"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you." Advantage is of course taken of what a lion has done, and they go and bring home the buffalo or antelope killed when he was a lion, or rather found when he was patiently pursuing his course of deception in the forest. We saw the Pondoro of another village dressed in a fantastic style, with numerous charms hung round him, and followed by a troop of boys who were honouring him with ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."—Pope, on ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... building this triumphal column, which is two hundred and twenty-seven feet high. It consists of five stories, becoming smaller as they ascend. The remains of his mosque were visited, the columns of which look like enlarged jewellery, elaborately worked into fantastic forms. By its side is an iron column with contradictory stories about its origin. The tourists visited other mosques and tombs, which reminded them of the tombs ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... wholly committed for the time to the First Consul; while Russia, although her youthful sovereign had abandoned the anti-British policy of his predecessor, remained undecided as to the general course she should pursue amid the ever-shifting perplexities of the day. Less fantastic in imagination than his insane father, Alexander I. inherited a visionary tendency, which hindered practical action, and showed itself in plans too vast and complicated for realization, even when two rulers of the overwhelming power of himself and Napoleon, at a later date, set their ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely that men will leave off endeavouring to secure themselves ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... willingness to cloud the vital fact and excuse Shelby. Indeed, he finally left with the disgusted conviction that she had pilloried not the sinner but himself,—a not uncommon outcome in a clash of wits between a woman and a man. After that, he told himself, she might form what fantastic opinion of this freebooter she chose without let or hindrance from him, and at the same time he resolved that she should see less of him. The latter resolution proved as flimsy as a New Year's vow, but while it needed less than a smile to whistle him back, the whole distasteful ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... pumpkin bowls, And the gleams that showed fantastic holes In the quaint old lantern's tattooed tin, From the hermit glim set ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... changes than thawing snowbanks and the swelling buds and leaves, which seem to grow almost visibly. It is surprising how many of the wild folk meet the spring with changed appearance—beautiful, fantastic or ugly to us; all, perhaps, beautiful to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... Superb on unreturning tides. Those silent waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering masses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure world, a shifting world, Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled, Or serpentine, or driving arrows, Or serene slidings, or March narrows. There slipping wave and shore are one, And weed and mud. No ray of sun, But glow to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... the stairs he wondered why he had coupled himself with Cass. Was the difference so slight—had they been together in the same boat up to the point of that silly, fantastic dream. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... they dashed at so lightheartedly was much larger than any of them imagined. It was a Gibraltar of impossibilities. It was on the face of it a fantastic nightmare of a task—to weave such a web of wires, with interlocking centres, as would put any one telephone in touch with every other. There was no help for them in books or colleges. Watson, who had acquired a little knowledge, had become a shipbuilder. Electrical engineering, as a profession, ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... worked out its issues. Its decrees, with the noble doctrines of which it formed a part, lay buried beneath the ruins of human intellect. But they were only buried, not destroyed; and rose, like wildflowers on a ruined edifice, to adorn the irregularity which they could not conceal. The fantastic institutions of chivalry which it is now the fashion to deride (how unjustly!) were among the first scions of this plant of heavenly origin. They bore the impress of heaven, faint and distorted indeed, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... recorded by the memory and which is inevitably recalled to the mind without any need of reflection. Confusion? I refuse to believe in it. Impossible to tell one from the other? It isn't true. In the world of fiction, yes, one can imagine all sorts of fantastic accidents and heap contradiction on contradiction. But, in the world of reality, at the very heart of reality, there is always a fixed point, a solid nucleus, about which the facts group themselves in accordance ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... their scanty clothing, this was surprising. For a considerable time the whole party moved on without speaking, staggering as if in sleep. Their eyes were dazzled with the whiteness of the snow, which now surrounded them on all sides. Above their heads hung icicles of fantastic shapes, ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... redound to the credit of a nation when one of its citizens resolves to discover some inaccessible and futile place, and proceeds to do so in the most fantastic manner. The inhabitants of that country who remain at their work and continue to pay their rates are expected to be in a condition of wild enthusiasm and delight at the adventure.—My own impression is, that the majority of people take no more than a tepid interest in these ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... Papal nuncio. He passed beneath countless triumphal arches. Banners waved before him, on which the battle of Lepanto, and other striking scenes in his life, were emblazoned. Minstrels sang verses, poets recited odes, rhetoric clubs enacted fantastic dramas in his honor, as he rode along. Young virgins crowned him with laurels. Fair women innumerable were clustered at every window, roof, and balcony, their bright robes floating like summer clouds above him. "Softly from those lovely clouds," says a gallant ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the particularity of these painted faces, we are able to enjoy all the better what it is certainly important we should appreciate, if we are truly to appreciate our puppets. This is nothing less than a fantastic, yet a direct, return to the masks of the Greeks: that learned artifice by which tragedy and comedy were assisted in speaking to the world with the universal voice, by this deliberate generalising of emotion. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... from this gloomy shadow came something that whirred by my ear and was gone. But in that moment I had swept my companion behind a rock and with sword advanced leapt straight for the tree; and there, in the half-light, came on a fantastic shape and closed with it in deadly grapple. My rusty sword had snapped short at the first onset, yet twice I smote with the broken blade, while arm locked with arm we writhed and twisted. To and fro ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... ("Placebo" seems to have been a current term to express the character or the ways of "the too deferential man." "Flatterers be the Devil's chaplains, that sing aye Placebo."—"Parson's Tale."), or with the fantastic machinery in which Pluto and Proserpine anticipate the part played by Oberon and Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." On the other hand, Chaucer is capable of using goods manifestly borrowed or stolen for a purpose never intended in their original employment. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... boys with beards, and girls that be Big[8]as old women, wanting gravity. Then do not blame me, 'cause I thus describe them. Flatter I may not, lest thereby I bribe them To have a better judgment of themselves, Than wise men have of babies on their shelves.[9] Their antic tricks, fantastic modes, and way, Show they, like very boys and girls, do play With all the frantic fopperies of this age, And that in open view, as on a stage; Our bearded men do act like beardless boys; Our women please themselves with childish ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... singular Tupelo-tree. This tree is the opposite of the Ash in all its characteristics. There is no regularity in any part of its growth, and no tree in the forest sports in such a variety of grotesque and fantastic shapes. Sometimes it spreads out its branches horizontally, forming a perfectly flat top, as if it had grown under a platform; again it forms an irregular pyramid, most commonly leaning from an upright position. It has usually no definable shape, often sending out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... day complimenting Dr. Percy on the inestimable service he had done the arts in restoring him to his pencil, in proof of which the artist showed many master-pieces that wanted only the finishing touch, in particular a huge, long-limbed, fantastic, allegorical piece of his own design, which he assured Dr. Percy was the finest example of the beau ideal, ancient or modern, that human genius had ever produced upon canvas. "And what do you think, doctor," said the painter, "tell me what you can think of a connoisseur, a patron, sir, who could ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... cold fact that, on her return to "Heidelberg," her aunt's interest in these ivories seemed to wane and disappear. Was there not a bowl of specimens in the drawing-room already consigned to oblivion and dust? Aunt Flora's character exhibited an amazing combination of fantastic caprice and ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... the breach between the President and the Vindictives was just beginning to be evident, Greeley was pursuing an adventure of his own. Among the least sensible minor incidents of the war were a number of fantastic attempts of private persons to negotiate peace. With one exception they had no historic importance. The exception is a negotiation carried on by Greeley, which seems to have been the ultimate cause of his alliance ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... provincial, never cosmopolitan; that only provincial art is universal in its appeal. Like every other theory this one is to a large extent true, but Hergesheimer in his arbitrary summing up, has forgotten the fantastic. The fantastic in literature, in art of any kind, can never be provincial. The work of Poe is not provincial; nor is that of Gustave Moreau, an artist with whom Edgar Saltus can very readily be compared. If you have visited the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... now, as the line of visitors thinned, showing that the reception was nearly over, the boldest of the colored men drew near the door with faltering step. Some were in conventional attire, others in fantastic dress, and others again in laborers' garb. The novel procession moved into the vestibule and on into the room where the President was holding the republican court. Timid and doubting, though determined, they ventured where their oppressed and down-trodden race had never appeared ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... are we to detect this especial source of power? Often forsooth in a dimple, sometimes beneath the shade of an eyelid or perhaps among the tresses of a little fantastic curl! ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... another, however worthy the intention behind them. Once he wrote a burlesque on family history "The Autobiography of a Damned Fool." "Livy wouldn't have it," he said later, "so I gave it up." The world is indebted to Mark Twain's wife for the check she put upon his fantastic or violent impulses. She was his public, his best public—clearheaded and wise. That he realized this, and was willing to yield, was by no means the least of his good fortunes. We may believe that he did not always yield easily, and perhaps sometimes only ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, His glassy essence—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep! 126 SHAKS.: M. for M., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... It was gone as swiftly as it came, and the stare settled unwaveringly upon the stupefied girl. For stupefaction had gripped Dolores in that first entry into the great chamber. Her wildest dreams, and they had been at times fantastic, had never showed her anything measurably approaching the scene that smote her eyes now. For the moment death, Red Jabez, her destiny, everything melted into the visionary beyond and left her ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... beautiful retreat, with its venerable trees, was in our sight, the green mountain meadows between literally verifying its name by the brilliance of their sunshiny rich grass, where "God had showered the landscape;" to a fantastic fancy, giving the idea of the quivering of the richest leaf gold on a ground of emerald. The humbler Welsh Parnassus of the painter poet, Grongar Hill, towered also in distance. We traced the pastoral yet noble river, winding away in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the audience, which is testified by laughter: as all things which are deviations from common customs, are ever the aptest to produce it. Though, by the way, this Laughter is only accidental, as the person represented is fantastic or bizarre; but Pleasure is essential to it, as the Imitation of what is natural. This description of these Humours[9], drawn from the knowledge and observation of particular persons, was the peculiar genius and talent of BEN. JOHNSON. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... [Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like pere Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... necessary to assume thicker garments. Once having bridged the river the ice strengthened rapidly. And then late one afternoon, on the wings of the northwest wind, came the snow. All night it howled past the trembling wigwam. All the next day it swirled and drifted and took the shapes of fantastic monsters leaping in the riot of the storm. Then the stars, cold and brilliant, once more crackled in the heavens. The wilderness in a single twenty-four hours had changed utterly. Winter ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... truth of the caricature so palpable that the widow herself was moved to as quick laughter as the others. But when American Palmer worked all day upon a panel to create a sunny sea laughing radiantly back at a sunny sky, while fantastic lateen-sailed craft floated like bits of jewelled color between, it was mean, to say the least, of Scotch Willie to take advantage of the American's departure and paint out those fairy boats, filling their places with horrible bloated corpses, floating upon the bright water like a nightmare upon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... have passed since that night in Florence, I suppose, I may confess to you that I loved you deeply. You yourself, however, stifled my love by your fantastic devotion and your insane passion. From the moment that you became my slave, I knew it would be impossible for you ever to become my husband. However, I found it interesting to have you realize your ideal in my ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... character. Nothing could well be more beautiful than this bird's plumage; and his nest, which is "globular, with an entrance on one side," is described as a wonder of elegance; while in grace of movement not even the titmouse can surpass him. Strange that such an exquisite should have so fantastic a song. ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Valdichiana. In the Madonna, the principal church of Orvieto, he finished with his own hand the chapel that Fra Giovanni da Fiesole had formerly begun there; in which chapel he painted all the scenes of the end of the world with bizarre and fantastic invention—angels, demons, ruins, earthquakes, fires, miracles of Antichrist, and many other similar things besides, such as nudes, foreshortenings, and many beautiful figures; imagining the terror that there shall be on that last and awful day. By means of this ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... A Government in which two wills only prevail—that of the ignorant, envious, ambitious, aggressive multitude, and that of the despot who, whatever be his natural disposition, is soon turned, by the intoxication of flattery and of universal power, into a capricious, fantastic, selfish participator in the worst passions of the worst portion ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... which is as the sin against the Holy Ghost in these high concerns. What Diderot meant, probably, was to charge Spinosa with inventing a conception of substance which has no relation to objective experience; and further with giving fantastic answers to questions that were in themselves never worth asking, because the answers must always involve a violent wrench of the terms of experience into the sphere transcending experience, and because, moreover, they can never be verified. Whether he meant this or something ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... to that quarter where they lived, insinuated himself into their family, and partly by conversation, and partly by the writings of Jacob Behman, which he put into their hands, filled their heads with wild and fantastic ideas. Unhappily for the poor family those strange notions gained ground on them, insomuch that in one year they began to withdraw themselves from the ordinances of public worship, and all conversation with the world around them, and strongly ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... but not to respect; quick-witted as a soubrette, unable to refuse his pen to any one that asked, or his heart to the first that would borrow it, Emile was the most fascinating of those light-of-loves of whom a fantastic modern wit declared that "he liked them better in satin ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... philosophy with some account of the philosopher's life and character. Thus the work took the form of a "Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdroeckh," and as such it was offered to the world. Here, of course, we reach the explanation of its fantastic title—"Sartor Resartus," or the Tailor Patched: the tailor being the great German "Clothes-philosopher," and the patching being done by Carlyle ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... effect may be compared to that which would be felt, if we should detach the songs of the artificial drama from their original impulse and feeling, (for instance, the willow dirge of Desdemona, and the fantastic moans of Ophelia,) and produce them in a parlor. Not but that these lyrics have a universal fitness, and a value which no time can change or circumstance diminish; but as we are looking at them simply in a dramatic view, we claim the right to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... those, no doubt, to whom this will seem fantastic, but it is a truth, I am convinced, which is presupposed in the Christian doctrine of Atonement, as the mediation of forgiveness through the suffering and death of Christ: and it is a truth also, if I am not much mistaken, ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... day; made the very Empress shut her windows when he came to audience; fed, cautiously daring, on boiled capons: more I remember not,—except also that he would suffer no mention of the word Death by any mortal. [Hormayr,—OEsterreichischer Plutarch,—iv. (3tes), 231-283.] A most high-sniffing, fantastic, slightly insolent shadow-king;—ruled, in his time, the now vanished Olympus; and had the difficult glory (defective only in result) of uniting France and Austria AGAINST the poor old Sea-Power milk-cows, for the purpose of recovering Silesia from Friedrich, a few years hence!"—These ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... that tramp over the uneven fields with a flickering lantern throwing dim shadows before them and the bushes and trees assuming strange and terrifying shapes, fantastic beyond the power of clear daylight to make them. More than once Miss Charity started back in fright, and Miss Hope, who was stronger, shook so with nervousness that she found it difficult to walk. Betty, ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... world he faced in Paris and London seemed to him fantastic Willing to admit it real in the sense of having some kind of existence outside his own mind, he could not admit it reasonable. In Paris, his heart sank to mere pulp before the dismal ballets at the Grand Opera and the eternal vaudeville at the old Palais Royal; but, except for ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... which the descent is made into the channel, and the other close under a summer-house, near to which the visitors reascend into the wood. But these cataracts, though by no means despicable as cataracts, leave comparatively a slight impression. They tumble down with sufficient violence and the usual fantastic disposition of their forces; but simply as cataracts within a day's journey of Niagara, they would be nothing. Up beyond the summer- house the passage along the river can be continued for another mile; but it is ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... Fathers, and, Origen excepted, of the Ante-Nicene Fathers in particular, in all that respects Hebrew learning and the New Testament references to the Old Testament, is shown in this so early fantastic misinterpretation grounded on the fact of our Lord's reminding, and as it were giving out aloud to John and Mary the twenty-second Psalm, the prediction of his present sufferings and after glory. But the entire passage in Tertullian, though no proof of his Arianism, is ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Rolling figures, enlarged and fantastic, emerged from the mist. Robert saw great, red eyes, sharp teeth and claws, and yet he felt neither fear nor hostility. Tayoga's statement that they were bears, into which the souls of great warriors had gone, was strong in his mind, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... think, Giovanni, I can divine the place. Although this fig-tree, growing out of the wall between the cellar and us, is fantastic enough in its branches, yet that other which I see yonder, bent down and forced to crawl along the grass by the prepotency of the young shapely walnut-tree, is much more so. It forms a seat, about a cubit above the ground, level and ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... many fantastic stories told, to which the public lend a sometimes too ready ear, of what occurs in police stations. Always one can find some person to assert positively that the police as a body are bribed by bookmakers ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... was distinguished as much by the superior magnificence of her attire as by her striking beauty. Moireau could not believe his eyes; he felt assured he beheld madame Rossin, yet he fancied he must be under the influence of some fantastic dream; but every look, every gesture of the princess, a thousand trifles, which would have escaped the notice of a common observer, but which were engraved in indelible characters on the heart of her admirer, all concurred to assure ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... proves his acquaintance with Grotius, internal evidence his knowledge of Andreini: and small as are his direct obligations to the Italian drama, we can easily believe with Hayley that "his fancy caught fire from that spirited, though irregular and fantastic composition." Vondel's Lucifer—whose subject is not the fall of Adam, but the fall of Satan—was acted and published in 1654, when Milton is known to have been studying Dutch, but when the plan of "Paradise Lost" must have been substantially ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... brooding stillness and the moon, high-risen, touched the world about me with her magic, whereby things familiar became transformed into objects of wonder; tree and hedgerow took on shapes strange and fantastic; the road became a gleaming causeway whereon I walked, godlike, master of my destiny. Beyond meadow and cornfield to right and left gloomed woods, remote and full of mystery, in whose enchanted twilight elves ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... tried in vain to fix some of its main features on my memory; then set the mules to graze again, and took my sketch-book, and marked the outlines—but where is the use of marking contours of a mass of endless—countless—fantastic rock—12,000 feet sheer above the valley? Besides, one cannot have sharp sore-throat for twelve hours without its bringing on some slight feverishness; and the scorching Alpine sun to which we had been exposed without an instant's cessation from the height of the col till now—i.e., from half-past ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... "It's fantastic the number of cars there are in use in America. You know it's a literal fact that almost every American family has a car. For instance, whenever there's a big meeting of strikers in New York, all the streets near the hall ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... that age seem now superfluous, the recreations of a holiday rather than the business of life. But coming from the dust and din of the fifteenth century, it looks differently. It was, in whatever dim or fantastic shape, a recognition of universal brotherhood,—of a common ground whereon all mankind could meet in peace and even sympathy, were it only for a picnic. In this villeggiatura of the human race the immediate aim is no very lofty one,—not truth, not duty, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... soon absorbed by the papers before me. Such a fantastic collection of words, lines, and epithets I had never before seen, or even in dreams imagined. In truth, they were like the work of dreams: they were Kubla Khan, only more so. Here and there was ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... from mouth to mouth, as it did in the Highlands a century ago, as it did but lately in the Indian Mutiny; till after a fact had taken ten years in crossing a few mountains and forests, it had assumed proportions utterly fantastic and gigantic. ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of this nature passed through my mind—for as I grow older I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me—while I stood and stared at those grim yet fantastic lines of warriors, sleeping, as their ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... subject for the artist's pencil and the storyteller's invention. Brought across the seas, he was welcomed by American children and now appears in a new volume which sets forth his travels in Africa. The lessons underlying his fantastic experiences are clear to the youngest readers but are never allowed to become obtrusive. The amusing illustrations of the original are fully equaled in the present edition, while the whimsical nonsense which ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... the Egyptian queen during the recent contest. On his passage through Cilicia, in 41, he was visited by Cleopatra, who came to answer the charges in person. She sailed up the Cydnus in a gorgeous bark, with a fantastic and brilliant equipage, and brought all her allurements to bear on the heart of the voluptuous Roman. Her success was complete; and he who was to have been her judge, was led captive to Alexandria as her slave. All was forgotten in the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... them. As they were jogging homeward they saw the gray gulls rise from the sod and go home to the lake for the night. They heard the crickets' evening chorus broaden and deepen to an endless and monotonous symphony, while behind fantastic, thin, and rainless clouds the sun sank in unspeakable glory of colour. The air, perfectly still, was cool almost to frostiness, and, far above, the fair stars broke from the lilac and gold of the sun-flushed sky. Lights in the farm-houses began ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... beheld a sight that almost petrified her. In the midst of the nave, which was illumined by a blue glimmering light, whence proceeding it was impossible to determine, stood a number of grotesque figures, apparelled in fantastic garbs, and each attended by a skeleton. Some of the latter grisly shapes were playing on tambours, others on psalteries, others on rebecs—every instrument producing the strangest sound imaginable. Viewed through ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... either side of which are villas and avenues of noble trees. Altogether it reminded me of Bagneres-de-Luchon, in the Pyrenees, though the general effect is unfortunately marred by the gay and rather too fantastic painting of some of ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... said at last night's 'light fantastic,' she has sent you to me!" he cried excitedly, as he opened the door on ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... perhaps, the most inconsistent thing in all nature; and in nothing is it more capricious than in the manifestations of its passions; and in no passion is it so fantastic as in that which it miscalls love, but which ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the days when she ran "shrill as a cicada and thin as a match" through the chill mists of her native mountains could she ever have felt so cold, so wretched, and so desolate. Her very soul, her grave, indignant, and fantastic soul, seemed to drowse like an exhausted traveller surrendering himself to the sleep of death. But when I asked her again to lie down she managed to answer me, "Not in this room." The dumb spell ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... may recall, my famous translation from college during my banquet at the Cambridge Tavern—that Fate struck me my first severe blow. My guests were still sitting at table while one of the ladies executed a fantastic dance amid the wine-glasses, when my butler touched me upon the arm and whispered that Mr. Gottlieb was outside and desired to see me on urgent business. Excusing myself, I hurried out, greeting my partner rather impatiently, as I disliked to be interrupted by business details ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... was well-known at the "Boheme", for the waiters gathered like flies around the honey-pot, and the august head-waiter himself took the order, and beamed his approval at Barry's selections. So presently there flowed in a stream of costly viands, served in outre and fantastic fashion—many of them things not known even by name to Thyrsis. There were costly wines as well, and at the end an ice in the shape of a great basket of fruit, wonderfully carved and colored like life, resting upon a slab ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... into cheers, and Smithy's name was given three and a tiger; so that the racket made even the hungry bear look wonderingly at the fantastic group that took hold of hands, and danced around the hero of ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... liked all his pictures because they were his, personalities count for nothing; you must have an eye for the thing itself, and the thing itself was the one thing that Audrey could not see. In that world she was a pilgrim and a stranger; it was peopled with shadowy fantastic rivals, who left her with no field and no favour; flesh and blood were powerless to contend against them. They excited no jealousy—they were too intangible for that; but in their half-seen presence she had a sense of helpless irritation and bewilderment—it ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... equable and better tempered. Who ever breasted a snowstorm without being excited and exhilarated, as if this meteor had come charged with latent aurorae of the North, as doubtless it has? It is like being pelted with sparks from a battery. Behold the frost-work on the pane,—the wild, fantastic limnings and etchings! can there be any doubt but this subtle agent has been here? Where is it not? It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... notice for the first time the fantastic strangeness of the place in which she finds herself. Frightened and genuinely perturbed.] Mother o' God, what ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... passed for little more than a literary curiosity, arousing no new ideas as to Shakspere's mental development. The notable suggestion of Chasles on that head has been ignored more completely than the theory of Mr. Feis, which in comparison is merely fantastic. Either, then, there is an unwillingness in England to conceive of Shakspere as owing much to foreign influences, or as a case of intelligible mental growth, or else the whole critical problem which ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... impossible to go far into detail without illustrations; and if readers find this book useful, I may, perhaps, endeavor to supplement it by illustrated notes of the more interesting phenomena in separate groups of familiar minerals;—flints of the chalk;—agates of the basalts;—and the fantastic and exquisitely beautiful varieties of the vein-ores of the two commonest metals, lead and iron. But I have always found that the less we speak of our intentions, the more chance there is of our realizing them; and this ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... brave the daring glance, The public ball, the midnight wanton dance? There many a blooming nymph, by fashion led, Has felt her health, her peace, her honour fled; Truss'd her fine form to strange fantastic shapes, To be admir'd, and twirl'd about by apes; Or, mingling in the motley masquerade, Found innocence ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... severely for caring less than one ought to do for the Merry Wives of Windsor. Had he Imagination? In its high literary and poetic form he rose to few conspicuous flights—such, for example, as Burke's descent of Hyder Ali upon the Carnatic—in vast and fantastic conceptions such as arose from time to time in the brain of Napoleon, he had no part or lot. But in force of moral and political imagination, in bold, excursive range, in the faculty of illuminating practical and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... lay drying on flat roofs, and yet now and then would come a high-pitched northern gable. Latin and Teuton met and mingled in the place, and, as Mr. Gibbon has taught us, the offspring of this admixture is something fantastic and unpredictable. I forgot my grievous thirst and my tired feet in admiration and a certain vague expectation of wonders. Here, ran my thought, it is fated, maybe, that romance and I shall at last compass a meeting. Perchance some princess is in ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... wing of the building near by came the twanging of a string, like a banjo string being tuned in fantastic quarter tones. A few sharp notes were struck, at random it seemed, followed by a few bars of a quavering song and then a burst of clownish laughter. Young bloods of Nagasaki had called in geisha to amuse ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be 'positively mischievous'. 'At an age,' he wrote, 'when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind which are the best ornaments of youth, and offer the best promise of a noble manhood?' One had not ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... the sun; accordingly, when we examine the spectrum of a sun-spot, we often see that some of the lines are shifted a little towards one end of the spectrum and sometimes towards the other, while in other cases the lines are seen to be distorted or twisted in the most fantastic manner, indicating very violent local commotions. If the spot happens to be near the centre of the sun's disc, the gases must be shooting upwards or downwards to produce these changes in the lines. The velocities indicated in observations of this class sometimes amount to as much ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... interesting and by stretching the imagination may suggest some fantastic fairy tale, but its chief merit is that it is more in keeping with MacDowell's natural gift for musical suggestion than are the preceding pianoforte pieces, and also the ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... Ellie, why indeed? We never know why women do things. But it has been my experience in legal cases, and especially in criminal ones, that women will often give evidence in some such high-fantastic way as this, which could never be got out of them through the proper channel,—that is by means of cross-examination, in court. Now she's evidently taken a fancy to tell you something, and I feel it is our duty to see just ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... saw, for the first time, Osnomians clothed. The great room was filled with the highest nobility of Kondal, wearing their heavily-jeweled, resplendent robes of state. Every color of the rainbow and numberless fantastic patterns were there, embodied in the soft, lustrous, ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... commenced their brief reign; to be dethroned by a severe-looking quilted ruffle marching around the hem of the dress and up the centre to the throat; and this grave adornment suddenly found its place usurped by an inundation of fantastic trimmings, jet, bugles, passementerie, velvet or lace. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... thing that I most wanted to see when I went to the war was a cavalry charge. I had seen mounted troops in action, of course, both in Africa and in Asia, but they had brown skins and wore fantastic uniforms. What I wanted to see was one of those charges such as Meissonier used to paint—scarlet breeches and steel helmets and a sea of brandished sword-blades and all that sort of thing. But when I confided my wish ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... man would do this," and "a man would do that," said Billy time after time, till a new, fantastic notion came bounding full-fledged into Beth's anxious brain and almost made her laugh with delight. She could dress as a man and ride as a man and be absolutely safe on the journey! She knew a dozen unusual arts for dying the skin and concealing the hair and making the hands look rough. Make-up ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... given to every man to start on the quest of the rainbow's end. Such fantastic pursuit is not for him who is bound by ties of home and duty and fortune-to-make. He has other adventure at his own door, sterner fights to wage, and, perhaps, higher rewards to gain. Still, the ledgers close sometimes on a sigh, and by the cosiest fireside one will see in the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... progress as one might make in some fantastic nightmare—as the hero of some eerie piece of fiction about the Last Man in the World. Street after street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sandbags, mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over cellar windows; streets in which the only sound was that of one's own feet, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... previous quotation from the Midrash Rabbah. The Targum of Jonathan and also the Yerushalmi record the same fantastic tradition. In the latter it is given thus, "And Esau ran to meet him, and hugged him, and fell upon his neck and kissed him. Esau wept for the crushing of his teeth, and Jacob wept for ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... master-spirit of this age. He represented the best aims of his nation; he understood the needs of the time; he worked for them, and he suffered for them. With an overbearing spirit, fantastic too often in his conduct, he saw what was needed—he saw the necessity for unity with Rome. This was a necessity, not for one country alone, but for the whole West at that time. Protestant writers have looked at Wilfrid through ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... were near the ships again. Mel wondered what kind of reprimand the crewmen of the Martian Princess could give him, and what fantastic justification they might ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... A band in fantastic livery was playing away in the marble hall; but Pocket had no ear for their music, though he was fond enough of a band. And though history was one of his few strong points at school, the glittering galaxy of kings and queens appealed to him no more ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... clasping his troubled lady, who is unaccountably saddened by the untimely farce, struggles with a hysterical desire to laugh—it is all so like a fantastic dream. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... argument that anybody could probably effect a sale in this instance, if the diamonds were plainly marked with their prices; it would be a mere question of displaying the goods. That was not the point. Gray was a rich, a busy man—the idea was fantastic. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... flash into view on their ancient hills, of the vast stretch of beautiful and varied French land, of Limoges, the last outpost of the Northern French, whom it is sad to leave even when one is bound for Spain, of Rocamadour (and I think of that fantastic old-world shrine, with the legendary blade of Roland's Durandel still struck into its walls, and of the long delicious day on the solitary brooding height over the exquisite ravine), the night at Toulouse ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... representation of the South should be greater or less according to the extent to which the Negro population were admitted to the franchise or excluded from it. This clause was re-cast more than once in order to satisfy a fantastic scruple of Sumner's concerning the indecency of mentioning the fact that some people were black and others white, a scruple which he continued to enforce with his customary appeals to the Declaration of Independence, until even his ally Stevens lost all patience with ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... chill that was uncanny. The forest, thick and black, spread away, he knew, for hundreds of miles, and neither city nor town broke it. A fervent imagination leaped up and peopled it with weird beings. Nor would imagination go down before will and knowledge. Boughs twisted themselves into fantastic, hideous shapes, and the moan of the wind was certainly like the cry ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... This court was circular in form and was paved with red and yellow slabs, laid alternately, like a chess-board. In the centre was a fountain, which cast up a tall thin jet of water. A gallery extended around the place, supported by columns that had been painted scarlet and were gilded with fantastic designs. The walls were of the colour of claret and were adorned with golden cinquefoils regularly placed. From a distance they resembled stars, and so ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... reproach, and were images and remembrances which awaked the craving after Nature that had lain dormant for six months. The broken rays of moonlight floated at night upon the tepid waters of the river, and the dreamy orb opened, as far as the Seine could be traced, luminous and fantastic vistas where the eye lost itself in landscapes of shade and vapor. Involuntarily the soul followed the eye. The front of the shops, the balconies, and the windows of the quays were covered with vases of flowers which ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Vathek (c. 1781), written originally in French and, as he was accustomed to boast, at a single sitting of three days and two nights. There is reason, however, to believe that this was a flight of imagination. It is an impressive work, full of fantastic and magnificent conceptions, rising occasionally to sublimity. His other principal writings are Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), a satirical work, and Letters from Italy with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1835), full of brilliant descriptions ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... have fitted into place almost as if made on a pattern. The other day-coach had fallen upon one end, and one-third of it was under water. The other end resting partly against the broken car, stuck up in the air like some curious, fantastic pillar or leaning tower. ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... a trace of the fantastic or miraculous, were the other dreams, of which we were informed. Moreover, I remember that once, as a boy, I was turning over his books and memoranda, and found, among some other remarks which related ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... practical joke on Dr. Kettle, the woman-hating President of Trinity, who resented the intrusion of petticoats into his garden, "dubbed Daphne by the wits." The lady in question aired herself there in a fantastic garment cut after the pattern of the angels, with her page and singing boy wafting perfumes and soft music before her, an apparition not likely to soothe the gigantic, choleric doctor. Lady Isabella and her friend Anne ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... attempt to contrive an automatic governor—a machine which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature into account? What other explanation is there for the naive faith of the Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to have illuminated those historic deliberations. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action, disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to penetrate—the doings and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the terror went beyond the black border of the forest. Out in the open and over the clearing, the mists from the swamp mingling with the darkness gave everything a look of fantastic unreality yet wilder than it had worn earlier in the night. Dense earth-clouds were thus massed about the base of Anvil Rock. Its blackened peak loomed through the clouds,—a strange, wild sight, apparently belonging neither to earth ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... Kew delighted me, thereabouts all was so green, and still one could indulge at leisure in the humorous and fantastic associations that cluster around the name of Kew, like the curls of a "big wig" round the serene and sleepy face of its wearer. Here are fourteen green-houses: in one you find all the palms; in another, the productions ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... cathedral; its countless spires are scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan, rising into one tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the steady moon; domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds. Needles of every height and most fantastic shapes rise from the central ridge, some solitary, like sharp arrows shot against the sky, some clustering into sheaves. On every horn of snow and bank of grassy hill stars sparkle, rising, setting, rolling round through ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... more I tread thy courts, O God of heaven! I lay my hand upon a rock, whose peak Is miles away, and high amid the clouds. Perchance I touch the mountain whose blue summit, With the fantastic rock upon its side, Stops the eye's flight from that high chamber-window Where, when a boy, I used to sit and gaze With wondering awe upon the mighty thing, Terribly calm, alone, self-satisfied, The hitherto of my child-thoughts. Beyond, A sea might roar around ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... early part of our journey, I had been carried back in my dreams to scenes of recent date, and into the society of men with whom I had lived shortly before starting on my expedition. As I proceeded on my journey, events of earlier date returned into my mind, with all the fantastic associations of a dream; and scenes of England, France, and Italy passed successively. Then came the recollections of my University life, of my parents and the members of my family; and, at last, the days of boyhood and of school—at one time as a boy afraid of the look of the master, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... to be appointed military governor of the capital. Imperialism remained an empty name. France was without one ally, nor had the emperor one friend. Meantime Palikao, to appease the irritation of the public, continued to announce victory after victory. Of all his fantastic inventions, the most fantastic was one published immediately after Bazaine had shut himself up with his army in Metz. A despatch was published, and universally accepted with confidence and enthusiasm, announcing that three German army corps had been overthrown at the Quarries of Jaumont. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... now sipping from the small coffee cup in his hand, now setting it down to move excitedly about the room, he talked of his life, his book, his plans. He told anecdotes, strange adventures; he drew his own inverted morals; he sketched his fantastic opinions; he was in truth fascinating, a speaking face, a lithe, brilliant presence, a voice of edged persuasion. He turned witty phrases. Poor Joan! One sentence in ten she understood and answered with her slow smile and her quaint, murmured, "Well!" His eloquence did her ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... of human time brought me back with a shock from the fantastic world to which he had ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... city disagreeable now, for it was the end of June; but they had pleasant rooms upon the Battery, and Fleda's windows looked out upon the waving tops of green trees and the bright waters of the bay. She used to lie gazing out at the coming and going vessels with a curious fantastic interest in them; they seemed oddly to belong to that piece of her life, and to be weaving the threads of her future fate as they flitted about in all directions before her. In a very quiet, placid mood, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... trifle too deep for me, and it's difficult to think of anything but the work I have to do. But you were the first at Silverdale to hold out a hand to me—and I have a feeling that your good wishes would go a long way now. Is it altogether fantastic to believe that the good-will of my first friend would help to ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... turrets and towers, all seeming to be ornamented with fretwork where the sun's rays struck the peaks and turned them into silver and gold. Lower down the ice looked like animals, so twisted was it into fantastic shapes; fierce sea monsters with yawning mouths seeming ready to devour; bears and wolves, whales, gigantic elephants, and snowy tigers, tropic beasts looking strangely out of place in ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet
... always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.—Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... from getting any shade the better of them. Debutantes with shy eyes and slim figures had their little plans to engineer delicately. Sometimes they were larger plans than the uninitiated would have suspected as existing in the brains of creatures in their 'teens, sometimes they were mere fantastic little ideas connected with dashing young men or innocent dances which must be secured or lovely young rivals who must be evaded. Young men had also deft things to do— people to see or not to ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... patch'd up with voices rude, The drunken bastard of the multitude, (Begot when father Judgment is away, And, gossip-like, says because others say, Takes news as if it were too hot to eat, And spits it slavering forth for dog-fees meat,) Make me, for forging a fantastic vow, Presume to bear what makes grave matrons bow? Good vows are never broken with good deeds, For then good deeds were bad: vows are but seeds, And good deeds fruits; even those good deeds that grow From other ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... dreariness, its lonely lakes reflecting a dull, grey sky, its desolate boglands, its solitary chapels, its wretched cabins perched on hillsides that are very wildernesses of rocks. But for cloud effects, for wonderful shadows, for fantastic and unbelievable sunsets, when the mountains are violet, the lakes silver with red flashes, the islets gold and crimson and purple, and the whole cloudy west in a flame, it is unsurpassed; only your standard of ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the mental constitution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily reception of the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... disappeared instantly below the counter rim. Silence, except for the voices of the rain and the wind. Ling Foo, tensely, even painfully alive now, waited. He was afraid, and it was perfectly logical fear. Perhaps they had not noticed him in the alcove. So he waited for this fantastic ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... way lay parallel with the railroad tracks, and he drove for some time beside long lines of freight and coal cars as they stood resting for the night. The fantastic Queen Anne suburban stations were dark and deserted, but in one or two of the block-towers he could see the operators writing at their desks, and the sight in some ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... gently heaving surface reflecting the light of the stars. Where the river debouched, there was a sheltered cove of fine white sand, and here every species of gaily painted craft was drawn up. The light from the Market Square, ablaze with lamps, reached out to it and shewed boat after boat of fantastic shape and colour, with striped awnings fixed on bamboo poles over their centre, lying in the shelter of the palm-trees that fringed the cove. We rounded the slight promontory on our left hand and came full into the light of ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating "'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door, Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door: This ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... others preferred Laurentia or Britannia. If the maritime union had been effected, the name of that division would probably have been Acadia, and this name was suggested for the larger union. Other ideas were merely fantastic, such as Cabotia, Columbia, Canadia, and Ursalia. The decision that Canada should give up its name {128} to the new Confederation and that Upper and Lower Canada should find new names for themselves was undoubtedly a ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... which is but for a moment; now with ringing laugh and reckless gaiety he enjoys the present, forgetful alike of past and future, now with stormy passions raging he "like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep;" and then is his short act over, then the curtain falls and then will he be called before it to receive approbation? Who can tell, I judge not one individually; but I may generalize and say, that while as a rule we ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... the projections from which, the arches spring, usually carved in some fantastic mask or face; and on these the Shakspearian imagination of the Gothic artists seems to have let itself loose to run riot: there is every variety of expression, from, the most beautiful to the most goblin and grotesque. One ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... said quietly, "pay his sincerest homage to the most beautiful woman he has even seen." And as the girl moved proudly away, the strain of fantastic music which followed ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... "pretty" charity schools; and, if they ever enter upon a work of higher rank, economy is the order of the day: plaster and stucco are substituted for granite and marble; rods of splashed iron for columns of verd-antique; and in the wild struggle after novelty, the fantastic is mistaken for the graceful, the complicated for the imposing, superfluity of ornament for beauty, and ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... face exposed; and this too might be covered by a species of veil or mask, which, however, was now fastened back on the headpiece, after the manner of a visor. The front of the tunic was embroidered with fantastic devices in gold thread, brightened here and there with precious stones; and other devices appeared on the hood. The face of this figure was pale and calm, with great dark eyes beneath black brows. The stature was no greater than that of a lad ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... town. The strangers entered the first house they came to, which was also the largest, and found the floor strewn with pieces of the people who lived there. They looked much like fragments of wood neatly painted, and were of all sorts of curious and fantastic shapes, no two pieces being ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... mean time I neglect the momentous history which I have proposed to write, and leave my day's pleasurers to fade into the background of a fantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look without pain upon the discomforts which they suffer at this stage of their joyous enterprise. At the best, the portables of such a party are apt to be grievous embarrassments: a package of shawls ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the revolt of the colonies on Mars and Venus. Talking about something he calls the Terran Federation, some kind of a world empire. Or something he calls Operation Triple Cross, that saved the country during some fantastic war ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... many happy hours over these scraps, building up the fantastic fairy tale of Paragot's antecedents, and should have gone on reading them for an indefinite time had not Paragot one day discovered me. It was then that I learned the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... to sell the lands, but the council was protracted, pending the arrival of other bands. Not until July 27th did they make any movement to close the deal. On that day, Ma-ghe-ga-bo, a warrior of the Pillager band, dressed in his most fantastic costume, covered a map of the land in question with a piece of paper, remarking that when the paper was removed the land would be considered sold. He added a final request: "My father, in all the country we sell you, we wish to hold on to that which gives us life—the streams and lakes where ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... floors, made for the convenience of transporting the ore to the mouth of the mine. The walking then became comparatively easy, but Mark's weariness was on the increase, and there were moments when the faint glow of light which spread around Dummy, as he walked in front, grew misty and strange, playing fantastic tricks to the observer's eye: now it seemed close to him; now it and the black silhouette it formed of the bearer's body appeared to be far-off, and to die away in the distance, but only to return again ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... "and it is just as well. Or the west-ends of the world would reek with deodorizers. Restitution is inconceivable; how and to whom? And in the meanwhile here we are lifted up by our advantage to a fantastic appearance of opportunity. Whether the world looks to us or not to do tremendous things, it ought to look to us. And above all we ought to ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... seek Wisdom. But if she is sought for the sake of getting these attendant blessings, she will not be found. She must be loved for herself, not for her dowry, or she will not be won. At the same time, the overstrained and fantastic morality, which stigmatises regard to the blessed results of a religious life as selfishness, finds no support in Scripture, as it has none in common sense. Would there were more ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... annual report of the United States Commissioner of Labor is given a long catalog of theories that have been suggested, many of them quite fantastic.] ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... man!" the magistrate exclaimed, "Fantomas is a perfect obsession with you," and as Juve acquiesced with a laugh the magistrate dropped his bantering tone. "Shall I tell you something, Juve? I too am beginning to have an obsession for that fantastic miscreant! And what I want to know is why you have not come to me before to ask me about that sensational robbery at the Royal ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... days at Chela, we descended the stream in canoes, shooting over pebbly rapids, and amongst rocks of limestone, water-worn into fantastic shapes, till we at last found ourselves gliding gently along the still canals of the Jheels. Many of these rapids are so far artificial, that they are enclosed by gravel banks, six feet high, which, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the idea appealed to me. There was suddenly something fantastic, unbelievable, in the ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flame, Gives to the tomb she mock'd, her beauteous frame; Yet diff'rent far, where Claudio sees return'd To life, and love, the maid too rashly spurn'd; Or Falstaff, in his sympathetic scroll, Forth to the Wives of Windsor pours his soul. Again, forsaking mirth's fantastic rites, The Muse to follow, through her nobler flights, Where Milton paints angelic hosts in arms, And Heaven's wide champaign rings with dire alarms, Till 'vengeful justice wings its dreadful way, And hurls ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... stars, swinging about in the sky, like incandescent bulbs strung on a wire, made their appearance here and there. They came out rapidly, by twos and threes, by scores and hundreds. In clusters and fantastic figures they swam about in the ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... met their eyes. All about were great rocks rent and torn by the awful power of the lightning. The fronts of the stone cliffs were scarred and burned by the electrical fire, and fantastic markings, grotesque faces, and leering animals seemed to have been drawn by some gigantic artist who used a bolt from heaven for ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... the more prevalent way, if there were nothing but this inferior bent of herself to restrain her. Lastly, the love of learning, as it is the pursuit of something good, it would sooner follow the more excellent and supreme good known and presented, and so be quickly diverted from the empty and fantastic chase of shadows and notions, to the solid good flowing from due and timely obedience to that command in the Gospel set out by the terrible seasing of him ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... guilty, was, curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it was only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic and he wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in the fantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimes flashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these are the dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and true things ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... great dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family, in a massive dim-gold frame; dark-hued rugs on the tiled floor; dark pieces of furniture, tables, cabinets, dark and heavy; and tall windows, bare of curtains at this season, opening upon a court—a wide stone-eaved court, planted with fantastic-leaved eucalyptus-trees, in the midst of which a brown old fountain, indefatigable, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... as close to the edge of the ravine as was prudent, so that the moonlight fell about them. They were enabled to see quite a long distance up and down the pass, the uncertain light, however, causing objects to assume a fantastic contour, which would have made an inexperienced person uncertain whether he was looking down upon animate or inanimate objects. They were on the point of moving away, when Fred Munson exclaimed, ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... as children, we first encounter the words, in geographical compilations disguised as books of travel, what visions do they not summon up! Visions of the realm of the Frost King and of his Regent, the White Tzar, as fantastic as any of those narrated of tropic climes by Scheherezade, and with which we are far more familiar than we are with the history of our ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... farther into the cave, and found that it increased in grandeur and beauty. The walls glittered with the light of the torches, the ceiling rose higher, and became a great vaulted dome. From the roof hung fantastic stalactites and from the floor stalagmites equally fantastic shot up to meet them. Slow water fell drop by drop from the point of the stalactite upon the ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had also brought stores of valuable ornaments which had once belonged to wealthy Mexican families, their value increased by the quaint, old time setting, and the romance connected with them; and Elsie consumed hours in adorning herself with them, laughing at her own fantastic appearance, and dancing about like a regular ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... reached by the road skirting the river, the opposite low banks of which are fringed with willows and endless rows of poplars, which at the time of our visit were already golden with the fading tints of autumn. Numerous fantastic windmills crown the heights, the summit of which is covered with vines, varied by dense patches of woodland. Here, as elsewhere along the banks of the Loire, the many abandoned quarries along the face of the hill have been turned by the peasants into cosy dwellings ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... of the simplest strains to be heard,—as simple as the curve in form, delighting from the pure element of harmony and beauty it contains, and not from any novel or fantastic modulation of it,—thus contrasting strongly with such rollicking, hilarious songsters as the bobolink, in whom we are chiefly pleased with tintinnabulation, the verbal and labial excellence, and the evident conceit ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... wanted to talk about," he broke in. There was something bewitching about the girl. She more than realized his fantastic visions of the night. She had mastered him. Perhaps it was a subtle masculine desire to turn her mastery into ultimate ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... vineyards, which began to spread themselves up the steep sides of the hills, delighted us all; and our prospects now began to be diversified with rock, which in a thousand fantastic forms showed itself along the heights. The country seemed thickly spread with villages, many at the edge of the water, others receding into winding valleys, and all boasting some peculiar beauty. Whether upon a nearer approach they would have been equally pleasing, it is not possible to ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... to twenty feet; and that at a moment when, driven by wind and current, the huge fragments are impelled over each other with a roar that can only be likened to continuous thunder, forming, in various directions, lofty peaks from which the sun's rays are reflected in a thousand fantastic shades and shapes. On these occasions the sleighs, or carioles, are drawn, not as otherwise customary, by the fast trotting little horses of the country, but by expert natives whose mode of transport is as follows: A strong ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... ridiculed the girl's fantastic vagaries; her sound common sense rallied to her aid. "They are the people who remember; sane folk forget. Work is the only cure ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... over the city, as I peer from my tower window,—driving, ever driving, from the east, and changing, ever changing, their fantastic shapes. Now they are the waving hands and gowns of a closely packed multitude surging with human passions; now they are the headlong rout of a flying army upon which press hordes of riders, dark, fierce, and barbarous—horses with tumultuous ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne |
