last, and I'm deuced glad of it. It's perfectly monstrous you fellows haven't better horses. You ought to make me remount agent, and I'd show you the sort of horses that ought to be bought for police service. Let me have a glass of beer, that's a good fellow, before I'm locked up. I suppose there's no tap ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... Chick 'How very monstrous! Misanthrope, is the word I want. The idea! Misplaced affection! I say, if any misanthrope were to put, in my presence, the question "Why were we born?" I should reply, "To make ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... his release each day in some novel manner. Each morning I looked abroad from my window on arising, more than likely detecting his outstretched form on the walk below, patiently awaiting my appearance, and each night I was liable to dreams of his coming upon me, a monstrous creature, sad-faced but eager, tireless, resolute, determined to ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... about with strawe, and tow, they closely hide: And caryed to some mountaines top, being all with fire light, They hurle it downe with violence, when darke appeares the night: Resembling much the Sunne, that from the heavens downe should fal, A straunge and monstrous sight it seemes, and fearfull to them all; But they suppose their mischiefes all are likewise throwne to hell, And that from harmes and daungers now, in ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... about three and one-third millions of them now. Say they are worth, old and young, large and little, one thousand dollars a head—monstrous thing, to put a price upon a human head, but suppose it. It would amount to but a few billions of dollars. What would a war cost between these two sections? Perhaps a million dollars a day! How much ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... seeing Ghatotkacha and his followers scatter in different directions and seeing those vow-observing great rishis, of ascetic wealth, viz.; Lomasa and the rest, away for bathing and collecting flowers, assumed a different form, gigantic and monstrous and frightful; and having secured all the arms (of the Pandavas) as also Draupadi, that wicked one fled away taking the three Pandavas. Thereupon that son of Pandu, Sahadeva, extricated himself with exertion, and by force snatched the sword ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Profession, or indulged Arrogance of Temper) with his violent Introduction of anti-dramatick Rope and Wire-dancing, Tumbling, and Fire-eating, to the visible Degradation of a liberal Stage, whereon nothing mean, shocking, or monstrous, should ever appear; he hath not succeeded so well: Then, his Scheme of uniting an Academy, for the sober regular Education of Youth, with a publick Theatre, seemed rather the feverish Delusion of a distempered Brain, ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
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