"Marvellous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... saying, "It is so, I read it in a book." We should have little hopes of those who swallow every thing they read in a book; we are always pleased to see a child hesitate and doubt, and require positive proof before he believes. The taste for the marvellous, is strong in ignorant minds; the wish to account for every new appearance, characterizes the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... dreams and intentions were undoubtedly good, and, had he been able to carry them out for the benefit of the world, would have entitled himself to the name of a great poet, a great genius. His readiness to discuss all subjects, and his ability to talk on most of them with ease, were marvellous. But he was always infirm of purpose, and never did ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... francs 50 centimes to a Richebourg at 20 francs, the Burgundy offered to the traveller in Belgium is generally unimpeachable. Ghent is another town famous for its big feasts. The market dinner on Friday at the Hotel de la Poste is often quoted as a marvellous "spread," but the best restaurant in Ghent is undoubtedly Mottez's, on the Avenue Place d'Armes. This is an old-fashioned place with no appearance of a restaurant outside, and a stranger would easily pass it by. Here one dines ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... of my first name was, I knew, inadvertent and unconscious. It thrilled me. There was a marvellous fascination always about Vicky Van, and now, at the end of this my mysterious night telephone conversation, I felt its thrill and ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... John Britton stood alone on one of the mountain terraces, his tall, lithe form silhouetted against the evening sky, his arms folded, his face lifted upward. It was a face of marvellous strength and sweetness combined. Sorrow had set its unmistakable seal upon his features; here and there pain had traced its ineffaceable lines; but the firmly set mouth was yet inexpressibly tender, the calm brow was unfurrowed, and the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... twisted elastic, and caught him in such a grip that he was powerless to free himself. Bolter passed on from beneath, and the more he fought and struggled the tighter he became entangled. Had his arms been free it would have been different; but the strength of the cane was marvellous—moreover, it was covered with vicious thorns. That Bob had fought desperately for his life was to be seen by the condition of his shirt and his deeply-scored skin. He was now in a state of more than semi-unconsciousness from exhaustion and starvation; ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... to symmetry and proportion. The different articles, keeping strictly each in its own place, formed a very attractive group wonderful to behold. Diana, placed in the apex of the pyramid, would remind you of those marvellous suspensions in the air performed by Houdin, Herman, and a few other first class wizards. Only being kept in her place without being hampered by invisible strings, the animal rather seemed to enjoy the exhibition, though ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the faculty is claimed by many, but possessed by few. After all, however mystifying it may be to the ordinary mind, hard facts cannot be ignored, and proof positive has repeatedly been adduced of the good work done by men possessing this marvellous faculty. ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... a steady black pony, with a light open wagon, appeared at the door; and by ten o'clock the travellers reached the mountain top. Their steed showed marvellous endurance in the way of slow pacing down steep hills, which they afterward found had been acquired in leading sad trains of mourners to the modest graveyards, wherein rest the earthly remains of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... talker, and her voice had the quality which fixes attention. At luncheon, whilst half-a-dozen persons lent willing ear, she compared Sarasate's playing of Beethoven's Concerto with that of Joachim, and declared that Sarasate's cadenza in the first movement, though marvellous for technical skill, was not at all in the spirit of the work. The influential writer applauded, drawing her on to fresh displays of learning, taste, eloquence. She had a great deal to say about somebody's 'technique of the left hand', of ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... ship was much shorter than the Spanish; and this (with the rig of those days) gave them an ease in manoeuvring, which utterly confounded their Spanish foes. "The English ships in the fight of 1588," says Camden, "charged the enemy with marvellous agility, and having discharged their broadsides, flew forth presently into the deep, and levelled their shot directly, without missing, at those great ships of the Spaniards, which were altogether heavy and unwieldy." ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the very newest of new towns, in fact it only had an existence of eighteen months; as may be inferred, it had no past, but any want in that respect was compensated for in its marvellous future. It was to be the great grain emporium of the North-west; it was to kill St. Paul, Milwaukie, Chicago, and half-a-dozen other thriving towns; its murderous propensities seemed to have no bounds; lots were ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... reader will feel delight in the accuracy with which the details are painted, and the marvellous clearness with which the whole scene is imagined, both in its objective and subjective relations, i.e., both in the objects seen and the emotions ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... effect. How any British officer could have been so imprudent as to give the order to charge into the nullah is almost inconceivable; that the error was not evident, while the brave men were being mowed down by an artillery fire, which they could do nothing to silence, is still more marvellous; such, however, was the case. Colonel Havelock dashed into the ford at the head of the 14th Light Dragoons, but was never seen again. A native trooper supposed he saw him in the nullah soon after he entered it, unhorsed, and several ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the world; but somehow my wife began to have a kind of idea of her own that all was not right. Do you know, Hamilton, the intuitions of that woman are something marvellous—marvellous, sir! Her perceptions are something outside herself, something transcendental, sir. So I telegraphed to my friend Clinton, and here we ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... Pretoria. They fight splendidly. I watched the battle until the wounded began to come in, and the way those regiments by the railway advanced under a fire that seemed as if nothing could live for a minute, was marvellous. But brave as they are, they will never force their way through these hills. They will never get to Ladysmith. Well, perhaps we shall meet ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty
... disposed in their proper places of rest, the goddess transports the king to her temple, and there lays him to slumber with his head on her lap; a position of marvellous virtue, which causes all the visions of wild enthusiasts, projectors, politicians, inamoratos, castle-builders, chemists, and poets. He is immediately carried on the wings of Fancy, and led by a mad poetical Sibyl, to the Elysian shade; ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... which was oscillating above our heads. Louis Godard again proposed to descend; but we said, 'No! forward! forward!' Two hours sped away without our being able to tell where we were. At five o'clock day broke, and broad daylight came on with marvellous rapidity. It is true that we were at a height of 980 metres. Novel-writers and others have so much abused descriptions of sunrise, on mountains and on the ocean, that I shall say little about this one, although it is not a common thing to ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... you say," answered Nello; and then added, with an air of extra gravity, but with marvellous rapidity, "and his waxen image in the Nunziata fell at the same moment, they say; or at some other time, whenever it pleases the Frati Serviti, who know best. And several cows and women have had still-born calves this Quaresima; ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... marvellous man! Nearly all the morning he was closeted with the financiers; in the afternoon he went for a ride with Lady Clansford; he was in attendance at the solemn function of afternoon tea; he played croquet—and played it well—at half-past five; at six I saw him walking round ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... that had ever been set in the face of a mortal. She caught her breath. What could it mean? No man could live the life he had lived—Lady Mary, who had a fine turn for gossip, had told her all that Lord Hunsdon had left unsaid—and keep his soul unspotted. It was marvellous, incredible. She recalled confusedly something Hunsdon had said about his having a beautiful character—well, that was originally, not after years of degradation. Besides, Hunsdon was a ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... mother was too ignorant to save her own baby boy! Indeed, I know of no greater instance of the cruelty of "the conspiracy of silence" than the fact that in all the orthodox medical manuals for young mothers the necessary knowledge is withheld.[8] But more marvellous still is the fact that women should ever have placidly consented to an ignorance which makes it impossible for them to save even baby boys from a corrupt nursemaid, who by some evil chance may have found her way into their service through a false character or under ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... truth about the man on whom people have been pleased to fix an iron mask. And thus was it related in writing, and published by M. ——- twenty years ago. He had searched the archives of the Foreign Office, and laid the real story before the public; but the public, prepossessed in favour of a marvellous version, would not acknowledge the authenticity of his account. Every man relied upon the authority of Voltaire; and it was believed that a natural or a twin brother of Louis XIV. lived many years in prison with a mask over ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... least, the marvellous Ethiope, Changing his skin by preternatural skill, Whom every setting sun's diurnal slope Leaves whiter than the last, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... stomach, and courage, fighteth, and crieth, and by crying and fighting, by help from heaven, its way is made through all the oppositions that appear so mighty, and draweth up at last to Jesus Christ, into whose bosom it putteth the soul, where, for the time, it sweetly resteth after its marvellous tossings to and fro.27 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of his character; and when Phoby made up, she took and told him, in all the boldness of affection, to make himself scarce, for she wouldn't have him—no, not if he was the last man in the world and she the last woman. I daresay she overstated the case, as women will. But what appeared marvellous to all observers was that the girl had no particular good looks that wouldn't have passed anywhere in a crowd, and yet these two had singled ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... molecules of the glass, and a current of electricity and magnetism passes through it into the room; this current, falling upon animal or vegetable life within, stimulates it to unusual vigor. Certainly the results achieved, and abundantly certified to, are marvellous, and sufficient to provoke further experiments and inquiry." Prior to these splendid original discoveries of our contemporary, we ignorantly believed that blue glass only partially sifted out the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... with his guards, to the vestibule; and then entered, first the Holy, and then the Holy of Holies. After one glance at the beauty and magnificence of the marvellous shrine, he rushed back and again implored his soldiers to exert themselves to save it; and ordered Liberatus to strike down any who disobeyed. But the soldiers were now altogether beyond control, and were mad with ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... whole day along the shore of the Lake of Geneva, and yet when in the evening his comrades spoke some word about the lake, he inquired: 'What lake?'[3] It was not mere difference of temperament that made the preacher of one age pass by in this marvellous unconsciousness, and the singer of another burst forth into that tender invocation of 'clear placid Leman,' whose 'contrasted lake with the wild world he dwelt in' moved him to the very depths. To Saint Bernard the world was as wild and confused as it was to Byron; ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... a strange motion on the part of Hyndford; but Friedrich, severely silent to it, understands it very well; as readers soon will, when they hear farther. But marvellous things have happened on the sudden! In these three weeks, since the Camp of Strehlen broke up, there have been such Events; strategic, diplomatic: a very avalanche of ruin, hurling Austria down to the Nadir; of which it is ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... resistance was hopeless, resorted at once to their old game of intrigue and management, and proved that, fresh as they were from the experience of violent methods, they had not forgotten their old art of manipulating Presidents. They adapted themselves with marvellous flexibility to the changed condition of things, in order to become masters of the situation, and began to declaim in favor of the Union, even while their curses against it were yet echoing in the air. They wheedled the President into pardoning, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... numberless other feats of bravado, went to make up the heroic legend of Perenna. It threw into relief the superhuman energy, the marvellous recklessness, the bewildering fancy, the spirit of adventure, the physical dexterity, and the coolness of a singularly mysterious individual whom it was impossible not to take for Arsene Lupin, but a new and greater Arsene Lupin, dignified, ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride; Of Burns, who walk'd in glory and in joy Behind ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... had hurt him, or whether the fresh air was too much for him, nobody ever knew. He died, and there being no professional naturalist on the spot, his body was not preserved. The men of the gang gathered around his death-bed, and the contractor had some marvellous stories to tell of things of the kind he had met with ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Brother John, sometimes he used this formal term when excited, "it is the most marvellous Cypripedium in the whole earth, and, sir, I have discovered it. A healthy root of that plant will be ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... speed attained by the wretched half-starved animals is little short of marvellous. Nothing seems to tire them. We averaged fifty miles a day after leaving Teheran, covering, on one occasion, over a hundred miles in a little over eleven hours. This is good work, considering the ponies seldom exceed fourteen hands ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... atmosphere, perhaps thousands of miles above their solid surfaces, and a somewhat similar condition seems to prevail in the far more remote planets Uranus and Neptune. It has thus happened, that, although as telescopic objects of interest and beauty, the marvellous rings of Saturn, the belts and ever-changing aspects of the satellites of Jupiter, and the moon-like phases of Venus, together with its extreme brilliancy, still remain unsurpassed, yet the greater amount of details of these features when examined with the powerful instruments of the nineteenth ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... intelligent and hospitable Padre, or Catholic priest, of Santa Cruz del Quiche, formerly of the village of Chajul; and of the exciting information he had received from him, concerning immense and marvellous antiquities in the surrounding country, which, to the present hour, remain entirely unknown to the world. The Padre told him of vast ruins, in a deserted and desolate region, but four leagues from Vera Paz, more extensive than Quiche itself; and of another ruined ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... Basil at his forge and with wondering eyes had seen him handle the hoof of a horse as easily as a plaything, taking it into his lap and nailing on the shoe. Together they had ridden on sledges in winter and hunted birds' nests in summer, seeking eagerly that marvellous stone which the swallow is said to bring from the shore of the sea to restore the sight of its fledglings. Lucky is he who ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... We ask him where he heard the tune. "O, I catch him from the phunny-graph, me at the Mission." Canned culture even here! It is light enough to read on the deck at quarter past eleven. We chunk along through a lake of amethyst and opal, the marvellous midnight light keeping us from sleep. On the scow astern, sprawled on the season's output of fur, the men smoke and argue. In the North, men talk of feats of strength and endurance, boast about their dogs, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... domain the products of nature and of human industry vie with each other in extent and variety. A bare enumeration would read like a page of a gazetteer and possibly make no more impression than a column of figures. To form an estimate of the marvellous fecundity of the country and to realise its picturesqueness, one ought to visit the provinces in succession and spend a year in the exploration of each. If one is precluded from such leisurely observation, ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... table, at which he worked, he had placed, as it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's Daughter. He would gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of her skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting what he had already felt to be beautiful, on aesthetic grounds, to the idea of a living woman, he converted it into a series of physical merits which he congratulated himself ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... such; for he was a curious and industrious collector of old local traditions—a commodity in which the quarter where he resided mightily abounded. The collection and arrangement of such legends was, as long as I can remember him, his hobby; but I had never learned that his love of the marvellous and whimsical had carried him so far as to prompt him to commit the results of his inquiries to writing, until, in the character of residuary legatee, his will put me in possession of all his manuscript papers. To such as may think the composing of such productions ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the music was glowing with love too. "Again!" he whispered as the last chord sounded. The old man threw him an eagle glance, struck his hand on his chest and saying deliberately in his own tongue, "This is my work, I am a great musician," he played again his marvellous composition. There was no candle in the room; the light of the rising moon fell aslant on the window; the soft air was vibrating with sound; the poor little room seemed a holy place, and the old man's head stood out noble and inspired in the silvery half light. Lavretsky went ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... fictions of the Provencal writers, whether drawn from the Arabian legends, brought by the Saracens into Spain, or recounting the chivalric exploits performed by the crusaders, whom the Troubadors accompanied to the east, were generally splendid and always marvellous, both in scenery and incident; and it is not wonderful, that Dorothee and Ludovico should be fascinated by inventions, which had captivated the careless imagination in every rank of society, in a former age. Some of the tales, however, in the book now before Ludovico, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... canst thou not allure me. Willingly will I employ my hands in industry and toil; I will look around me at thy bidding; I will celebrate the full glory of thy splendour; trace out, untired, the beauteous consistency of thy wondrous work; willingly will I mark the marvellous course of thy mighty, glowing timepiece; observe the balance of gigantic powers, and the laws of the wondrous play of countless spaces and their periods. But true to the Night remains my heart of hearts, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart for ever faithful? ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... churches will listen to the call of Christ and appreciate the opportunity which he has placed before them, there may be in these mountains, filled with their marvellous mineral wealth, Congregational churches which shall be not only self-supporting, but give generously for the advancement of Christ's kingdom throughout the earth. The most generous giver I know, is a native of the mountains and a member of ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... the sights she saw on the journey inflated Tottie's soul with joy, the glories of Rosebud Cottage almost exploded her. It was a marvellous cottage. Rosebushes surrounded it, ivy smothered it, leaving just enough of room for the windows to peep out, and a few of the old red bricks to show in harmony with the green. Creepers in great variety embraced it, and a picturesque clump of trees on a knoll behind sheltered ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... doesn't; still, it defies them a good deal), no one can doubt that it must rank among the very greatest books that have ever been written. How Odyssean it is in its sincerity and downrightness, as well as in the marvellous beauty of its language, its freedom from all taint of the schools and, not least, in complete victory of genuine internal zeal over a scheme initially so faulty as ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... them. In short, all were employed in some way, to divert their minds from the contemplation of their miserable condition. Some would read while others listened; some practice fencing; some sing, some dance. Others would relate their adventures, many of which savored rather too strongly of the marvellous to be readily believed, while others partook in an equal degree of the ludicrous. One of these latter was related by 'Old John Young'—a tale of his early courtship. In his youthful days he lived somewhere in Pennsylvania, where also resided an old farmer, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... between her lips. All she did was to bite a piece out of the glass as clean as if a diamond had cut it. This did her a world of good: destruction of sacred household property gave her another turn. "There, I've broke your glass now," she cried, with a marvellous change of tone; and she came-to and cried quietly like a reasonable person, with her apron to ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... are unpronounceable even by Europeans, what would the poor Hindu malee make of them? The pedantry of some of our scientific Botanists is something marvellous. One would think that a love of flowers must produce or imply a taste for simplicity ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... discrimination, now and again with startlingly eloquent flights and witty sallies. His memory was prodigious. The variety and vivacity of his conversation, the immense range of subjects he brilliantly laboured, when in the vein, remain with me as simply marvellous. With us he mostly was in the vein. And, vanity apart, we must have composed a delightful audience, generously censer-swinging. No man of even average feeling but would be moved by such fresh, such spontaneous admiration! ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... striking examples of what is termed instinct, those in which reason or observation appear to have the least influence, and which seem to imply the possession of faculties farthest removed from our own, are to be found among insects. The marvellous constructive powers of bees and wasps, the social economy of ants, the careful provision for the safety of a progeny they are never to see manifested by many beetles and flies, and the curious preparations for the pupa state by the larvae of ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... clever young doctor, brimful of new methods, who had brought her round, had arrived just in time to stop the process of physical deterioration before it had gone too far; and the recovery of power both on the paralysed side and in general health had been marvellous. She walked with a stick, and was an old and blanched woman before her time. But her indomitable spirit was once more provided with its necessary means of expression. She was at least as rude as ever, and it was as clear as anything ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not difficult to catch his enthusiasm over the marvellous invention, though we could not follow him through the mazes of explanation about radio-combinators, telecommutators and the rest of the technicalities. I may say, however, that on his radio- combinator he had a series of keys marked "Forward," "Back," "Start," ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... Cromwell's wretched compositions that remains, and we shall here extract a passage out of it. "You say you have not so learned Christ as to hang the equity of your cause upon events. We could wish that blindness had not been upon your eyes to all those marvellous dispensations which God hath wrought lately in England. But did not you solemnly appeal and pray? Did not we do so too? And ought not we and you to think, with fear and trembling, of the hand of the great God, in this mighty and strange appearance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... that chamber for the conversation of such a group of happy girls. The bridal trousseau was spread out before them, and upon chairs and couches lay dresses of marvellous fabric and beauty,—muslins and shawls of India and Cashmere, and the finest products of the looms of France and Holland. It was a trousseau fit for a queen, and an evidence at once of the wealth ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... attach to these blocks is not marvellous. The parish in which lies the Punch-Bowl and rises Hind Head, comprises one such Thors-stone, named perhaps after the Scandinavian Thunder god. One of these strange masses of stone formerly occupied a commanding position on the top of ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... master of irony—must have occasionally curled his thin lip on reading some of the epistles which were addressed to him by his friend Pliny. It is a tribute to Pliny's powers of literary discernment that he appreciated the marvellous ability of Tacitus, though had he failed to do so, we should have rated him for his blindness. No cultured Roman could fail to see that Tacitus had brought a new literary style to a pitch of the highest perfection, and his fame throughout his lifetime was enormous. So apparently was Pliny's, and ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... the gorge of the Yuga both Ben and Beatrice were instinctively awed and stilled. Ever the walls of the gorge grew more steep, until the sunlight was cut off and they rode as if in twilight. The stone of the precipices presented a marvellous array of color; and the spruce, almost black in the subdued light, stood in startling contrast. Ben saw at once that even were they able to land they could not—until they had emerged from the gorge—climb to the highlands. A mountain goat, most hardy of all mountaineers, could scarcely scale ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... successful effort, the rondo a la Sicilienne from 'La Clochette,' in which was a silver bell accompaniment to the fiddle, producing a most original effect (one of those effects, we presume, which have tended to associate so much of the marvellous with the name of this genius). No sooner had the outburst of applause ended, than the excited Paddy in the gallery shouted out as loud as ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... passed merrily enough in humorous anticipations of my coming life with the two young ladies in Cumberland. Pesca, inspired by our national grog, which appeared to get into his head, in the most marvellous manner, five minutes after it had gone down his throat, asserted his claims to be considered a complete Englishman by making a series of speeches in rapid succession, proposing my mother's health, my sister's health, my ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... becoming extinct uncounted ages since—simply because it was lacking in the higher qualities which would have enabled it to survive. And even the diplodocus, with its lumbering body and diminutive brain, was whole worlds superior to inorganic nature. That the marvellous thing called human personality should outlast the decay of what is so much inferior to itself, is therefore not only not inconceivable, but in itself not even improbable. It is a strange sort of modesty—to say the least of it—which would make us think ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his Defensio Secunda. It is Milton now, almost alone, that we remember as Cromwell's laureate; but among the sub-laureates there were some by no means insignificant. Old George Wither, though his marvellous metrical fluency had now lapsed into doggrel and senility, had done his best by sending forth, in 1654-5, from some kind of military superintendentship he held in the county of Surrey (Wood calls it distinctly a Major-Generalship at last, but that is surely an exaggeration), two Oliverian poems, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... greater sweep of lake opened out. Here the afternoon wind sprang up, shooting gustily through a gap between the Springs and Hopyard and ruffling the lake out of its noonday siesta. Ripples, chop, and a growing swell followed each other with that marvellous rapidity common to large bodies of fresh water. It broke the monotony of steady cleaving through dead calm. Stella was a good sailor, and she rather enjoyed it when the Chickamin began to lift and yaw off before the following seas that ran up ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... conceived anything like it,' said he. 'I come across witch tales here, there, everywhere; and the marvellous thing is, some of the people ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... till Ralph, her husband, who loved her, sought her out and rescued her, that by the mercy of the Lord during all this time had suffered neither harm nor violence. Yes, many have heard of these things, for in bygone years there was much talk of them as of events out of nature and marvellous, but few have heard them right. Therefore before I go, I, who remember and know them all, would set them down that they may be a record for ever among my descendants and the descendants of Ralph Kenzie, my foster-son, who, having been brought ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... a fresh rival arose to compete for me with my Father's dogmatic theology. This rival was the Sea. When Wordsworth was a little child, the presence of the mountains and the clouds lighted up his spirit with gleams that were like the flashing of a shield. He has described, in the marvellous pages of the 'Prelude', the impact of nature upon the infant soul, but he has described it vaguely and faintly, with some 'infirmity of love for days disowned by memory',—I think because he was brought up in the midst of spectacular beauty, and could ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... smelleth powder, 'tis said, Like a soldier escheweth the taste of cold lead; No jester, or mime, hath more marvellous wit, For, wherever he lighteth, he maketh a hit! Caw! Caw! the Carrion Crow! Dig! Dig! ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... indeed but three years before his name had been noised all over Europe. He had been sentenced to have his ears cut off for some religious offence, when the Judge was taken ill in the court itself, and, the infection travelling with marvellous rapidity, the greater part both of the bench and of the jury were stricken down with gaol fever, and two judges, twelve justices, and other high officials, almost the whole jury, and many others, died within the space of ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... from Atlanta. Efforts were made to concentrate all available forces against him at Augusta to his north-west. Making feints against Augusta on the one side, and against the city and port of Charleston on the other, he displayed the marvellous engineering capacity of his army by an advance of unlooked-for speed across the marshes to Columbia, due north of him, which is the State capital of South Carolina. He reached it on February 17, 1865. The intended concentration of the South at Augusta was broken up. The retreating Confederates ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... is also awakened by the marvellous combinations, in which the work abounds to a degree that the common reader must find perfectly bewildering. This can hardly, however, be treated as a consequence of the style; for the style in this respect coheres with, and springs from, the whole turn and tendency of thought. ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... marvellous in what sparse cover they will manage to lie up. So admirably do their stripes mingle with the withered and charred grass-stems and dried up stalks, that it is very difficult to detect the dreaded robber when he is lying flat, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... had been young and fair, and life had stretched before her like an empty page, on which the most marvellous happenings might be enrolled. Now, she was old and harassed and poor, and there seemed little ahead but work and worry; yet she could not call life ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... period in the painter's career—it may be convenient to mention it here. As an example of accomplished brush-work, of handling careful and yet splendid in breadth, it is indeed worthy of all admiration. The colours of the fair human body, the marvellous wealth of golden blond hair, the youthful flesh glowing semi-transparent, and suggesting the rush of the blood beneath; these are also the colours of the picture, aided only by the indefinite landscape and the deep blue sky of the background. If this were to be accepted as the Magdalen painted ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... general was marvellous, incredible. I have already mentioned that up to the time of his death he kept his almost childishly fresh complexion. Illness was a thing unknown to him, in spite of his excesses; the strength of his constitution never once showed signs of giving way. When any other man would infallibly have ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... It was a marvellous exhibition of sagacity. They came to a place where it was necessary to turn sharply to the right to cross a small creek; one of the dogs shot forward, and sent the leading sheep scurrying down the bank, ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... bringing to enjoyment its riches and its depths." It is the work of a master-mind, as every one must feel who tackles to the study of it, and of one who has mastered the subject of it as not another in England, or perhaps even in Germany, has done. The grip he takes of it is marvellous and his exposition trenchant and clear. It was followed in 1881 by his "Text-book to Kant," an exposition which his "Secret" presupposes, and which he advised the students of it to expect, that they might be able to construe the entire Hegelian system ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... never constructed a more marvellous tale. It contains the strongly marked features that are always conspicuous in Mr. Fenn's stories—a racy humour, the manly vigour of his sentiment, and wholesome moral lessons. For anything to match his realistic touch we must go to Daniel ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... newspaper account of his shipwreck on the filibuster "Commodore" off the Florida coast was as lifeless as the "copy" of a police court reporter. It was many months afterwards that the literary product of his terrible experience appeared in that marvellous sea story "The Open Boat," unsurpassed in its vividness ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... All the marvellous words of the poets rush into my brain when I think of this new blessing. Yes, I have acted a robber's part, sweet Jessica, and he who ravished that great jewel from the Indian idol never carried away so large a draft on the world's happiness as this that I have stolen. I cannot be repentant ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... his mind was made up. He would not ask to be made master of the Sultan's marvellous yacht, that was sent out from Liverpool,—although the possibility made him catch his breath: he would ask nothing for himself,—he would ask that his Excellency let his son Noa go to Mecca, that he might become a hadji and then some day—who knows—Noa might become a kateeb in the attap-thatched ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... subtly alluring, so overwhelmingly full of enchantment. Day after day slipped by in what seemed an endless succession. Night followed magic night, and the spell wound closer and ever closer about her. She sometimes felt as if her very individuality were being absorbed into the marvellous beauty about her, as if she had been crystallized by it and must soon cease to be in any sense a being apart ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... have contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gift as a story-teller.... Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... cleverly perpetrated, was from the point of view of penetrability a weak failure. Traces and trails were left on all sides—ragged edges, rough-hewn corners; in short, the job was botched, artistic completeness unattained. To the vulgar, my feats might seem marvellous—the average man is mystified to grasp how you detect the letter 'e' in a simple cryptogram—to myself they were as commonplace as the crimes they unveiled. To me now, with my lifelong study of the science of evidence, it seemed possible to commit not merely one but a thousand ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... does not matter what that garment may be; so long as it is whole, off it comes. But as soon as that garment becomes a series of holes, held together by filaments of rag, he keeps it upon him in a manner that is marvellous, and you need have no further anxiety on its behalf. Therefore it was but natural that the governmental cummerbunds, being new, should come off their wearers several times in the course of our two mile trip, and as they wound riskily round the legs of their running wearers, we had to make ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... whether historical or fabulous, are always crowded with incidents, by which the attention of a rude people was more easily caught than by sentiment or argumentation; and such is the power of the marvellous, even over those who despise it, that every man finds his mind more strongly seized by the tragedies of Shakespeare than of any other writer: others please us by particular speeches; but he always makes us anxious for the event, and has, perhaps, excelled all but ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... said soothingly, "we may be sure it's all for the best;" and he stood looking down fondly at her. Amroth crossed the room and stood beside the pair, with a hand on the shoulder of each. I saw in an instant that there was an unmistakable likeness between the three; but the contrast of the marvellous brilliance and beauty of Amroth with the old, world-wearied, simple-minded couple was the most extraordinary thing to behold. "Yes, I feel better already," said the old lady, smiling; "it always does me good to say out what I am feeling, ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and taste saw the maiden's face, And thought her beauty would grace his stately southern home, So he took her there, with pictures from France, and statues from Rome, And marvellous works of art from many an ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... from the enemies that were round about, making rebellious nations subject to him, especially those Frisians who had invaded his territories. Moreover, God did make his days illustrious by many marvellous deeds, so that an age of gold seemed to have been granted to his land of Utrecht. But this did appear more evidently after the Bishop's death, when a schism—exceeding lawless and long enduring—arose and increased among Clerks ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... of Kossuth is often too Asiatic for English taste, and that excision of words, which needful abridgment suggests, will often seem to us a gain. Moreover, remembering that he is a foreigner, and though marvellous in his mastery of our language, still naturally often unable to seize the word, or select the construction which he desired, I have not thought I should show honour to him by retaining anything verbally unskilful. To a ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... I was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe?). "All I can say for myself is that I do not think my concubines have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of anything marvellous." ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... fell upon the lithe figure of the young girl folding tucks that were to be made in the skirt, measuring distances, placing pins here and there for guides; and, as the dawn broke, she sat down unwearily, and sent her needle in and out of the transparent fabric with a rapidity of motion marvellous to behold. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... country roads. But, then, Champion Harrison told me how the fighting-men lived there, and my father how the heads of the Navy lived there, and my mother how her brother and his grand friends were there, until at last I was consumed with impatience to see this marvellous heart of England. This coming of my uncle, then, was the breaking of light through the darkness, though I hardly dared to hope that he would take me with him into those high circles in which he lived. My mother, however, had such confidence either in his good nature or in her own powers of persuasion, ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... It was almost marvellous to Max to see the way in which the great forester made his way up the gully, so that he would have been at the top in half the time if he had not kept stopping to reach down his hand to the lad, who was at various places compelled to ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... when we compare with these inductions the actual state of man, as displayed to us in the page of history, and in our own daily observation, the conviction is forced upon us, that some mighty change has taken place in this beauteous system, some marvellous disruption of its moral harmony. The manner in which this condition arose,—or the origin of moral evil under the government of God, is a question entirely beyond the reach of the human faculties.—It is one of those, however, on which it is simply our duty to keep in mind, that ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... telescopic-sight as we now do in gunnery. This not only removes the difficulty of focussing, but makes the minimum visible angle smaller. Helmholtz has defined the minimum angle measurable with the naked eye as being one minute of arc. In view of this it is simply marvellous that, when the positions of Tycho's standard stars are compared with the best modern catalogues, his probable error in right ascension is only /- 24", 1, and in declination only ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... Going in, he inquired about its privileges, and became a regular borrower of books. Peter had always been a reader, but now he gave from three or four hours a day to books, aside from his law study. Although he was slow, the number of volumes, he not merely read, but really mastered was marvellous. Books which he liked, without much regard to their popular reputation, he at once bought; for his simple life left him the ability to indulge himself in most respects within moderation. He was particularly careful to read a classic occasionally ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... heirs would not probably be very willing to acknowledge the true source from which the wealth and position they may now be enjoying was derived,—and finally a traffic which, in its attending homicides and desperate affrays, its hot pursuits and marvellous escapes, its curious concealments and artful subterfuges, and, lastly, in the family and neighborhood feuds which it left behind, would furnish materials for a series of tales as wild and romantic, if not always as creditable to the actors, as any thing ever ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... introduce the motion in the House of Commons, and his speech was a truly marvellous feat of oratory. He was interrupted on all sides of the House, and in a speech of nearly five hours in length never once lost the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... to be a mere lovable fault of temperament. When Michael Angelo actually did bring a thing off, the result was not always more than magnificent. His David is magnificent, but it isn't David. One is duly awed, but, to see the master at his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that marvellous bleak Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the mind's ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... him," Lord Dorminster replied, indicating the pile of manuscript upon the table,—"a dispatch which came into my hands in a most marvellous fashion. He died last week in a nursing home in—well, let us say a foreign capital. The professor in charge of the hospital sends a long report as to the unhappy disease from which he suffered. As a matter of ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... responds to what have been called Suggestions of Personality. As early as the second month it distinguishes its mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic methods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts itself, by a marvellous accuracy of protestation or acquiescence, to these personal variations. Its associations of personality come to be of such importance that for a long time its happiness or misery depends upon the presence of certain kinds of "personality suggestion." It is quite a different ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... then let your vision sweep past and over the islands to the outlets beyond, where the quiet ocean lies, bordered with fog-banks that loom ominously at the boundary-line of the horizon, you will see a picture of marvellous beauty; for the coast scenery here transcends our own sea-shores, both in color and outline. And behind us again stretch large green plains, dotted with cottages, and bounded with undulating hills, with now and then glimpses of blue water; and as we walk down Citadel Hill, we feel half-reconciled ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... other, to see whether I could discover anything inside, and this being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having remained there some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire—fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvellous ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... subject which this woman has not pondered deeply. Her theory of Temperament is an attendant fairy that does marvellous things for her, and not only apportions natures, but corresponding bodies, so that we can easily see how the golden age is to return again, when peradventure deceits shall be impossible, and all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... The marvellous saloon, still flooded with light, had been carefully closed. The iron door leading on deck was then securely fastened in such a manner as to prevent even a drop of water from penetrating to the interior of ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... in the most unreserved manner, yet was strangely jealous on some points. I called on him two or three times before the voyage of the "Beagle", and on one occasion he asked me to look through a microscope and describe what I saw. This I did, and believe now that it was the marvellous currents of protoplasm in some vegetable cell. I then asked him what I had seen; but he answered me, "That is ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... is marvellous!" he said exuberantly. "The blue patches appeared after the plague, didn't they? After ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... recalled a marvellous stage-curtain entirely of glass mosaic executed by Louis C. Tiffany, of New York, for the Municipal Theatre at Mexico City. The work had attracted universal attention at its exhibition, art critics and connoisseurs had praised it unstintingly, and Bok decided ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... our legendary and marvellous French basilica, to bid it farewell, before its fall and irremediable crumbling to dust, I had made my military auto make a detour of two hours on my return from completing ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... cogency see; And I grieve to confess, did the poor Irish Church Stand on reasoning alone, she'd be left in the lurch. It was therefore, dear Lizzy, with joy most sincere, That I heard this nice Reverend O'something we've here, Produce, from the depths of his knowledge and reading, A view of that marvellous Church, far exceeding, In novelty, force, and profoundness of thought, All that Irving himself ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and tore down the road, an archaic figure in his towering bearskin. He reached the troops uninjured and gave the order for them to retreat, but as they fell back the German gunners got the range and with marvellous accuracy dropped shell after shell into the running column. Soon road and fields were dotted ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... rush and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed significance of each line, the allusiveness of each word—his imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored. Danyers had written, at college, the prize essay on Rendle's poetry (it chanced to be the moment of the great man's death); he had fashioned the fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... consecutive fifths and octaves, or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules, that he wrote false relations with the most outrageous recklessness, that his melodies were irregular and not measured out by the bar; but they could not feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous beauty of the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous expressiveness of his music. These old doctors may be forgiven, and, being long dead, they care very little whether they are forgiven or not. But the modern men who parrot-like echo their ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... marvellous statue of ivory and silver," the maid exclaimed. "But she should have some colour. If Madame—but no, it is too late. There is a knock. It will be Monsieur. Shall I ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... together with their dead and wounded, were transferred to the felucca and dispatched to the shore, the Spanish captain being entrusted with the letter to the governor or commandant of the town; and then the English found time to look into their own affairs and take a meal. It was found that by a marvellous stroke of good fortune the galleon had been captured without the loss of a man, or even so much as a single casualty on the English side; and, this being the case, the question arose whether or not they should retain possession of the vessel, dividing the Adventure's ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... sermon my wife likes best with me; but I know it lacks—it lacks—it isn't what you need! I was dreadfully scared and I felt miserable when I got up to preach it—and then to think that you were—but it is the Lord's doing and marvellous in our eyes! I don't know what Maggie will say when I tell her we can get the window. The best she hoped was I'd bring back enough so the church could pay me eighteen dollars they owe on my salary. And now—it's ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... confusion of discordant cries. The butlers stood by the wine-casks, filling the bottles which were carried out by the nimble and active vivandieres, and on the same stage on which once Galiari and Barbarini, Ostroa and Sambeni enchanted the public with their marvellous singing, were seen now large caldrons of beef; and, instead of the singers, the performance was conducted by cooks, who drew the meat out of the pots, and arranged it neatly on enormous dishes. Gotzkowsky had attained his object, and Berlin fed this day the exhausted and hungry troops of ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... man consisted principally in reading passages from books presented to him while under the influence of the mesmeric sleep, into which he had been thrown by Mr. Townsend, and with which he was previously unacquainted. The results were certainly sufficiently curious, though probably neither marvellous nor unaccountable. To make sure that his eyes were really effectually closed, cotton-wool was laid over them, and a broad, tight bandage placed upon them; during another trial the hands of our chief sceptic were placed upon his eyelids, so as effectually to keep them completely closed, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... marvellous story than Marco's is related of this monastery by Vincent of Beauvais: "There is in that kingdom (Armenia) a place called St. Brassamus, at which there is a monastery for 300 monks. And 'tis said that if ever an enemy attacks ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood. But Coodle knew the danger, and Doodle knew the danger, and all their followers and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... of marvellous wind saw that his foe was dead, he gave him no second glance, but set out at a lope for a farm four miles across the snow where he had left his master when first the wolf was started. He was a wonderful dog, ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... rate, he was holidaying on the lake that summer. There had grown up a genuine intimacy between Linda and Stella. There were always people at the Abbeys'; sometimes a few guests at the Fyfe bungalow. Stella's marvellous voice served to heighten her popularity. The net result of it all was that in the following three months source three days went by that she did ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... said the king, gravely, "I purchase the salvation of my army in this holy war at a marvellous heavy price; and if the infidels hold out much longer, we shalt have to pawn ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Rhymer, and True Thomas were thus only different names for one marvellous man who sang and played, never told an untruth, and who, moreover, was able to tell beforehand events that were going to ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... silence]. How marvellous a love my steps has led To this sweet trysting place! My life that sped In frolic and fantastic visions gay, Henceforth shall grow one ceaseless working day! O God! I wandered groping,—all was dim: Thou gavest me light—and I discovered him! [Gazing at FALK ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... is a wonderful thing. One can't help feeling proud of it. I must admit that I do. Whenever I get talking to anyone—that is, to anyone who knows even less about it than I do—about the marvellous development of electricity, for instance, I feel as if I had been personally responsible for it. As for the linotype and the aeroplane and the vacuum house-cleaner, well, I am not sure that I didn't invent them myself. ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... It must therefore be altogether without reference to its present usefulness, that we pursue our inquiry into the merits and meaning of the architecture of this marvellous building; and it can only be after we have terminated that inquiry, conducting it carefully on abstract grounds, that we can pronounce with any certainty how far the present neglect of St. Mark's is significative of the decline of the Venetian character, or how far ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his mind followed the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have been more astonished had he suddenly read a new language. Among the marvels of education, this was the most marvellous. A prison-wall that barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell, of its own accord, without so much as his knowing when it happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer, surrounded by the commonest ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... for, after all, if he had failed, he ought not to have been treated as a culprit. Not a soul had had the slightest suspicion of how the affair had ended. Not one of them knew the incredible truth—how the marvellous, the redoubtable, the incredible Fantomas had elected to make his escape at the very moment when Juve was preparing to put ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... louis d'ors on a large gaming-table after dinner. With this money Gaston's attendants and even the prince himself sat down to play. It is probable, however, that Voltaire extended a single instance or two into a general habit or custom. That writer always preferred to deal with the splendid and the marvellous rather than with plain ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... many Harems and girls' schools tallow candles and similar succedanea are vainly forbidden and bananas when detected are cut into four so as to be useless; of late years, however, China has sent some marvellous artificial phalli of stuffed bladder, horn and even caoutchouc, the latter material of course borrowed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... have been scattered throughout France to stimulate the zeal and self-love of the "progressive and intelligent masses"! Titles, medals, diplomas, a sort of legion of honor invented for the army of martyrs, have followed each other with marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the manufactured products of the intellect have developed a spice, a ginger, all their own. From this have come premiums, forestalled dividends, and that conscription of noted names which is levied without the knowledge of the unfortunate ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... diversity that the mind scarcely cared to rise from this fantastic and grotesque world to seek the sublime principles of Infinity, of Unity. If the ancients had regarded nature as a vast system of signs designed to manifest the ideas of the Great Artist; if they had at all understood the marvellous Unity of the Divine Works, it would have been worse than idle in them to have invented a language which thus lowered nature, robbing it of its solemn majesty, its august dignity. As all these divinities had the human figure, God was banished ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... city, and in old times was the seat of a great kingdom; but the Great Kaan conquered it by force of arms. Nevertheless it is still the noblest city in all those provinces. There are very great merchants here, who trade on a great scale, and the abundance of silk is something marvellous. They have, moreover, most charming gardens abounding with fruit of large size. The city of Tadinfu hath also under its rule eleven imperial cities of great importance, all of which enjoy a large and profitable trade, owing to that ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... representation of the scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus, who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes—like the lakes of "The Thirst of the Antelope" in the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia—that ever elude his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the svastika, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... we resist the thought," he said to Wilhelm, "and no matter how much I railed yesterday evening against modern culture, a sight like that must impress a man. It must go to the very marrow of his bones. It is simply absurd that such a marvellous product of secret natural forces, joined together by man's brains and hands, such a creation over creation, such a miracle has become even possible." They touched glasses. The sound of clinking glasses could be heard all ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... country Hop-Frog originally came. It was from some barbarous region, however, that no person ever heard of—a vast distance from the court of our king. Hop-Frog, and a young girl very little less dwarfish than himself (although of exquisite proportions, and a marvellous dancer), had been forcibly carried off from their respective homes in adjoining provinces, and sent as presents to the king, by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with bright, inquisitive eyes. A maiden, all brown and gold, on a golden haycock! What strange apparition was this? Had she come for acorns? Did she know about the four young ones in the snug little house in the hollow just above the first branch! Perhaps—dreadful thought!—she had heard of the marvellous beauty of the four young ones, and had come to steal them. "Chip!" whisk! and Madam Squirrel was off up the branch like a streak of brown lightning, with its ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... meat set before him by Jacob had had marvellous qualities. Any savor that one desired it possessed, it was even endowed with the taste of the food that God will grant the pious in the world to come. "I know not," he said, "what the meat was. But I had only ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... my dear! They are marvellous! I've never imagined anything like it... to be able to see so much of the world at once. It's the way you ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... administration in the management of the war; attributing every failure to their measures, and every successful operation to circumstances over which they had no control. It was argued, indeed, that ministers had only made such preparations as would ensure defeats; and that it was marvellous we were not involved in indiscriminate ruin and disgrace. The blunders of ministers were both numerous and palpable, but it cannot be denied that they were mightily magnified by the opposition, who looked at their every movement with a jealous and jaundiced ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... may be more telling than if spoken while the storm of debate was raging. The still, small voice came after the lightning and the thunder and the earthquake, and God spake in it with power and effect. It is the quiet utterance in the home which is of marvellous power in the world. It is womanly to adorn ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... horns of mine, Like some in the advertising line, To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales That the sounds of a cod seem as ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... wind, she thought that the figure of the hated steward and spy moved along a wild path on the opposite side of that great mountain cleft, traversed by a noisy torrent almost the depth of the whole hill, near the top of which this cottage was perched. His being there alone was nothing marvellous, but an ominous horror seemed, in her mind, to hover round that man, who (as if conscious of some deadly evil which was through him to overwhelm her some time) studiously avoided ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... that though my countenance is exceptionally mobile, I possess marvellous powers for keeping it impassive when necessity arises. In this instance, at mention of Theodore's name, I showed neither surprise nor indignation. Yet you will readily understand that I felt both. Here was that man, once more revealed as a traitor. Theodore had an aunt of whom he ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... careful classification, it will be chiefly to this collection that the student of Christian antiquity will hereafter resort. It in in the charge of the Cavaliere de Rossi, who is engaged in editing the Christian inscriptions of the first six centuries, and whose extraordinary learning and marvellous sagacity in deciphering and determining the slightest remains of ancient stone-cutting give him unexampled fitness for the work. Of these inscriptions, about eleven thousand are now known, and of late some forty or fifty have been added each year to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... into a river is not likely to be attempted by the amateur, but the head of salmon frequenting a river is undoubtedly affected in the most marvellous manner by artificial means. In Canada and the United States this is particularly remarkable, but the operations are conducted on a ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... long, and she suddenly broke in, "O mother, Master Eyre saith there is a marvellous cavern near his father's house, all full of pendants from the roof like a minster, and great sheeted tables and statues standing up, all grand and ghostly on the floor, far better than in this Pool's Hole. He says his father will have ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the ships had descended from above on their ample wings, and that these marvellous beings were inhabitants of the skies. They appeared to be simple and artless people, and of gentle and friendly dispositions. As Columbus supposed that the island was at the extremity of India, he called them Indians. He understood ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... out, do you.... Having a beastly time with my port engine?' 'Sorry,' I said. There was no answer. I told D'Aubigne what Carville had said, and we went out into the open air again. You know, it seems marvellous, though I don't suppose it's any more so than many other inventions. But to think of that chap, nearly thirteen thousand feet in the air, actually talking to us down on the earth while he was wrestling with a battery or sparking plug, or something! Think of him sitting in ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... he had refused the ten francs a day that M. Fortunat had offered him, and this evening he declined the twenty sous proffered him by Madame Paul. This was apparently a trifle, and yet in reality it was something marvellous, unprecedented, on the part of this poor lad, who, having neither trade nor profession, was obliged to earn his daily bread through the medium of those chance opportunities which the lower classes of Paris are continually ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... physical world, but because of the extreme unreliability of the impressions brought back from it by the untrained seer. This is to be accounted for mainly by two remarkable characteristics of the astral world—first, that many of its inhabitants have a marvellous power of changing their forms with Protean rapidity, and also of casting practically unlimited glamour over those with whom they choose to sport; and secondly, that sight on that plane is a faculty very different from and much more extended than physical vision. An object is seen, as it were, from ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... marvel at the perfection of encyclopaedic learning in Grocyn?[26] What could be keener or nobler or nicer than Linacre's[27] judgement? What has Nature ever fashioned gentler or sweeter or happier than the character of Thomas More? But why should I catalogue the rest? It is marvellous how thick upon the ground the harvest of ancient literature is here everywhere flowering forth: all the more should you hasten your return hither. Your friend's affection and remembrance of you is so strong that he speaks of none so often or so gladly. Farewell. Written in haste in ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... some old marvellous tale, Some legend strange and vague, That a midnight host of spectres pale Beleaguered ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... royal prophet, David, boldly cried, and said, O sing unto the Lord a new song, for he hath done marvellous things; his right hand and his holy arm ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... upon the God of heaven to descend upon that company she lifted her hand toward the low and humble roof, and with her eyes still gazing up she seemed to see the Son of man coming in his glory on the clouds of power. The effect was marvellous. Many people were in tears. Some sighed deeply as though for relief while others, raising their arms above their heads, ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick |
