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More "Portentous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... judgment. In the "Tuba mirum" the spirit of the music changes from the church form to the secular. It is written for solo voices, ending in a quartet. The bass begins with the "Tuba mirum," set to a portentous trombone accompaniment; then follow the tenor ("Mors stupebit"), the alto ("Judex ergo"), and the soprano ("Quid sum miser"). This number is particularly remarkable for the manner in which the music is shaded down from the almost supernatural character of the opening ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... to be one of the most extraordinary in the annals of the Maison Vauquer. Hitherto the most startling occurrence in its tranquil existence had been the portentous, meteor-like apparition of the sham Comtesse de l'Ambermesnil. But the catastrophes of this great day were to cast all previous events into the shade, and supply an inexhaustible topic of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her boarders ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... came the notorious Dr. Oates, rustling in the full silken canonicals of priesthood, for ... he affected no small dignity of exterior decoration and deportment.... His exterior was portentous. A fleece of white periwig showed a most uncouth visage, of great length, having the mouth ... placed in the very centre of the countenance, and exhibiting to the astonished spectator as much chin below as there was nose ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... "Peace," commanded Democrates, with portentous gravity, "justice first, mercy later. Do you solemnly swear you heard Phormio call ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... crumbling into whiteness, the furious into the obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind under a catafalque—such is the snowstorm. Underneath trembles the ocean, forming and re-forming over portentous ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... himself, were men who were secretly endeavouring to make political capital of that new and immense motive power, that not yet available, and not very easily organised political power which was already beginning to move the masses here then, and already threatening, to the observant eye, with its portentous movement, the foundations of tyranny, the fact, too, that these men were understood to have made use of the stage unsuccessfully as a means of immediate political effect, are facts which lie on the surface of the history of these works, and unimportant as ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... months could not be utilized to much effect by the South. Worn in resources, supplies—in everything but patient endurance, she still came forth from the dark doubts the winter had raised, hopeful, if not confident; calm, if conscious of the portentous clouds lowering ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Grandlieus of the elder branch. More than once he took particular interest in the family's affairs. He employed Corentin to clear up the dark side of the life of Clotilde's fiance. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.] Some time before this M. de Chaulieu made one of the portentous conclave assembled to extricate Mme. de Langeais, a relative of the Grandlieus, from a ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... Then in deep portentous tones she said: "I came down to pay a surprise visit to your cats' home. I always do. It's the only way I can make sure that the poor dear things are receiving proper treatment." The frown on her face grew rhadamanthine. "And last night I saw your Uncle Maurice at the station—he did not see me—with ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... certainly forbidding. He perched in grim, expectant silence on the edge of his chair, waiting, watching. His lean face had the blue-white look of the much-shaven actor, and his manner was as portentous as ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... the main! Tis the vex'd billows, that insurgent rave, Their white foam silvers yonder distant wave, Tis not his sails! thy husband comes no more! His bones now whiten an accursed shore!— Retire,—for hark! the seagull shrieking soars, The lurid atmosphere portentous lours; Night's sullen spirit groans in every gale, And o'er the waters draws the darkling veil, Sighs in thy hair, and chills thy throbbing breast— Go wretched mourner!—weep thy griefs to rest! "Yet, though through life is lost each fond delight, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... success of the play; in fact the book is greater than the play. A portentous clash of dominant personalities that form the essence of the play are necessarily touched upon but briefly in the short space of four acts. All this is narrated in the novel with a wealth of fascinating and absorbing detail, making ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... up to the climax. But at the end of the seventh, with the score tied six and six, with daring steals, hard hits and splendid plays, enough to have made memorable several games, it seemed that the great portentous moment ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... research and skill in discussion first appeared in his "Pensees sur la Comete." In December, 1680, a comet had appeared, and the public yet trembled at a portentous meteor, which they still imagined was connected with some forthcoming and terrible event! Persons as curious as they were terrified teased Bayle by their inquiries, but resisted all his arguments. They found many things more than arguments in his amusing volumes: "I am not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... an end, the footman ventured to knock, and ask if the master wanted lights. He replied that he had lit the candles for himself. No smell of tobacco smoke came from the room; and he had let the day pass without going to the laboratory. These were portentous signs. The footman said to his fellow servants, "There's something wrong." The women looked at each other in vague terror. One of them said, "Hadn't we better give notice to leave?" And the other whispered a question: "Do you ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... and a tall, slender, childish figure in a white smock, slipped in and closed it gently behind him. Tony stole up to his father and stood between his knees. He looked at Ian, silent, pale, large-eyed. That a grown-up person and a man should shed tears was strange, even portentous, to him. ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... appearance of the comet: "I stand unshaken prepared for everything, seeking my help in God." He heard without alarm, how people in one place were terrified by monstrous births, and how in another reports were afloat concerning portentous signs, a shield and banner seen in the sky; ships manned by spirit-warriors crossing Lake Luzern; and the shooting of guns by night, that wakened from slumber the neighbors on the Reuss. Ulric Meier, vogt of Schenkenberg, ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... position of many members of the present Parliament, shortly before the opening of this session, when, on a sudden, rumours of some intended change began to spread themselves abroad. An era of conversion had commenced. In one and the same night, some portentous dream descended upon the pillows of the Whig leaders, and whispered that the hour was come. By miraculous coincidence—co-operation being studiously ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Upon the Louisiana Purchase, I have already touched; but not upon its diplomatic side. In those years the European game of diplomacy was truly portentous. Bonaparte had appeared, and Bonaparte was the storm centre. From the heap of jackstraws I shall lift out only that which directly concerns us and our acquisition of that enormous territory, then called Louisiana. Bonaparte had dreamed and planned an empire over here. Certain vicissitudes disenchanted ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... instantly to his palace. Trembling for their lives from the suddenness of the summons, and from the unseasonable hour, and scarcely doubting that by some anonymous delator they have been implicated as parties to a conspiracy, they hurry to the palace—are received in portentous silence by the ushers and pages in attendance—are conducted to a saloon, where (as in every where else) the silence of night prevails, united with the silence of fear and whispering expectation. All are seated—all look at each other ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Desjardins's earliest essays, strikes the note of his life and writings at a time when he himself was unconscious of its portentous meaning to his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... lay in working up to a dramatic climax dramatically. He didn't understand the hurried leaps and bounds by which you took the tragic on the skip, as if it were not portentous. In his response to Miss Walbrook there was a hint of irritation, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Mr. Skryme is accustomed to say, "may go star-gazing, and look for conjunctions in the heavens, but here is a conjunction on the earth, near at home and under our own eyes, which surpasses all the signs and calculations of astrologers." Since these portentous weathercocks have thus laid their heads together, wonderful events had already occurred. The good old king, notwithstanding that he had lived eighty-two years, had all at once given up the ghost; another king had mounted the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... woman into whose charge he had been given was seized with the plague and died the same day, whereupon his mother took him home with her. The first of his bodily ailments,—the catalogue of the same which he subsequently gives is indeed a portentous one,[13]—was an eruption of carbuncles on the face in the form of a cross, one of the sores being set on the tip of the nose; and when these disappeared, swellings came. Before the boy was two months old his godfather, Isidore di Resta of Ticino, gave him into the care of another nurse ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... instance. If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... was amazing and portentous and full of horrible phenomena, according to White, with a peculiar haze or smoky fog prevailing for many weeks. 'The sun at noon looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... have lost their grip on the masses who are rapidly slipping into a religious chaos. The universal disintegration of creeds, strangely combined with a secret thirst for truth and unity now sweeps the English-speaking world. Are not these portentous events that manifest, as "The stirring of the waters," the movement of the ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... in a nook, An' at his lordship steal't a look, Like some portentous omen; Except good sense and social glee, An' (what surpris'd me) modesty, I marked ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... illustrious orators of the Left, interspersed with caricatures at the expense of the Government; but he looked more particularly at the door of the sanctuary where, no doubt, the paper was elaborated, the witty paper that amused him daily, and enjoyed the privilege of ridiculing kings and the most portentous events, of calling anything and everything in question with a jest. Then he sauntered along the boulevards. It was an entirely novel amusement; and so agreeable did he find it, that, looking at the turret clocks, he saw the hour hands were ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... faces, all turned toward the same object but with expressions subtly various, I spent my days, studying them all, and finding (here has been nature's consolation to me) relief from my own thoughts in an investigation of the mind of others. The portentous pretence on which we were engaged needed perhaps a god to laugh at it, but the smaller points were within the sphere of human ridicule; with them there was no danger of amusement suffering a sudden death, ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... upon Statius observes, every thing great and noble was looked upon as Cyclopian: [570]quicquid magnitudine sua nobile est, Cyclopum manu dicitur fabricatum. Nor was this a fiction, as may be surmised; for they were in great measure the real architects. And if, in the room of those portentous beings the Cyclopes, [Greek: Kuklopes], we substitute a colony of people called Cyclopians, we shall find the whole to be true, which is attributed to them; and a new field of history will be opened, that was before unknown. They were, undoubtedly, a part of the people styled Academians, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... meeting was a very solemn and portentous one. He had studied the question long and deeply—not from the standpoint of his own mere individual feelings and judgment, but from that of fair Constitutional construction, as interpreted by the light of Natural or General Law and right reason. What ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... away, plodding along the pavement heavily, huge and portentous. The back of his head bulged above the collar, with no show of neck between. He was comical and pathetic; he seemed too vast in mere flesh to be the sport of a thing so freakish as luck. To think that such a bulk had a weak heart in it—and that deeper still in its ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... short, he had fallen in love with Ida de la Molle when he first saw her five years ago, and was now in the process of discovering the fact. There he sat in his chair in the old half-furnished room, which he proposed to turn into his dining-room, and groaned in spirit over this portentous discovery. What had become of his fair prospect of quiet years sloping gently downwards, and warm with the sweet drowsy light of afternoon? How was it that he had not known those things that belonged to his peace? And ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... Italy (145-207). Anchises owns his mistake, and recalls how Cassandra had in other days been mocked for prophesying that Troy should eventually be transplanted to Italy (208-225). Landing in the Strophades, they unwittingly wrong the Harpies, whose queen Celaeno thereupon threatens them with a portentous famine. Panic-stricken, they coast along to Actium, where they celebrate their national games and leave a defiance to the Greeks (226-342). At Buthrotum they find Helenus and Andromache in possession of the kingdom of Pyrrhus, and by them are entertained awhile and sent upon their way with ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later on the salt-white sand in face of orthography and the sun appeared these portentous letters: ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... but little (by "we" I mean the freshmen of our year) from those who have lately appeared for the first time in King's Parade, or Jesus Lane. We were very young—we imagined Proctors to be destitute of human feeling; we ate portentous breakfasts of many courses, and, for the most part, treated our allowances as though they had been so much pocket-money. Also we had an idea that a man who had passed his thirtieth year was absurdly old, and that nobody could be called a boy whose ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... precipitated the ruin of the Confederate cause; yet we must in candor admit that the situation was becoming so portentous that human wisdom might be overtaxed in trying to determine what course to take. Of one thing there is no shadow of doubt. We of the National Army in Georgia regarded the removal of Johnston as equivalent to a victory for us. Three months ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... I did indeed blanch when that portentous word was uttered in conjunction with my darling's name. Mr. Sheldon leant a little further across the table, and his hard black eyes penetrated a little deeper into the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... circumstances, moreover, which coupled with late events, gave an unearthly and portentous character to the mania of the rider, and to the capabilities of the steed. The space passed over in a single leap had been accurately measured, and was found to exceed, by an astounding difference, the wildest expectations of the most ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to surround and capture these floating boats, though, to their great disappointment, the prize usually proved empty. On one occasion they tried a still profounder strategy; for an officer visiting the pickets after midnight, and hearing in the stillness a portentous snore from the end of the causeway (our most important station), straightway hurried to the point of danger, with wrath in his soul. But the sergeant of the squad came out to meet him, imploring silence, and ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... amusement at all, particularly if triflings bring serious thoughts in their train and frivolous matters are so treated that a reader not altogether devoid of perception wins more profit from these than from the glittering and portentous arguments of certain persons—as when for instance one man eulogizes rhetoric or philosophy in a painfully stitched-together oration, another rehearses the praises of some prince, another urges us to begin a war with the Turks, another foretells the future, and another proposes a new method ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Beholding the forest burning in innumerable places and Krishna also ready to smite them down with his weapons, they all set up a frightful roar. With that terrible clamour as also with the roar of fire, the whole welkin resounded, as it were, with the voice of portentous clouds. Kesava of dark hue and mighty arms, in order to compass their destruction, hurled at them his large and fierce discus resplendent with its own energy. The forest-dwellers including the Danavas and the Rakshasas, afflicted ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... had to be summoned home: and after his departure, Conon, in alliance with Pharnabazus, recovered the supremacy of the sea for Athens, and greatly weakened Spartan influence in Asia. Not content with this result, the two friends, in the year B.C. 393, sailed across the Egean, and the portentous spectacle of a Persian fleet in Greek waters was once more seen—this time in alliance with Athens! Descents were made upon the coasts of the Peloponnese, and the island of Cythera was seized and occupied. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... of you to say that the fourteen pages of good advice did not bore you. Can it have been that you did not read them? No Dean—and perhaps no don—who has been in that portentous position as long as I have can fail to become a perennial stream of advice. It is the Nemesis of those who have all their lives been treated with more respect than they have deserved. I am the only exception with which ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... the populace. They awaited, in throngs, an appointed signal. In the steeple of the State House was a bell, imported twenty-three years previously from London by the Provincial Assembly of Pennsylvania. It bore the portentous text from Scripture: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof." A joyous peal from that bell gave notice that the bill had been passed. It was the ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... perhaps the lightest-hearted, lightest-handed man still pouring out fragments of pearl and spangles of pure gold on the stage.... With all this it is remarkable as it is unfair, that among musicians—when talk is going around, and this person praises that portentous piece of counterpoint, and the other analyzes some new chord the uoliness of which has led to its being neglected by former composers—the name of this brilliant man is hardly if ever heard at all. His is the next name among the composers belonging to the last thirty years which ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... We boys felt something portentous in the scene. The Captain grew uncomfortable, too, no longer laughing heartily or joining in our talk. He kept his eyes on the sky, and smoked pipe ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... laugh at the portentous glare of a comet, and hear a crow with equal tranquillity from the right or left, will yet talk of times and situations proper for intellectual performances,' &c. The Idler, No. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... it had been rapidly growing dark, and the gloom at length increased so much, that the speakers could scarcely see each other's faces. The sudden and portentous darkness was accounted for by a vivid flash of lightning, followed by a low growl of thunder rumbling over Whalley Nab. The mother and daughter drew close together, and Mistress Nutter passed her arm round ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... genius loci weary of the solemn silence in his awful mountains, and we chatted carelessly of the sights animate and inanimate before us, laughing at the asseverations of the salesmen, and at the hardened scepticism of the customer, at the portentous dignity of the superb old messenger, white-bearded and clad in scarlet and gold, as he bombastically described to the knot of poor relations and admirers that elbowed him the splendours of the last entertainment at "Peterhof," where Lord Lytton still reigned. I smiled, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... a small oaken bookstand which stood slightly in advance of the more imposing shelves in which reposed the portentous volumes of newspaper clippings and photographs which ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... Lord omnipotent foretold to Phoebus, Phoebus Apollo to me, I eldest born of the Furies reveal to you. Italy is your goal; wooing the winds you shall go to Italy, and enter her harbours unhindered. Yet shall you not wall round your ordained city, ere this murderous outrage on us compel you, in portentous hunger, to eat your tables ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... awesome name to Penrod Schofield and Samuel Williams. Even Herman and Verman, though lacking many educational advantages on account of a long residence in the country, were informed on the subject of Rena Magsworth through hearsay, and they joined in the portentous silence. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... he stood leaning upon the railing. With his eyes on the blossoming locust tree, he waited, in helpless patience, for the words to enter into his thoughts and to readjust his conceptions of the last few months. There slowly came to him, as he recognized the portentous gravity in the air about him, something of the significance of that ringing call; and as he stood there he saw before him the vision of an army led by strangers against the people of its blood—of an army wasting the soil it loved, warring for an alien right against the convictions ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... reserved for his old age; and, during the many years which I knew him, he never lacked invention or laboriousness. From the very first moment he had attracted me very much: even his residence, strange and portentous, was highly charming to me. In the old castle Pleissenburg, at the right-hand corner, one ascended a repaired, cheerful, winding staircase. The saloons of the Academy of Design, of which he was director, were found to the left, and were light ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... with her, did he seem to be anxious about, or even attentive to, what she was thinking of him. And the completeness of his egoism called from her egoism respect, as she was forced to realize that he possessed certain of her own qualities, but exaggerated, made portentous, brilliant, mysterious, by something in his temperament which had been left out of hers, something perhaps racial which must be for ever denied ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Swiveller, with a portentous frown. ''Tis well. Marchioness!—but no matter. Some wine there. Ho!' He illustrated these melodramatic morsels by handing the tankard to himself with great humility, receiving it haughtily, drinking from it thirstily, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... danger. And yet Mrs. Bassett was outwardly friendly, and she privately counseled Marian, quite unnecessarily, to be "nice" to Sylvia. On the same evening Mrs. Bassett was disagreeably impressed by Harwood's obvious rubrication in Mrs. Owen's good books. It seemed darkly portentous that Dan was, at Mrs. Owen's instigation, managing Sylvia's business affairs; she must warn her husband against this employment of his secretary to strengthen the ties between Mrs. Owen and ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... Martha happened to have her handkerchief in her hand, and stuffed it into her mouth so tightly that she came near suffocating. Judge Owen still stood in the doorway, his face judicially severe and portentous, as if he felt that some awful desecration had been committed, for which the full severity of the criminal law could scarcely be ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the better for living on fraud, Lady Rose, and I don't believe you have any right to drop the case. You have to think of Sir David's good name and of his wishes. The will you are suffering from was a portentous wrong." ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... road in the gray of a morning overcast with clouds and portentous of a storm. At the last moment, their host, with an eye upon the weather (and another upon Markham's hidden wallet), had sought to keep them until the skies were more propitious. But they were not to be dissuaded and trudged off briskly, Monsieur Duchanel and Madam Bordier accompanying them ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... it was judged that the furthest could not have been many miles distant. In some they imagined they could trace the spiral motion of the water as it was drawn up to the clouds, which were every moment being augmented in their portentous darkness. The sense of personal danger, Mr Ellis confesses, and the certainty of instant destruction if brought within their vortex, prevented a very careful observation of their ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... dark-skinned girls, on their knees in a corner, were gathering together the shirts and stockings destined for the parental traveling-bag. Garcia, for his part, was occupied in cleaning with a bit of rag a portentous, long-barreled carbine, apparently dating back to the time of Pizarro, which he had been exhibiting during the day as his hunting rifle, and which he intended to carry along ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Egypt—which was a long way from Brittany—or by anointing themselves with the blood of a Christian child. Blood gushed out of the body of every Cagot on Good Friday. No wonder, if they were of Jewish descent. It was the only way of accounting for so portentous a fact. Again; the Cagots were capital carpenters, which gave the Bretons every reason to believe that their ancestors were the very Jews who made the cross. When first the tide of emigration set from Brittany to America, the oppressed Cagots crowded to the ports, ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell
... to dream of Elks, But always thought portentous of Success, Of happy Life, and Victories in War, Or fortune good when we ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... and mental energies of this nation,—that it is depraving our morals, and destroying the public conscience,—and that it is causing an amazing waste of property, and health and life. I ask every patriot to look at this portentous evil. Every true patriot, who will examine the length, breadth, and depth of this evil, cannot but feel that it claims his attention. And he will enquire what efforts, what sacrifices, can deliver us from the curses of this narcotic? The answer to this inquiry is an easy ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... Wiggs's Good Day. The legend of it was handed down for years afterwards in Euralia. It got into all the Calendars—July 20th it was—marked with a red star; in Roger's portentous volumes it had a chapter devoted to it. There was some talk about it being made into a public holiday, he tells us, but this fell through. Euralian mothers used to scold their naughty children with the words, ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... spoke, his extraordinary voice ran over half a dozen notes of portentous depth, like the opening of a fugue on the pedals of an organ. Unorna ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... or tempt the Irish peasant to violate the law, especially when sanctioned, in that violation, by those whose opinion and advice he takes as the standard of his conduct. Be this as it may, the state of the country was now becoming frightful and portentous; and although there had not, as yet, been much blood shed, still there was no person acquainted with the extraordinary pains which were taken to excite the people against the payment of tithe, who was not able to anticipate the ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Moreover, portentous as the numbers appear to us, they are small compared with those which represented Henry's ruthless severity after the Northern Rising, when the whole country was covered with gibbets, and with those of Elizabeth's victims who were hanged, cut ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... his old woman, in a portentous bonnet, beneath whose gay yellow ribbons appeared a dusky old face, wrinkled like a ship's timbers, out of which looked a pair of keen black eyes, where the best beauty, that of loving-kindness, had not ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... little solemnity-without even a room prepared and empty—to go through a business of such portentous seriousness!— 'Tis truly amazing from a man who seemed to delight so much in religious regulations and observances. Dr. Fisher himself was dissatisfied, and wondered at his compliance, though he attributed the plan to the ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... almost touching the ship, when the whirling waves round its base made us oscillate from side to side, the Josephine, heeling over to her chain-plates from a sudden rush of wind that appeared to accompany it, the portentous column of vapour darted off almost at right angles to its former course; and then, the cloud, having taken up more of the sea-water than it could contain, burst with a loud hissing sort of report, ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... finger on hushed lips; when deliberately, without haste the great white flakes zigzagged down from the soft gray above, obscuring and softening the landscape, rendering dear and mysterious the commonest things. Then sounds came, subdued as in a sanctuary, and people approaching showed portentous as through a mist, and the boys, looking upward, caught big wet flakes on their lashes as they tried in vain to determine the point at which the snowflakes became visible. There existed no such point. The snowflakes ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... of the renowned Hudibras was portentous, as we learn from Butler, who thus describes ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... refreshing fragrance to the air, and they rested the longer, as Mrs. Shortridge seemed worn out with the heat. Lady Mabel seized the occasion to add some new plants to her hortus siccus, which, now swollen to a portentous bulk, occupied the highest place in the load of one of the mules. As she wandered from one cluster of plants to another, her voice rose into a tuneful strain. L'Isle followed her with eye and ear, as imprisoned Palamon ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... masses of clouds, heavy and black, were piled in the western sky, fringed here and there by an angry red, and torn by vivid streams of lightning. Not a breath of wind shook the leaves or stirred the high, rank grass by the water-side; a portentous and awful stillness filled the air,—the stillness felt by nature before a devastating storm. Quiet, with the like awful and portentous calm, the black regiment, headed by its young, fair-haired, knightly colonel, marched to ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... own fault if a blessing be not extorted ere they take their flight. Principles, like those which in the earlier days of the republic elevated men into statesmen, are now again in the field, chasing the policies which have dwarfed their sons into politicians. These things are portentous of change,—perhaps ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... is, that soon after my arrival at the cottage there had occurred to myself an incident so entirely inexplicable, and which had in it so much of the portentous character, that I might well have been excused for regarding it as an omen. It appalled, and at the same time so confounded and bewildered me, that many days elapsed before I could make up my mind to communicate ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... daily increased. On the twenty-ninth day of the month the stock had sunk to one hundred and fifty; several eminent goldsmiths and bankers, who had lent great sums upon it, were obliged to stop payment and abscond. The ebb of this portentous tide was so violent, that it bore down everything in its way; and an infinite number of families were overwhelmed with ruin. Public credit sustained a terrible shock; the nation was thrown into a dangerous ferment; and nothing was heard but the ravings of grief, disappointment, and despair. Some ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... It is portentous, and a thing of state That here at midnight, in our little town, A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, Near the old ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... of Tegea, many years elapsed before the Lacedaemonians sustained a defeat. At length a calamity befel them which astonished all their neighbours. A division of the army of Agesilaus was cut off and destroyed almost to a man; and this exploit, which seemed almost portentous to the Greeks of that age, was achieved by Iphicrates, at the head of a body of mercenary light infantry. But it was from the day of Leuctya that the fall of Spate became rapid and violent. Some time before that day the Thebans had resolved to follow the example set many years ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the full measure of his base rage, and her face grew pale and set. "You're making a perfect fool of yourself, Cliff," she said, with portentous calmness. ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... portentous signalling that went on night after night could resuscitate our faith in the Military. An age ago the Magersfontein misfortune had put off indefinitely the long-expected succour. We had been made to feel our ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... time to suggest a more active treatment should the course first tried prove unsatisfactory. Who can be surprised that the earlier apologists should have felt thus in the presence of an enemy whose novelty made him appear more portentous than he can ever seem to ourselves? They were bound to venture nothing rashly; what they did they did, for their own age, thoroughly; we owe it to their cautious pioneering that we so know the weakness of our opponents and our own strength as to be able to do fearlessly ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... old legends of what the Thames was in ancient times, when the Patent Shot Manufactory wasn't built, and Waterloo-bridge had never been thought of; and then they would shake their heads with portentous looks, to the deep edification of the rising generation of heavers, who crowded round them, and wondered where all this would end; whereat the tailor would take his pipe solemnly from his mouth, and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... to the chief editor for acceptance, alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the display of parcels, packets, and envelopes, large and small, spread out on the side-table in his sitting-room was simply portentous; for the fashionable world of London had had no intimation yet that their favorite singer was ill-disposed towards them, and had even at times formed sullen resolutions of withdrawing altogether from their brilliant rooms. As he quite indifferently ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... as, on rising of his esteemed colleague, he hastily passed out. Example again contagious; Benches emptied; but ELLIS ASHMEAD pounded along. There was the speech reproachfully facing him in its portentous-printed length; must be reeled off, though the glass roof fell. Did it at last; sat down, flushed, and triumphant. Members, warily assuring themselves speech really finished, began to stream back again, till all the Benches filled to hear ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... did not move from his semi-recumbent position as he uttered this alarming threat, but he accompanied it with a portentous frown and an ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... the world. So it was in France. Despotism and License, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed hopes and terror, that agonizing travail and that portentous birth. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... god in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving more and more to subdue it under his feet? Did not the Ancients, in their wise, perennially significant way, figure Nature itself, their sacred All, or Pan, as a portentous commingling of these two discords; as musical, humane, oracular in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven hairy feet of a goat? The union of melodious, celestial Freewill and Reason, with foul Irrationality and Lust; in which, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... rose and moved down the car, oscillating heavily, steadying himself with his gold-headed cane, and got out in front of a portentous mansion, Andrew would scarcely have recognized the look in his own eyes had he seen himself in ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... correspondence. It is also certain to develop and extend. But its main significance is twofold: as a sign of China's awakening and as an innovation, the certain effect of which will be to weaken national unity and extend regionalism at its expense. From this point of view the reform is portentous. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... parallel in nobility these two letters, which were exchanged between a comprehensive intellect such as Garve and one of the most portentous geniuses of the world, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... in nowise remote; but close, evident almost to the point of alarm. It looked out from the wasted face, at once—to her seeing—exquisite and austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal, unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of impending portentous adventure. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... his chair. In the unlit room the figure of his master seemed to have assumed a portentous, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... persiflage, perspicacious, perspicuity, pertinacious, pharmaceutic, phenomenal, phlegmatic, phraseology, pictorial, piquant, pique, plagiarize, platitudinous, platonic, plebeian, plenipotentiary, plethora, pneumatic, poignant, polity, poltroon, polyglot, pontifical, portentous, posterior, posthumous, potent, potential, pragmatic, preamble, precarious, precocious, precursor, predatory, predestination, predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, presentiment, primogeniture, probation, probity, proclivity, procrastinate, prodigal, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... office at the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty. The nation would have deserted them, and Parliament would have deserted them, too; neither would have endured to see a secret negotiation, on which depended the portentous alternative of war or peace, in the hands of a person who was thought to be weak—who had been promoted because of his mediocrity—whom his own friends did not respect. A Ministerial government, too, is carried on in the face of day. Its life ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... a portentous character, which seemed to threaten a prolongation of this controversy, when his companion, who had been looking sharply at the old man, put a ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... He fell, less from disapproval of his policy, than from rude prejudice against his country. The flow of angry emotion had not subsided before the whisper of strife in the American colonies began to trouble the air; and before that had waxed loud, the Middlesex election had blown into a portentous hurricane. This was the first great constitutional case after Burke came into the House of Commons. As, moreover, it became a leading element in the crisis which was the occasion of Burke's first remarkable ...
— Burke • John Morley
... theatrical grandeur of Napoleon, the severe dignity of Cromwell, are strangely contrasted by a frequent, nor always seasonable buffoonery, which it is hard to reconcile with the ideal of their characters, or the gloomy and portentous interest of their careers. And this, equally a trait in the temperament of Rienzi, distinguished his hours of relaxation, and contributed to that marvellous versatility with which his harder nature ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Three white-clad figures were standing in the bows of the superstructure, examining the open space through binoculars; and as Lethbridge waved his handkerchief they waved in return, while one—the smallest—was seen to run excitedly aft and dart into the pilot-house. The savages also saw the portentous apparition, and fled, howling with abject terror, to the shelter of their huts; while the Flying Fish, sweeping gracefully round, came to earth within a few feet of the spot where the four white men stood awaiting her arrival. A ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... "The portentous purchase by the civic authorities of Mr. Whistler's senile Carlyle renders it necessary for that section of the community who are not enamoured of Impressionism to watch with some vigilance the next steps taken by that body towards the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... no conflagration, no fuss, no searching of the passengers, no whisper of what had happened in the air; instead of a stir there was portentous peace; and it was clear to me that Raffles was not a little disturbed at the falsification of all his predictions. There was something sinister in silence under such a loss, and the silence was sustained for hours during ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... bird of night did sit, Even at noon-day, upon the market-place, Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies Do so conjointly meet, let not men say, 'These are their reasons—they are natural; For, I believe, they are portentous things." ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... did rushing come. Scarce could they hear, or see their foes, Until at weapon-point they close. They close in clouds of smoke and dust, With sword-sway and with lance's thrust; And such a yell was there Of sudden and portentous birth, As if men fought upon the earth And fiends in upper air; O life and death were in the shout, Recoil and rally, charge and rout, And triumph and despair. Long looked the anxious squires; their eye Could in ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... arms the human bodies passing into long snaky bodies coiled together. A single pair of wings was divided between the two outermost of the three beings, while snakes' heads, growing out of the human bodies, rendered the aspect of the group still more portentous. The center of the pediment was probably occupied by a figure of Zeus, hurling his thunderbolt at this strange enemy. We have therefore here a scene from one of the favorite subjects of Greek art at all periods—the gigantomachy, ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... papers with nervous hand. Gray impulsively stepped forward, his eyes kindling with hope. It was on the tip of his tongue to launch into a proffer of his own services for the detail, but Gordon hastily warned him back with a sweep of the hand and a portentous scowl. ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... elevation of the neck behind, a bolder protrusion of the front, and the increased perpendicular of the profile. To this conception Parrhasius fixed a maximum; that point from which descends the ultimate line of celestial beauty, the angle within which moves what is inferior, beyond which what is portentous. From the head conclude to the proportions of the neck, the limbs, the extremities; from the Father to the race of gods; all, the sons of one, Zeus; derived from one source of tradition, Homer; formed by one artist, Phidias; on him measured ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... as you can, and meet Simms who is coming up with Mrs. Brewster. Send Simms and the men on to help us, but you three women take Jeb and go right on down. There's a forest fire." Mr. Brewster added the last portentous words in an ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Marcellus, or Darius. The map of the United States was just about to bloom forth with towns named Ithaca and Syracuse, Corinth and Sparta; and on the Ohio River, opposite the mouth of Licking Creek, a city had lately been founded, the name of which was truly portentous. "Losantiville" was this wonderful compound, in which the initial L stood for "Licking," while os signified "mouth," anti "opposite," and ville "town;" and the whole read backwards as "Town-opposite-mouth-of-Licking." In 1790 General St. ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... will earnestly strive to hold up the glass of the constantly shifting times before you, that you may be enabled to see the flitting shadows of the hour as they pass across it, grave or gay, portentous or hopeful, draped in solid political vesture, the toga of the statesman, or robed in the blue gossamer of metaphysics, in the drapery of sorrow or light hues of joy, in the tried armor of the Divine, or the dubious motley of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... would have proved amusing to the bloods of that day, and merely incredible to those of the present time. There was an unnecessary twopence for the ferry—admitting the whole business to have been unnecessary. There was sixpence for a meal, consisting of tea and a portentous allowance of scones with butter. There was threepence for a packet of cigarettes ('colonial' tobacco), the first I had ever smoked, and a purchase which had actually been decided upon some days previously. Finally, there was fourpence ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... Carrie Amelia Nation, but having noticed from old records that her father wrote the first name "Carry," she now does the same, and considers the name portentous as concerns what she is trying and means to do. She believes, she says, that it is her mission to "carry a nation" from the darkness of drunken bestiality into the light of purity and sobriety; and if she can do this, or in any great measure contribute ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... and supports his family on the remaining five cents. Among the educated classes the men are beginning to refuse to permit their wives and daughters to attend the confessional, the most subtle and portentous agency for evil that was ever invented, which has contaminated more innocence and destroyed more domestic happiness than any other ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... the point of alarm. It looked out from the wasted face, at once—to her seeing—exquisite and austere, reaching forward, keenly curious of all death should reveal, unmoved, yet instinct with the brilliance, the mirthfulness even, of impending portentous adventure. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... to be both admired and feared, and this incident took its place in Wall Street history as a brilliant coup side by side with Vanderbilt's Harlem Railroad and other celebrated exploits. It was soon followed, however, by much more sensational events. We have seen that the portentous figure of Vanderbilt was just at this time looming up in the railroad world, and Vanderbilt had his own theory of the management and financing of railroads. It was inevitable that he should clash ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... their conferences had been overheard and were now recalled, in which this expression of dislike had taken the form of threats, vague and purposeless, seemingly, at the time; but which now, taken in connection with what she gathered from the lips of the child, seemed of portentous interest. Then, when she understood that Stevens had sent a note in reply—and that both notes were sealed, the quick, feminine mind instantly ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... journals and periodicals and extending over a period of more than a quarter of a century, these opinions and reflections express the refined judgment of one who has seen, not as through a glass darkly, the trend of events. And having seen the portentous effigy that we are making of the Liberty our fathers created, he has written of it in English that is the despair of those who, thinking less clearly, escape not the pitfalls of diffuseness and obscurity. For Mr. Bierce, as did Flaubert, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the early age of twenty-six, having suddenly disappeared from Florence, leaving certain work unfinished. A strange portentous meteor in art. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Taft delegates went home to meditate on the fight which they had won and the more portentous fight which they must wage in the coming months on a broader field. The Roosevelt delegates, on the other hand, went out to Orchestra Hall, and in an exalted mood of passionate devotion to their cause and their beloved leader proceeded ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... The fires of the goddess burn! Now for the dance, the dance! Bring out the dance made public By Mana-mana-ia-kalu-e-a. 30 Turn about back, turn about face; Advance toward the sea; Advance toward the land, Toward the pit that is Pele's, Portentous consumer of rocks in Puna. 35 Pi and Pa chirp the cricket notes Of Pele at home in her ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... besides the three shamans. When at last news came that a woman had gone to see the wife of the chief penitent, and had heard from her that her husband was working, things began to look not only strange but portentous. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... the whole. Without this, no government, certainly not our government, is capable of a great war. None of the ancient regular governments have wherewithal to fight abroad with a foreign foe, and at home to overcome repining, reluctance, and chicane. It must be some portentous thing, like regicide France, that can exhibit such a prodigy. Yet even she, the mother of monsters, more prolific than the country of old called Ferax monstrorum, shows symptoms of being almost effete already; and she will be so, unless the fallow of a peace comes to recruit her fertility. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... and of the allied states," he said, "are you aware of a silent but portentous growth within the bosom of Hellas? (14) Few here need to be told that for size and importance Olynthus now stands at the head of the Thracian cities. But are you aware that the citizens of Olynthus had already brought over several states by the bribe of joint citizenship and ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... awfully intelligible, against the men and the measures that had brought England to the brink of ruin. The effect of this popular feeling soon showed itself in the upper regions. The country-gentlemen, those birds of political omen, whose migrations are so portentous of a change of weather, began to flock in numbers to the brightening quarter of Opposition; and at last, Lord North, after one or two signal defeats (in spite even of which the Court for some time clung to him, as the only hope ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... sweep down every unsheltered foe who was upon his feet, and to utterly fright the savages from their propriety. Beaujeu and a dozen more fell dead upon the spot, and the Indians already began to fly, their courage being unable to endure the unwonted tumult of such a portentous detonation. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... father proposed dropping a brass door-key down her back as the most efficacious of cures. Had she consented to this heroic treatment I might have been shunted into silence, but her prompt refusal to allow any one to do anything for her left diplomacy at its wit's end. In the portentous silence which followed I was able to repeat my question ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... to his new passion. With his comfortable fortune and good connections, the future seemed bright and possible enough as to circumstances. He knew that Argemone felt for him; how much it seemed presumptuous even to speculate, and as yet no golden-visaged meteor had arisen portentous in his amatory zodiac. No rich man had stepped in to snatch, in spite of all his own flocks and herds, at the poor man's own ewe- lamb, and set him barking at all the world, as many a poor lover has to do in defence of his morsel of enjoyment, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... others were to leave in the course of the day. Lady Maud had just said good-bye to a party of ten who were going off together, and she had not had a chance to speak to Margaret, who had come down late, after her manner. Most great singers are portentous sleepers. As for Logotheti, he always had coffee in his room wherever he was, he never appeared at breakfast, and he got rid of his important correspondence for the day ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression (which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family, owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins. Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... of limestone, for all the world like a decayed rampart of some ancient city. A wide floor of rock at its base made beautiful walking to a place where the lofty escarpment showed exposures of limestone underlying an enormous mass of dark sandstone, topped by tar-clay. It is a portentous cliff, bearing a curiously Eastern look, as if some great pyramid had been riven vertically, and the exposed surface scarred and scooped by the weather into a multitude of antic hollows, grotesque projections, and unimaginable shapes. Here, also, the knives of passers-by had carved numerous ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... full measure of his base rage, and her face grew pale and set. "You're making a perfect fool of yourself, Cliff," she said, with portentous calmness. ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... glade, saw the sky had become flecked with clouds that were scudding across the heavens, in a thousand fantastic waves, while just above the peak of the topmost hill over the lake, a black cloud, heavy and portentous with a gathering storm, was rising slowly, leaving a long streak of light unbroken cloud ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... accidental any morning on their doorstep, they don't ask where it comes from, but just put it down into their cellars. Sometimes information gets sworn before them, and they has to let the revenue people know, but somehow or other, I can't say how it is," and the fisherman gave a portentous wink, "our fellows generally get some sort of an idea that things ain't right, and the landing don't come off as expected; queer, ain't it? But that fellow Faulkner, he ain't like that. He worries hisself about the ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... blue. But Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least comprehend the rich and romantic irony of Stevenson's London stories. He actually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, that, 'though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me on the whole rather an irritating presence.' From this we are almost driven to believe (though desperately and against our will) ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... was merely a handsome girl, with a strong vein of originality. I began to doubt the evidence of my senses. Surely I must have been labouring under some hallucination the previous night. It was almost easier to believe that I had been the dupe of a portentous nightmare than that this charming girl should have enacted such a ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... has not led to the formation of any school of writers adopting it and working it out, or to the production of any masterpiece that has held its ground, as has happened in tragedy, comedy, and farce. Beaumarchais, who at last achieved such a dazzling and portentous success by one dramatic masterpiece, began his career as a playwright by following the vein of The Father of the Family; but The Marriage of Figaro, though not without strong traces of Diderotian sentiment in pungent application, yet is in its structure and composition ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... among the austere flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the morning-room, with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors, its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark, book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its eighteenth-century pictures—family portraits, meticulous ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... when behold; the hands of all were loosed upon the booty and everywhere plucked up the shining treasure. There you might have marvelled at their disposition of filthy greed, and watched a portentous spectacle of avarice. You could have seen gold and grass clutched up together; the birth of domestic discord; fellow-countrymen in deadly combat, heedless of the foe; neglect of the bonds of comradeship and of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... am surprised to find Mr Tanner named as joint guardian and trustee with myself of you and Rhoda. [A pause. They all look portentous; but they have nothing to say. Ramsden, a little ruffled by the lack of any response, continues] I don't know that I can consent to act under such conditions. Mr Tanner has, I understand, some objection also; but I do not profess ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Thine own presence, and divested it of all its terrors. My soul! art thou at times afraid of this, thy last enemy? If the rest of thy pilgrimage-way be peaceful and unclouded, rests there a dark and portentous shadow over the terminating portals? Fear not! When that dismal entrance is reached, He who has "the keys of the grave and of death" suspended at His golden girdle, will impart grace to bear thee through. It ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... of the trilogy deals with Sigurd's sojourn at the Orkneys, where he interferes in the quarrel between the Earls Harold and Paul. The atmosphere of suspicion, insecurity, and gloom which hangs like a portentous cloud over these scenes is the very same which blows toward us from the pages of the sagas. Bjoernson has gazed deeply into the heart of Northern paganism, and has here reproduced the heroic anarchy which was a necessary result of the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... very many babies just able to walk, there happened to be in Coketown a considerable population of babies who had been walking against time towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and more. These portentous infants being alarming creatures to stalk about in any human society, the eighteen denominations incessantly scratched one another's faces and pulled one another's hair by way of agreeing on the steps to be taken ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... above-mentioned classes—the "slightly impoverished gentleman" never having laid eyes on him in his life—the negotiations had to be conducted with a certain formality. Todd had therefore, on his arrival, unpinned from the inside of his jacket a portentous document signed with his owner's name and sealed with a red wafer, which after such felicitous phrases as—"I have the distinguished honor," etc.—gave the boy's age (21), weight (140 pounds), and height (5 feet 10 inches)—all valuable data for identification in ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... at the change, none of the Rangers are dismayed by it, or even surprised. The old prairie men are the least astonished, since they know what it means. At the first portentous sign Cully ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... Unrest.—The four years intervening between the campaign of 1892 and the next presidential election brought forth many events which aggravated the ill-feeling expressed in the portentous platform of Populism. Cleveland, a consistent enemy of free silver, gave his powerful support to the gold standard and insisted on the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act, thus alienating an increasing number of his own party. In 1893 a grave industrial crisis fell upon ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... hand and then seemed to remember something. After exchanging a portentous glance with the woman in uniform, he looked steadfastly into her face and said sombrely: "I hope all's well with you, sister! I ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... When they had seen those two portentous heroes go in, the prospect of their ever going out had seemed fearfully remote. But now, if one man was got rid of for only three runs, why should not ten men go for only thirty? At which arithmetical discovery the school immediately leapt from the depths ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... of Warburton was a portentous meteor: it seemed unconnected with the whole planetary system through which it rolled, and it was imagined to be darting amid new creations, as the tail of each hypothesis blazed with idle fancies.[144] ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... matter actually in debate, and leave it to time to suggest a more active treatment should the course first tried prove unsatisfactory. Who can be surprised that the earlier apologists should have felt thus in the presence of an enemy whose novelty made him appear more portentous than he can ever seem to ourselves? They were bound to venture nothing rashly; what they did they did, for their own age, thoroughly; we owe it to their cautious pioneering that we so know the weakness of our opponents and our own strength as to be able to do fearlessly what may well have seemed ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... daughters to uphold that ensign and to exhibit the glory of their house. To the first-born, Piero, came the great inheritance of his father's place and power, and no man ever entered into a greater possession,—a possession, so firm, so unquestioned and so portentous, that nothing seemed likely to disturb its equilibrium or to sully ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... mockery. "You are scientifically frank. You were bored with yourself.—Then there is some hope for your future wife. . . . We have had many talks in our acquaintance, Dr. Marmion, but none so interesting as this promises to be. But now tell me what your purpose was in coming. 'Purpose' seems portentous, but quite ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gems, neck-laces, scarfs and bracelets, and infinite riches: In sum, was so enamour'd of it, that for some days, neither the concernment of his Grand Expedition, nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of his portentous army, could perswade him from it: He styl'd it his mistress, his minion, his Goddess; and when he was forc'd to part from it, he caus'd the figure of it to be stamp'd in a medal of gold, which he continually wore ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Elberfeld, has told the world, in sentences of portentous length and complication, that "the petty trader's instincts which form the most typical characteristic of the British race" came notably to the fore in our treatment of the German prisoners of war who were held under military surveillance in the British ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... on a stone and lit a cigarette. As soon as I had done it, it struck me as a puerile and portentous thing to do, with that great blind house looking down at me, and all the empty avenues converging on me. It may have been the depth of the silence that made me so conscious of my gesture. The squeak of my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a brake, and I almost ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... body, with its narrow shoulders and sunken chest, frail as it was, seemed almost too heavy for his feeble legs. His thin face, bloodless and sallow, with a sparse, daintily trimmed beard and weak watery eyes, was characterized by a solemn and portentous gravity, as though, realizing fully the profound importance of his mission in life, he could permit no trivial thought to enter his bald, domelike head. One knew instinctively that in all the forty-five or fifty years of his little life no happiness or joy that ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... him on the front seat of the Stenton stage, sharing with the driver not his customary cigarettes but more portentous cigars from an ample pocketful. "Greenstream's dead," he pronounced; "I'm going after ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... have "prave 'ords enough, look you," to fill the biggest speaking-trumpet that ever was cast; but miserable is it for men who have not such "prave 'ords," to be forced to bellow their little ones through the portentous instrument which they have not breath ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... have been exiled from office at the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty. The nation would have deserted them, and Parliament would have deserted them, too; neither would have endured to see a secret negotiation, on which depended the portentous alternative of war or peace, in the hands of a person who was thought to be weak—who had been promoted because of his mediocrity—whom his own friends did not respect. A Ministerial government, too, is ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... was a week old this was said in many a respectable household through the country. Many a squire, many a parson, many a farmer was grieved for Mr. Daubeny when the words had been explained to him, who did not for a moment think that the words could be portentous as to the great Conservative party. But Mr. Ratler remembered Catholic emancipation, had himself been in the House when the Corn Laws were repealed, and had been nearly broken-hearted when household suffrage ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... leather, I would fix my eyes on the dignified high-church rector, and the dignified high-church clerk, and watch the movement of their lips, from which, as they read their respective portions of the venerable liturgy, would roll many a portentous word descriptive of the wondrous works of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... to happen among the prairie folk time out of number. Many a brain stupefied by the lonely life of the dugout, the solemn, often portentous grandeur of the great blue dome, under which the pioneers crawled so helplessly, had been blown zigzag by the wild buffetings of the wayward, wanton winds, punctuating the dread loneliness so insistently, so incessantly, so diabolically by its staccato preludes, by its innuendoes of interludes prestissimo, ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... that, during that pause, she could see the little policeman everywhere. In every part of the room she found him, with his fat legs and dirty, streaky face and open collar. The flat was heavy, portentous with his presence, as though it stood with a self-important finger on its lips saying, "I've got a secret in here. Such a secret. You don't know what ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... influence of clergymen's collars and neck-bands upon the thoughts and minds of their audiences. Such questions of chance influence of trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... in American history was more portentous than the first gun fired from Fort Johnson at 1.30 o'clock in the morning of April 12, 1861. As the shell wound its graceful curve into the air and fell into the water at the base of Sumter, the Civil War ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... summit nodded to its base, The surly Tolbooth scarcely kept her place. The Tolbooth felt—for marble sometimes can, On such occasions, feel as much as man— The Tolbooth felt defrauded of his charms, If JEFFREY died, except within her arms: [64] Nay last, not least, on that portentous morn, 480 The sixteenth story, where himself was born, His patrimonial garret, fell to ground, And pale Edina shuddered at the sound: Strewed were the streets around with milk-white reams, Flowed all the Canongate with inky streams; This ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... her grasp on the bridle, for the ringing of a rifle rose, sharp and portentous, from beyond the rise. The colour faded in her cheek, and Hetty leaned forward a trifle in her saddle, with lips slightly parted, as though in strained expectancy. No sound now reached them from beyond the low, white ridge ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... had ceased their shrilling; the night birds their chirping; the animals, great and small, their callings or their stealthy rustling to and fro. Of the world of sound there remained only the crackling of our fires, the tiny singing of the blood in our ears, and that far-off portentous roar. Our simple dispositions were made. Trenches had been dug around the tents; the pegs had been driven well home; our stores had been put in shelter. We waited silently, puffing ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... closer and more thrillingly up to the climax. But at the end of the seventh, with the score tied six and six, with daring steals, hard hits and splendid plays, enough to have made memorable several games, it seemed that the great portentous moment ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... cut, sting, make bad smells, secrete the most dreadful poisons (which Heaven only knows how they contrive to make), cover their precious seeds with spines like those of a hedgehog, frighten insects with delicate nervous systems by assuming portentous shapes, hide themselves, grow in inaccessible places, and tell lies so plausibly as to deceive even ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... slipped loose; and when they came out they ran mad, biting all that came in their way, people and cattle. All who were bitten by them till the blood came turned raging mad; and pregnant women were taken in labour prematurely, and became mad. From Easter to Ascension-day, these portentous circumstances took place almost every night. People were dreadfully alarmed at these wonders; and many made themselves ready to remove, sold their houses, and went out to the country districts, or to other towns. The most intelligent ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... son, while they were talking thus, sat watching the same lime-kiln that had been the scene of Ethan Brand's solitary and meditative life, before he began his search for the Unpardonable Sin. Many years, as we have seen, had now elapsed, since that portentous night when the IDEA was first developed. The kiln, however, on the mountain-side stood unimpaired, and was in nothing changed since he had thrown his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its furnace, and melted them, as it were, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... another romantic tale to tell before we bid adieu to the story of early Rome. In the second year of the pestilence a strange and portentous event occurred. The Tiber rose to an unusual height, overflowed with its waters the great circus (Circus Maximus), and put a stop to the games then going on, which were intended to propitiate the wrath of heaven, ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... ran busily concerning the absent one. And then, soon, Plutina was again hurrying over the trail, which the bordering wild flowers made dainty as a garden walk. Once, her eyes turned southward, to the gloomy grandeur of Stone Mountain, looming vast and portentous. The blur of shadow that marked the Devil's Cauldron touched her to an instant of foreboding, but the elation of mood persisted. She raised her hand, and the fingers caressed the bag in which was the fairy crystal, and ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... 1720, was passed an Act with a pompous and even portentous title: it was called "An Act for the better securing the Dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain." The preamble recited that "attempts have been lately made to shake off the subjection of Ireland unto and dependence upon the Imperial Crown of this realm, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... wandering imagination climbed every height and fathomed every abyss, where it fancied that it might discover new prospects or new light amidst the fatalities impending, might gain fresh hopes in the desperate struggle against destiny, or perhaps might find merely fresh alarms. A portentous mysticism found in the general distraction— political, economic, moral, religious—the soil which was adapted for it, and grew with alarming rapidity; it was as if gigantic trees had grown by night out of the earth, none knew whence or whither, and this very marvellous rapidity of growth worked ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... altogether successful party. The dinner had portentous suggestiveness; the Leidchardt'stonians were at first rather difficult. Sir Luke a little too conscious of his responsibilities towards the British Throne: Lady Tallant so brilliant as to be bewildering. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... course. He was followed by another and another. Birds flew shrieking through the air. Even the river animals swam uneasily along the banks, or peered out of their holes, as if nature had communicated to them, also, the terrible alarm; while, like the roar of a cataract,—dull, heavy, portentous,—the wrath of the flames rolled ominously ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... how delightful! Its memories and associations, how charming! Its luxuries the most luxurious proffered to mortals! Its results how far reaching, and momentous! No mere lover's fleeting bauble, but life's very greatest work! None are equally portentous, for ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... for him did the Jessamine climb and the one hawthorn tree at the back gate leading to the orchard yield its sweet white May, not for him did the tall clock strike and the parrot talk. Talk!! Why, the only time the creature was ever known to be quiet was when Mr. Simon P. Rattray made his portentous visits twice or three times a year. And as for the hidden sweetness of the drawing-room or the comforts of the kitchen or the fascinations of the bar, Mr. Simon P. Rattray knew nothing whatever about them. He was a total abstainer you see, and the blue ribbon appeared in his ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... notorious Dr. Oates, rustling in the full silken canonicals of priesthood, for ... he affected no small dignity of exterior decoration and deportment.... His exterior was portentous. A fleece of white periwig showed a most uncouth visage, of great length, having the mouth ... placed in the very centre of the countenance, and exhibiting to the astonished spectator as much chin below as there was nose and brow above it. His pronunciation ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... what is that in heaven where grey cloud-flakes are seven, Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?" "Oh, that's a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous, An undeciphered solemn signal of ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it: not dead, chopping barren logic merely! Out of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... clearing the wave, but generally pitch nose foremost into the water where it begins to rise, and are hurled back head over tail in impotent confusion. Some of the heavier fish, too, after their jump may be seen to come down with portentous skelp on top of the retaining wall of the salmon-run in mid-stream, thence—apparently with "wind bagged"—to be ignominiously hurried back into the deep pool from which they have but the moment before hurled themselves. The general effect of the spectacle is as if one watched ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... his monotonous existence, riding hard and drinking obstinately, but never, even in the latter case, rising into conviviality. A long, bushy beard, and portentous mustache, grizzled, though he was scarcely past middle age, which could not conceal a deep sabre-scar, gave him a grim, sinister expression; and his voice had that brief imperious accent which is peculiar to men for many years used to give ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... keeping its own counsel. Their situation gained for them the further interest that nothing need be said about it; and the added importance of caution was plainly to be discerned in their bearing, even toward one another. It was a portentous business, this of marrying a minister, under the most ordinary circumstances, not to be lightly dealt with, and even more of an undertaking in a far new country where the very wind blew differently, and the extraordinary freedom of conversation made it more than ever necessary ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... died exhausted by precocious labor—is perhaps the lightest-hearted, lightest-handed man still pouring out fragments of pearl and spangles of pure gold on the stage.... With all this it is remarkable as it is unfair, that among musicians—when talk is going around, and this person praises that portentous piece of counterpoint, and the other analyzes some new chord the uoliness of which has led to its being neglected by former composers—the name of this brilliant man is hardly if ever heard at all. His is the next name among the composers belonging to the last thirty years ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... obscure a subject to be discussed here. Imagine yourself standing at a point from which you can survey the whole system and see into the depths and details of it. At one point is a single star (like our sun), billions of miles from its nearest neighbour, wearing out its solitary life in a portentous discharge of energy. Commonly the stars are in pairs, turning round a common centre in periods that may occupy hundreds of days or hundreds of years. Here and there they are gathered into clusters, sometimes to the number of thousands ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... making for Mr. Tom," said she with a portentous face. "Mr. Haines has given more orders about his reception than I ever knew him to issue before; and, what seems strange, he actually insists on my calling him Mr. Thomas, when I never can get my tongue round anything but Mr. Tom, ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... it was over I determined to close the palace in Vienna and remain in the country. I could not go back to that restless high-pitched life, with its ceaseless gaiety on the one hand and its feverish politics and portentous rumblings on the other. My tired mind rebelled. And the long strain ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... that have characterised the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, few are likely to be regarded by the future historian with a deeper or more melancholy interest than the anti-Semite movement, which has swept with such a portentous rapidity over a great part of Europe. It has produced in Russia by far the most serious religious persecution of the century. It has raged fiercely in Roumania, the other great centre of the Oriental Jews. In enlightened Germany it has become ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Phokians beforehand to slay every man whom they should see not coloured over with white. So not only the sentinels of the Thessalians, who saw these first, were terrified by them, supposing it to be something portentous and other than it was, but also after the sentinels the main body of their army; so that the Phokians remained in possession of four thousand bodies of slain men and shields; of which last they dedicated half at Abai and half at ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... the portentous and all-pervading chain of connection which links together the head and members of this great community, my scheme of lying perdu was defeated almost at the outset. A countryman of mine, whom a foolish lawsuit had brought to town, by chance met me, and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... had been the occasion of profaning the festival by such occurrences.], an uncorruptible yet mild tribunal, in which the white ballot of Pallas given in favour of the accused is an invention which does honour to the humanity of the Athenians. The poet shows how a portentous series of crimes led to an institution fraught ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... me feel languid, but did not affect my chest at all. To-day is a soft gray day; there was a little thunder this morning and a few, very few, drops of rain—hardly enough for even Herodotus to consider portentous. My donkey came down last night, and I tried him to-day, and he is very satisfactory though alarmingly small, as the real Egyptian donkey always is; the big ones are from the Hejaz. But it is wonderful how the little creatures run along under one as easy as possible, and they have no ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... of the portentous significance of this day in his life David could not help seeing and feeling in his suddenly changed environment, as he puffed along behind Father Roland, something that was neither adventure nor romance, but humour. A whimsical humour at first, but growing grimmer as his thoughts sped. ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... state, appeared to him to be so extremely just that he raised not the least objection to it. Accordingly, each of the two silent, voiceless victims of the evening's occurrences were wrapped into a bundle that from without appeared to be neither portentous nor terrible ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... getting the gig lowered. I suppose you will be content to sit here and smoke your pipe until we come back; and, indeed, seven is as many as the gig will carry with any degree of comfort. The cutter will go ashore to fetch off the luggage, which will probably be of somewhat portentous dimensions." ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... unscrupulous rascals in Colorado. Between you, you've got the men stirred up to a point where a strike is inevitable." For a time, Hartwell was apparently crushed by Firmstone's unanswerable logic, as well as by his portentous forecasts. He could not but confess to himself that his course of action looked very different under Firmstone's analysis than from his own standpoint alone. He drummed his fingers listlessly on the desk before him. He was all but convinced that he might have been wrong in his ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... state of exaltation. No longer was I conscious of the rasping cold, and it seemed to me I could have couched me in the deep snow as cosily as in a bed of down. Surpassingly brilliant were the lights. They seemed to convey to me a portentous wink. They twinkled with jovial cheer. What a desirable place the world was, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... purpose, and sends the seven sages to make the formal request for Parvati's hand. The seven sages fly to the brilliant city of Himalaya, where they are received by the mountain god. After a rather portentous interchange of compliments, the seven sages announce their errand, requesting Parvati's hand in behalf of Shiva. The father joyfully assents, and it is agreed that the marriage shall be celebrated after three ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... energy by the combination of stimulants which, in any other society, would have counteracted each other. The spirit of Popery and the spirit of Jacobinism, irreconcilable antagonists every where else, were for once mingled in an unnatural and portentous union. Their joint influence produced the third and last rising up of the aboriginal population against the colony. The greatgrandsons of the soldiers of Galmoy and Sarsfield were opposed to the greatgrandsons of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... winds. The deep groans which convulsed the distracted bosom, and shocked the trembling frame of Alonzo, broke the delusive charm: he awoke, rejoiced to find it but a dream, though it impressed his mind with doleful and portentous forebodings. ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... gives gentlemen and even painters cash upon good letters of credit; and, once or twice in a season, opens his transtiberine palace and treats his customers to a ball. Our friend Clive used jocularly to say, he believed there were no Romans. There were priests in portentous hats; there were friars with shaven crowns; there were the sham peasantry, who dressed themselves out in masquerade costumes, with bagpipe and goatskin, with crossed leggings and scarlet petticoats, who let themselves out to artists at so ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mingled black and gray. His swarthy, keen wizened face was twisted into grotesque lines beneath a pair of little blinking eyes, which seemed to say that anybody who refused to see that they belonged to a perfectly, wideawake son of old Adam made a portentous mistake. He was the mountain peddler, and to-day, at least, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... loaded every breeze With the fallen honours of the mourning trees, The maiden waited at the accustom'd bower. And waited long beyond the appointed hour, Yet Bateman came not;—o'er the woodland drear, Howling portentous did the winds career; And bleak and dismal on the leafless woods The fitful rains rush'd down in sullen floods; The night was dark; as, now and then, the gale Paused for a moment—Margaret listen'd pale; But through ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... wife's insistence, he attended an informal garden-party at the Fujinami house. Again he suffered acutely from those cruel silences and portentous waitings, to which he noticed that even the Japanese among themselves were liable, but which apparently they ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... boded rain, and about four o'clock, announced by deep-toned thunder and portentous clouds, it began to charge down the mountain-side in front of me. I ran ashore, covered my traps, and took my way up through an orchard to a quaint little farmhouse. But there was not a soul about, outside or in, that I could find, though the door was unfastened; so I went into ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... at that portentous moment made its descent on that unknown man. Cambronne invents the word for Waterloo as Rouget invents the "Marseillaise," under the visitation of a breath from on high. An emanation from the divine whirlwind leaps forth and comes sweeping over these men, and they shake, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to the presence of a minute unicellular plant of a red color, which grows and multiplies with great rapidity on the surface of bread, starch-paste, and similar substances. So general was once the belief in its portentous nature that Ehrenberg described it under the ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... Dred Scott decision; John Brown had organized an insurrection; Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln at the time were in exciting debate; William H. Seward was proclaiming the "irrepressible conflict." With other signs portentous, culminating in secession and events re-enacting history—for that the causes and events of which history is the record are being continuously re-enacted from a moral standpoint is of easy observation. History, as the narration of the actions of men, with attendant ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... "it does indeed look like it. An amazing and portentous exhibition of animal spirits, and not to be endured by the Proprieties. Where on earth can that young ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Central Empire," as the natives call it, for to Chinamen there is a fifth point to the compass—the center, which is China. Not far on the road we heard the clatter of hoofs behind us. A Kalmuck was dashing toward us with a portentous look on his features. We dismounted in apprehension. He stopped short some twenty feet away, leaped to the ground, and, crawling up on hands and knees, began to chin-chin or knock his head on the ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... solemnity-without even a room prepared and empty—to go through a business of such portentous seriousness!— 'Tis truly amazing from a man who seemed to delight so much in religious regulations and observances. Dr. Fisher himself was dissatisfied, and wondered at his compliance, though he attributed the ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... what a novel about Roedean or Wycombe Abbey would be like. The queer thing was that some young woman didn't write one; it need be no duller than the young men's. Rather duller, perhaps, because schoolgirls were more childish than schoolboys, the problems of their upbringing less portentous. But there were many of the same ingredients—the exaltation of games, hero-worship, rows, the clever new literary mistress who made all the stick-in-the-mud other mistresses angry.... Only were the other mistresses at girls' schools stick-in-the-mud? ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
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