"Fantastically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lava-fields, and here the beaten track ended. We now dismounted, and continued our ascent on foot. It is difficult for one who has not seen it to picture to himself the scene that lay around us. Devastation every where; lava covering the whole region in heaps upon heaps, fantastically piled one on the other. Here a huge isolated mound rises, seemingly cut off on all sides from the lava around; there we see how a mighty stream once rushed down the mountain-side, and cooled gradually ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... saw a little octagonal chapel perched upon a hilly promontory, overlooking a bridge across the river. Here the great mountain peaks were quite lost in the clouds, and the ruggedness of the scenery was grand in the extreme. Some of the immense pinnacles and jutting rocks were most fantastically shaped, like the residence of some fabled giant, in contrast to the little ruined castles we frequently saw, adding a touch of old-world ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... saw the library—not fantastically transformed, but just like what the room really was. So far, he might have been wide awake, looking at the familiar objects round him. But, after a while, an event happened which set the laws of reality at defiance. Simple Sally, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... for Tiahuana, the denunciation had fallen upon him with such paralysing effect that he had simply translated Escombe's message as nearly word for word as the Quichua language would permit, with the air and aspect of a man speaking under the influence of some fantastically horrible dream. But by the time that the excitement had subsided, and silence again reigned in the great building, he had pulled himself together ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... powers, which has led many of our noble but ill-judging youth into the saturnalia of a purely ideal science of nature, has been signalized by the intoxication of pretended conquests, by a novel and fantastically symbolical phraseology, and by a predilection for the formulae of a scholastic rationalism, more contracted in its views than any known to the Middle Ages. I use the expression "abuse of better powers," because superior intellects devoted to philosophical pursuits and experimental sciences have ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the drum and cymbals; they were active and industrious, and carefully cultivated the rich soil of the plain, devoting themselves to the raising of cattle, particularly of oxen, whose horns they were accustomed to train fantastically into the shapes of lyres, bows, and spirals, with bifurcations at the ends, or with small human figures as terminations. As in the case of other negro tribes, they plied the blacksmith's and also the goldsmith's trade, working up both gold and silver into rings, chains, and quaintly ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... been better able to adjust himself to circumstances. He might not have known how to spend his money, but he would have spent it in New York on New York joys. There would have been no foreign remoteness about the thing, howsoever fantastically unexpected such fortune might have been. At any rate, in New York he would have known the names of ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... place, Whose wild, green margin, now no more erase Art's works; no more its sparkling waters sleep, Prisoned in marble; bubbling from the base Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap, The rill runs o'er, and 'round, fern, flowers and ivy creep, Fantastically tangled." ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... so fantastically; for, midnight as it was, my chamber's solitude was not to be supported. After a few turns across the floor, I left the room, and the house. I walked without design and in a hurried pace. I posted straight to the house of Mrs. Fielding. I lifted the latch, but the door did not ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... and he felt a profound disgust for everything within the range of his vision. He was suddenly aware of his own total and hopeless ignorance of everything connected with building, theoretical or practical. The sight of the stiff, angular scaffoldings, draped with torn straw mattings that flapped fantastically in the south-east wind, the apparent absence of anything like a real house behind them, the blades of grass sprouting abundantly about the foot of each pole and covering the heaps of brown pozzolana earth prepared for making mortar, ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... Hanuman, King of the Monkeys, and his hosts.[361] Is there any kernel of history in this story? An examination of Hindu legends suggests that they usually preserve names and genealogies correctly but distort facts, and fantastically combine independent narratives. Rama was a semi-divine hero in the tales of ancient Oudh, based on a real personality, and Ceylon was colonized by Indians of Aryan speech.[362] But can we assume that a king of Oudh really led an expedition to ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... became the meeting-place of Hindu, Mahommedan and Jain architecture. Ahmad Shah pulled down Hindu temples in order to build his mosques with the material. The Jama Masjid itself, which he built in A.D. 1424, with its three hundred pillars fantastically carved, is a Hindu temple converted into a mosque (see INDIAN ARCHITECTURE, Plate III., fig. 15). One of the finest buildings is the modern Jain temple of Hathi Singh outside the Delhi gate, which was built only in 1848, and is a standing monument to the endurance of Jain architectural ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Glory Goldie remarked to the driver as the old man and the youngsters crowded in through the gate. She had not the faintest suspicion as to who the man was, but she could not help noticing a person who was so fantastically arrayed. On his head was a green leather cap, topped with a bushy feather; round his neck he wore a chain of gilt paper stars and crosses that hung far down on his chest. It looked as though he had on a ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... weary-looking bird with draggled feathers, which remained so still that it seemed to be a sad ornament set there above the city, and watching it for ever with eyes that could not see. At right angles, touching the mosque, was such a house as one can see only in the East—fantastically old, fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy, melancholy, showing hideous windows, like windows in the slum of a town set above coal-pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it to its work. In this building once dwelt the High ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... cook—a feast fit for the gods, he declared it would be—and fed the fire with fragments of the wheelbarrow, for they were all suffering so from hunger that they could have eaten the meat before the pot began to boil. Their huge shadows danced fantastically in the firelight on the rocky walls of the quarry. Then they found it impossible longer to restrain their appetite, and threw themselves upon the unclean mess, tearing the flesh with eager, trembling fingers and dividing ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Fantastically tangled; the green hills Are clothed with early blossoms, through the grass The quick-eyed lizard rustles, and the bills Of summer birds sing welcome as ye pass; Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class, Implore ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... with fantastic tapestry of red designs upon a black ground—designs that took monstrous shapes in the flickering light of a cluster of candles. Black curtains parted, and from between them stepped a short, plump woman, of a certain comeliness, with two round black beads of eyes. She was fantastically robed in a cloak of crimson velvet, lined with costly furs and closely studded with double-headed eagles in fine gold, which must have been worth a prince's ransom; and she wore red shoes on each of which there was the same eagle design ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... dancing and shimmering in the heat waves, it seems struggling to escape. When the wind blows, the dust-devils play tag among the low sage and greasewood; the Joshua trees, rising in the midst of this desolation, stretch forth their fantastically twisted and withered arms, seeming to invoke a curse on nature herself while warning the traveler that the heritage of this land is death. There is a bearing down of one's spirit in the midst of all this loneliness ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... been improved. If externals were of any value to this courtship, all that could have helped was there. The setting of the picture was perfect; a tall yew-hedge ran down the northern side of the walk, cut, as Bacon recommended, not fantastically but "with some pretty pyramids"; a strip of turf separated it from the walk, giving a sense both of privacy and space; on the south side ran flower-beds in the turf, with yews and cypresses planted here and there, and an oak paling beyond; ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the children took place; and the fantastically dressed crowd formed a lane to let the homely-clad lads and lasses pass along, with the six small pipers proudly playing ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Lely was born in Westphalia in 1618. His real name was Vander Facs, and his father was a 'Captain of Foot,' who, having chanced to be born in rooms over a perfumer's shop which bore the sign of a lily, took fantastically enough the name of Du Lys, or Lely, which he transmitted to his son. Sir Peter Lely, after studying in a studio at Haarlem, came to England when he was twenty-three years of age, in 1641, and set himself to copy the pictures of ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... shouts motioned them to go back. In an instant the whole cavalcade was in confusion. The horses reared and plunged, the men shouted and demanded who was there, and all the while the weird figure, whose tattered garments fluttered fantastically in the wind, waved her skinny arms wildly, ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... he brought fresh, cool sea-foam for the sick oyster to eat; he told her pretty stories, too,—stories which his grandmother, the venerable codfish, had told him of the sea-king, the mermaids, the pixies, the water-sprites, and the other fantastically beautiful dwellers in ocean depths. Now while all this was very pleasant, the sick little oyster knew that the perch's wooing was hopeless, for she was very ill and helpless, and could never think of becoming a burden upon one so young and so promising as the gallant ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... the diaphanous mists of early morning, making them hang luminous a moment and then disperse, like tinted gauze that flutters slowly upward in a breeze and vanishes. Great white clouds, foam-like and crisp, piled themselves up fantastically and floated off also, leaving the deep blue vault to mirror itself in the answering azure of the sea; the eternal calm above, awful in its intensity of stillness; the ceaseless movement below, a type of life, throbbing, murmurous, changeful, more interesting than awe-inspiring, more to ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Jean agreed. "I went to the dancing-class the other day to see a most unwilling Mhor trip fantastically, and I saw a tiny girl take the hand of an older girl and look admiringly up at her. The older child, with the awful heartlessness of childhood wriggled her hand away and turned her back on her small admirer. The poor mite stood trying not to cry, and presently ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... of the cucumbers and crossed the tracks in single file, pausing now to balance fantastically on the shining steel rails, and now to skip flat, smooth pebbles against the black, weathered girders which supported the block signals. As they reached the home precincts, a still-panting ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... the end the minister rose, took his text from three or four parts of the Bible, and gave a lengthy discourse, relieved at intervals with genuine outbursts of eloquence, relative to Christian action and general duty. He seemed to have a poor notion of many Christians, and somewhat fantastically illustrated their position by saying that they were, spiritually troubled with consumption and apparently with diabetes!—were continually devouring good things, constantly wasting away, and doing no particular good amongst it at all. We felt the force of this; but ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... more stolid, and easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the masses of the people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, the more meretriciously pretty or fantastically horrible, the better it is relished by its public. Even the stereotyped representations of the coarser fashion-plates, and the eccentric symbols and arbitrary groups employed in the humbler trade advertisements which the magnates in such ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... Executive Council. His will, drawn by himself after his fatal wound, is still extant in the Court of Probate records at Toronto. One clause reads: "I desire to be rolled up in a sheet and not buried fantastically, and that I may be buried at the back of my own house." Buried in his garden at his direction, his bones were accidentally uncovered in 1871 and reverently buried in Toronto. His manuscript diary is still extant, a copy being in the possession of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... images as large as life stuck over the gates of different streets, and upon platforms crossing them, with paintings of movable figures strung across them, Sing-Song houses, &c. &c. If you add to this an immense multitude of fantastically-dressed Chinamen, each carrying a lighted lantern richly ornamented, the coup d'oeil will be better imagined than I ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... two were still in motion, the mother at intervals seizing her hairy offspring, and grotesquely caressing it; then letting it go free to dance fantastically around the recumbent form of the unconscious captive child. This it did, amusing itself by now and then tearing off a strip of the girl's dress, either with ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... was overgrown with brushwood, and, where its sides were too abrupt to admit the growth of larger trees, they were matted with woodbine and brambles. Out of these would sometimes start a sharp pinnacle, or fantastically-formed crag, adding greatly to the picturesque beauty of the scene. On such points were not unfrequently found perched a hawk, a falcon, or some large bird of prey; for the gully, with its brakes ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a serious act of disenchantment. The ideal Gipsy is destined to be scattered to the winds by the unvarnished picture which Mr. Smith will cause to be presented to our vision. He does not pretend to show us the romantic, fantastically-dressed creature whose prototypes have long been in the imaginations of many of us as types of the Gipsy species. Those of our readers who have formed their notions of Gipsy life upon the strength of the assurances which ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... exceedingly gloomy bit of the road where there were plantations on each side, and the trees united their fantastically forked branches overhead. I thought I had never seen so dismal-looking a spot, and a sudden lowering of the temperature made me draw my overcoat ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... stopped at the edge of the path, which goes turning and twisting continually, and which comes back fantastically and strangely, along the side of the mountain, as far as the almost invisible little village at its feet. The women jumped into the snow, and the two old men joined them. "Well," father Hauser said, "good-bye, and keep up your spirits till next ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... by side we lie in the little room, Just touching hands, with eyes and ears that strain Keenly, yet dream-bewildered, through tense gloom, Listening in helpless stupor of insane Drugged nightmare panic fantastically wild, To the quiet breathing ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Callandar for the third time, and disappeared behind the bonnet. Fifteen minutes after, he reappeared with a very hot face decorated fantastically with black. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... sunset. It is rapidly darkening. The sea in the western corner is crimson, but all the vast south is silver and sombre. The horizon is like that seen from a balloon—pushed out to its furthermost, and there, where clouds and sky mingle, one sees fantastically as it were the sides ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... mentioned had been worn smooth by the action of the passage of water, so that it presented the appearance of an enormous tessellated pavement, before which the celebrated Roman one at Bognor, in Sussex, which I remember, when I was a boy, on a visit to Goodwood, though more artistically but not more fantastically arranged, would be compelled to hide its diminished head. In the course of my rambles I noticed a great quantity of beautiful flowers upon the hills, of similar kinds to those collected in the Glen ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... aboard and you won't miss the little that I requisitioned—causing these molecules to separate and pass at high speed through these various grids, providing electrostatic potentials in their passage which can be added quite fantastically to produce the necessary ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... his right hand, with a bell fastened to the lower part of his back, and several smaller ones round his ankles. Thus equiped he starts from the Egbo-house, runs through the streets with his bells ringing, to the house of the offender, followed by half a dozen subordinate personages fantastically dressed, each carrying ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... light of lamps that hung from the ceiling, or branched out from the smoky, white-washed walls, the throng of dark men in white burnouses, crowding the long benches or sitting on the floor, was like a company of ghosts. Their shadows waved fantastically along the walls as they strode noiselessly in, wild as spirits dancing to the voice of their master Satan, the seductive raeita. At one end of the room sat the musicians, all giant negroes, the scars and tattoo ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... will argue and parley just so long—then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression. The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... to be borne in mind is that Paul wrote about Religion "in a vivid and figured way"—not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, "he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion"; quoting them at haphazard and applying them fantastically. ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... blindly, others have speculated fantastically, and others have been shrewd to bad purposes; but you, sir, I am sure, will give under your hand, nothing but what is at the same moment, wise, practical and good, your account of yourself (for I suppose the parallel I am drawing for Dr. Franklin, ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit slavery within their limits; some for maintaining slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastically called "popular sovereignty"; but never a man among you in favor of Federal prohibition of slavery in Federal Territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... sweet with the scent of locust blossoms, and along the clear horizon fantastically formed mountains seemed to float ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... What applies to Scott, will apply still more to Byron's poems; Byron is one of the greatest of modern poets, but that does not make him an epic poet. We must keep our minds on epic intention. Shelley's Revolt of Islam has something of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generality of human experience had little to do with this glittering poem. Keats's Hyperion is wonderful; but it does not go far enough to let us form any judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose.[13] Our search will not take us far before ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... shall be able to manage without them—or we shall have travelled a long way down the slopes of waste towards extinction.... To-day, in getting, in distribution, in use we waste enormously....As we sit here all the world is wasting fuel fantastically." ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth that was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a checkered dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had moved a short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began playing listlessly with her gold chain, as was a common habit with her, coiling it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... good number of shorter and miscellaneous poems, must be mentioned the Glass of Government (a kind of morality or serious comedy, moulded, it would seem, on German originals), and the rather prettily, if fantastically termed Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds. Gascoigne has a very fair command of metre: he is not a great sinner in the childish alliteration which, surviving from the older English poetry, helps to convert so much of his contemporaries' ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... darkness set in, and my man, who has an especial talent for all sorts of illuminations, and in general for everything which in Southern Italy comes under the head of 'festa,' had borrowed long strings of little signal-flags and streamers, which he had hung fantastically from the house to the surrounding trees. When once the lamps should be lighted the effect would be very pretty, and to the eyes of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... "When it comes to missile work, you can get fantastically complicated. In fact, some missile systems are so complicated it's a wonder they ever work ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... many others, is easily your victim—at croquet. But come, let us be alone, let us dismiss this chain of faces, they confine my thoughts. I would like to talk well, I would like to talk fantastically, that is, I wish you would think of something original ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... We could find out, I suppose. But transistors are small, and they don't weigh much. Besides, some of the types used here are fantastically expensive. A couple of hundred dollars might pay for a transistor the size of a ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... how one can be careful! I had a long talk with—but I don't believe you have seen them. One of them is a fantastically thin, long person, apparently ailing; I shouldn't wonder if he were really so. He makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner. I imagine he must have suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much as he tries to make out. He's what people would call a gentleman. He seemed ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... he writes, "to imagine the frantic gambols that are daily played off here; sometimes dressing in red coats, and otherwise very fantastically, and collecting a number of ignorant natives around them, telling them that they are the great eris of the Northwest, and making arrangements for sending three or four vessels yearly to them from the coast with spars, &c.; while those very ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... some time, I don't know how long, till at length the Motombo picked up his fantastically shaped horn and blew. Thereon the women darted from the various doorways, but seeing that they were not wanted, checked themselves in their stride and remained standing so, in the very attitude of runners about to start upon a race. As the blast of the horn died away the turmoil was suddenly ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... by heavy toil; and when I compare the Caesar of Rome or the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of the Thebaid, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul fixed on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit, and not the Caesar, is ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... darkness of the wood 460 A human figure broke the solitude, Fantastically, it may be, arrayed, A seaman in a savage masquerade; Such as appears to rise out from the deep, When o'er the line the merry vessels sweep, And the rough Saturnalia of the tar Flock o'er the deck, in Neptune's borrowed car;[398] And, pleased, the God of Ocean sees his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... vigorously. Cool breezes coursed in transparent eddies round Oak's face. The wind shifted yet a point or two and blew stronger. In ten minutes every wind of heaven seemed to be roaming at large. Some of the thatching on the wheat-stacks was now whirled fantastically aloft, and had to be replaced and weighted with some rails that lay near at hand. This done, Oak slaved away again at the barley. A huge drop of rain smote his face, the wind snarled round every corner, the trees rocked to ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Grande, at Verona, during his exile. He is dressed in sober grey and drab clothes, and contrasts strongly in his ascetic and suffering aspect with the gay revellers about him. The people are preparing for a festival, and splendidly and fantastically robed, some bringing wreaths of flowers. Bowing with mock reverence, a jester gibes at Dante. An indolent sentinel is seated at the porch, and looks on unconcernedly, his spear lying across his breast. A young man, probably acquainted ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... thought no more. The man was rattled. His one idea was to pick up his traps and be gone. He was even afraid any more to employ his torch. Besides, the moonlight, to which Betty had drawn his attention, was asserting itself fantastically. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... killed, they have to deal with the body, which will very soon poison their dwelling. If it be impossible for them to expel or dismember it, they will proceed methodically and hermetically to enclose it in a veritable sepulchre of propolis and wax, which will tower fantastically above the ordinary monuments of the city. In one of my hives last year I discovered three such tombs side by side, erected with party-walls, like the cells of the comb, so that no wax should be wasted. These tombs the prudent grave-diggers had raised over the remains of three ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of his escapades, and of all the knowledge, unutterable in Bursley, fantastically impossible in Bursley, which he had imparted to her son, he marvelled that the maternal instinct should be so deceived. Still, he felt that her praise of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... dear, lost land, Over the sea the thousand miles, And know if yet that woman smiles With the calm smile; some little farm She lives in there, no doubt: what harm 150 If I sat on the door-side bench, And, while her spindle made a trench Fantastically in the dust, Inquired of all her fortunes—just Her children's ages and their names, And what may be the husband's aims For each of them. I'd talk this out, And sit there, for an hour about, Then kiss her ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... the cataract, here also the hills are simply jumbled heaps of granite boulders, fantastically piled one upon the other, barren and naked, and without any vegetable growth ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... along with the two Jesuits and two French officers, Saint-Castin and Croisil. In a few days the English at Georgetown saw them parading before the fort, well armed, displaying French flags,—feathers dangling from their scalp-locks, and faces fantastically patterned in vermilion, ochre, white clay, soot, and such other pigments as they could find ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky—so much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul, strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much vapour and sunshine ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... really couldn't be married to Mr. Piper—and yet somehow she seemed so much more married to him than Mrs. Piper ever had been—Oliver's thoughts played fantastically for an instant over the proposition that she and Mr. Piper had been secretly converted to Mohammedanism together and he looked at Mr. Piper's grey head almost as if he expected to see a large red fez suddenly drop down upon it from ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... must be utterly unlike what I am myself. He asked if I was now satisfied that she could have no correct conception of what faces and colors were really like? and if I agreed with him in believing that the image in her mind of the man with the blue face, was in all probability something fantastically and hideously unlike the reality? After what I had heard, I agreed with him as a matter of course. 'Very well,' says Mr. Sebright. 'Now let its remember that there is one important difference between the case ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... aside a silk coat that filled Eunice with a sort of wonder, being brocaded with beautiful leaves and roses that seemed as if they must have been worked by hand, they stood out so clearly. The child appeared fantastically attired to her plainer eyes, and her slim arms were weighted with bracelets. In her dainty ears were ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... A darkened theatre, fantastically decorated in scarlet and silver: a French orchestra already playing a delicate prelude: a lively audience—a typical "Moor" audience—agreeably ready to be piqued and scandalized as ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... it, and it will be as it was before." This idea, which was as fixed as an obsession of delirium, seemed to occupy some central space in her brain, leaving room for a crowd of lesser thoughts which came and went fantastically around it like the motley throng of a circus. She thought of Cyrus Treadwell's accident, of the stupid jokes the man from Dinwiddie had told her, of the noises of the train, which would not let one sleep, of the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... complete contrast to their tragedy. Not only were the characters and situations of individuals worked up into a comic picture of real life, but the whole frame of society, the constitution, nature, and the gods, were all fantastically painted in the most ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... discovering them as they moved about among the crowd. There was the same swarthy hue, black, burning eyes, and cunning, quick expression of countenance which distinguish them in every part of the world. The women were somewhat fancifully, but not fantastically dressed. This costume varied little from that common in Europe. It is only on festive occasions that they wear the dress of their people. The men had on surtouts, with belts round their waists, and light-coloured trousers. They were remarkable for their small well-formed ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... the green table. Strangers of all nations are standing behind the players, venturing their money or only looking on. My Lord is among the strangers. He is struck by the Countess's personal appearance, in which beauties and defects are fantastically mingled in the most attractive manner. He watches the Countess's game, and places his money where he sees her deposit her own little stake. She looks round at him, and says, "Don't trust to my colour; I have been unlucky the whole evening. Place your stake on the other colour, and you ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... still thought that the Civil War had been between North and South America. To him the United States was a vague region peopled with miners, pork-packers, and Indians; a jumble of factories, forests, and red-shirted men digging for gold, all of it fantastically seen through the medium of Buffalo Bill's show. It was a constant wonder to him that such conditions had been able to produce a woman ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... head bowed. For once silence had fixed its seal upon his lips, no inspiring speech fell from them. He had been suddenly swept back into a past he had striven these twenty years and more to forget, and his memories shaped themselves fantastically. Surely if ever a man had quitted the world that knew him, he was that man! He had died and yet he lived—lived horribly, without soul or heart, the empty shell of ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... of astonishment, half of disappointment, issued from Jimmie Dale's lips. There was money here, a great deal of money, undoubtedly, but there was no such sum as he had, somehow, fantastically imagined from the Magpie's evidently overcoloured story that there would be; there was money, ten packages of banknotes neatly piled in the bottom compartment—but there was no half million of dollars! He picked up one of the packages hurriedly—and ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, 195 Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar's plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set 200 With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; 205 For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o'er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dewdrops sheen, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Shelley from other writers is the unequalled exuberance of his fancy. The reader, say for instance of that fantastically brilliant poem, The Witch of Atlas, the work of three days, is overwhelmed in a storm, as it were, of rainbow snow-flakes and many-coloured lightnings, accompanied ever by "a low melodious thunder." The evidences of pure imagination in his writings are unfrequent as ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... even imagined anything so fantastically beautiful," Stephen returned warmly. "You ought to be happy, even if you could never go outside your own house and gardens. There's nothing to touch this on the Riviera. It's a ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... they seemed to stand up against the blazing sky, monstrous, horrific, smiting the senses like a blow. Their primordial faces were hacked and hewed fantastically, and there they posed in their immemorial isolation, virgin peaks, inviolate valleys, impregnably desolate and ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... a large dinner-plate. Instead of being gray or brown, however, like its aquatic relative, it is highly colored in diversified shades of red, scarlet, light yellow, orange, and black. Sometimes one tint prevails, sometimes another, and occasionally all of these colors are fantastically blended in a single specimen. The creature has two long fore claws, or pincers; small eyes, mounted like round berries on the ends of short stalks or pedicels; and a mouth that seems to be formed by two horny, beak-like mandibles. ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one hundredth ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... his works are more and more free in form, and their moods are more strongly marked and individual. This is true of Beethoven, in spite of his having been born, as we might say, under the star of the classic. He writes freely and fantastically, in spite of his early training. The mood in the man dominated everything, and it is always this which finds ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... delicious fruits whereof there was so marvelous an abundance. She seated herself on a bed of wild flowers on the shady side of a citron and orange grove, surrounded by a perfumed air. Before her stretched the valley, like a vast carpet of bright green velvet fantastically embroidered with flowers of a thousand varied hues. And in the midst meandered the crystal stream, with stately swans and an infinite number of other aquatic birds floating on its bosom. And the birds of the groves, too, how ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... close to which they passed on the journey were very fantastically formed, and many of them were more than a mile long, with clear, blue, glassy surfaces, indicating that they had been but recently thrown off from the great glacier of the North. Between two of these they drove for some time, before they found that they ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the exception that they do not contain a forward-looking but a {306} backward-looking prophecy. This is one of the most correct and fruitful thoughts which Johann Heinrich Kurz, in his "Bibel und Astronomie" ("Bible and Astronomy"), Berlin, Wohlgemuth, 1st edition, 1842, has expressed, but has fantastically misused, in that work, in general so prolific of indefensible positions; a fate which, as is well known, the forward-looking prophecy has had ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... stranger still, to be Captain Rowland's wife. Why he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had happened between them before, and whether—though it was of questionable propriety for a good citizen to espouse a young person of mysterious origin, who did her hair in fantastically elaborate plaits, and in whose appearance "figure" enjoyed such striking predominance—he would not have had a heavy weight on his conscience if he had remained an irresponsible bachelor; these questions and many others, bearing with varying degrees of ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... contrast the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream which washes the garden foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters and seems but just weaned from Twickenham Na?es! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... All was strange and mazed and quivering in her, her spirit straining away, drawn to him, fantastically confused. She could only look into his face with her troubled, dark eyes. And suddenly she was seized and crushed to him. She shrank away, pushing him back with all her strength. He hung his head, abashed, suffering, with eyes shut, lips trembling; and her heart felt again that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with patches of sunlit turf. Pines and firs reached almost to the water's edge, and the great age of some of them was a proof of the little value placed upon timber in a spot so inaccessible. One fir had an enormous bole fantastically branched like that of an English elm, and on its mossy bark was a spot such as the hand might cover, fired by a wandering beam, that awoke recollections of the dream-haunted woods before the illusion of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... a violent outcry, raucous and shrill as the wail of a captured hen, and out of the passage across the courtyard floundered a woman, fantastically ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... now made his appearance, was a tall good-looking young man about thirty, dressed rather fantastically, as I thought, having a laced cap on his head and a party-colored silk sash round his waist, such as they wear in ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... morning, as Gaspe tells us, the whole neighbourhood appeared, decked out fantastically, and greeted the manor-house with a salvo of blank musketry. With them they bore a tall fir-tree, its branches cut and its bark peeled to within a few feet of the top. There the tuft of greenery remained. The pole, having been gaudily embellished, was majestically reared aloft and planted firmly ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... well-drilled private armies, armed with modern weapons and organized on European lines. The "army" of Mangku Negoro consists of about a thousand men, and is a far more efficient fighting force than the fantastically uniformed rabble maintained by his suzerain, the Susuhunan. In certain respects this arrangement resembles the plan which is followed at West Point and Annapolis, where, if the appointee fails to meet the entrance requirements, the ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... geraniums stood about. Within a few hundred yards of the house, the green and glowing cultivation stopped as abruptly as the edges of an oasis in the desert, and the Karoo began—that sweeping, high table-land, empty of all but brown stones, long white thorns, fantastically shaped clumps of prickly-pear, bare brown hills, and dried-up rivulets, and that yet is one of the healthiest and, from the farmer's point of view, wealthiest plateaux in ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... wiseacres. Most of them are even more foolish than the follies they reprove. Take, for instance, the statement that "beauty fades." Absurd; everyone knows perfectly well that, as the years creep on, beauty simply gets more highly coloured. And then, "beauty is only skin-deep." Fantastically wrong! Some of it is not that; and, for the rest, is a woman like a toy balloon?—just a surface? To hear that proverb from a man is to know him at once for a phonographic kind of fool. The fundamental and enduring grace of womanhood goes down to ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... now within that valley Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever, And ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... spend a hundred pounds in Mr. Redfern's shop than to keep it in one's pocket; but, for my part, I contented myself with buying a little old spoon of silver-gilt, and fantastically shaped, and got it at all the more reasonable rate because there happened to be no legend attached to it. I could supply any deficiency of that kind at much less ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... wisteria bushes clipped and twisted out of all likeness to wholesome plants, leaning and leering out of green-glaze pots. In the flickering of the yellow flames, these forced cripples and the yellow faces above them reeled to and fro fantastically all together. As the light steadied they would return to the pretence of being green things till a puff of the warm night wind among the flares set the whole line off again in a crazy dance of dwergs, their shadows capering on the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... direction. What I maintain is that, with few possible exceptions, the brains of malformed people are seldom perfectly balanced. In those particular subjects it did not take a deep student of human nature to set down the entire crowd of them as visionaries, most fantastically inclined—in which direction, having no restraint ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... by the writers of the New is fantastically unlike the original writings. The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies everywhere. The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt with ceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whatever allegory or argument suited ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Browning professes to rest his narrative on a Rabbinical work, of which the title, given by him in Hebrew, means "Collection of many lies;" and he adds, by way of supplement, three sonnets, supposed to fantastically illustrate the old Hebrew proverb, "From Moses to Moses[116] never was one like Moses," and embodying as many fables of wildly increasing audacity. The main story is nevertheless justified by traditional Jewish belief; and Mr. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... face—pure and colorless as old ivory. Her robe, of green brocade, richly embroidered with gold, fell over full pantaloons of scarlet satin which were tightly bound about the slender ankles by jewelled bands, displaying to advantage the tiny feet, clad in boots of soft, yellow kid, fantastically wrought with gold threads; the robe parted over a bodice of yellow, open at the throat, around which chains of gold and jewels ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... We dropped into a low, broad watercourse, ascended its bed to big cottonwoods and flowing water, followed it into box canons between rim-rock carved fantastically and painted like a Moorish facade, until at last in a widening below a rounded hill, we came upon an adobe house, a fruit tree, and a round corral. ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... quaint effects are produced with this work, which is an adaptation of the well-known Eastern embroideries. Its ground-work is plain cashmere or flannel, red, black or blue, on which small fantastically shaped figures in variously colored velvets or cashmeres are laid and button-holed down with floss silks. All sorts of forms are employed for these figures—stars, crescents, circles, trefoils, shields, palm-leaves, griffins, imps; and little wheels and comets in feather-stitch and cat-stitch are ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... no food. The means employed failed of giving her relief, and it never occurred to M. Petetin to inquire of her how he should treat her. At length, with some vague idea that she suffered from too great electric tension of the brain, he tried, fantastically enough, the effect of making deep inspirations, standing close in front of the patient. No effect followed from this absurd proceeding. Then he placed one hand on the forehead, the other on the pit of the stomach of the patient, and continued his inspirations. The patient now opened ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... climbing a steep boulder-strewn slope above the pool till they came to the 'edge' itself, a tossed and broken battlement of stone, running along the top of the Scout. Here the great black slabs of grit were lying fantastically piled upon each other at every angle and in every possible combination. The path which leads from the Hayfield side across the desolate tableland of the Scout to the Snake Inn on the eastern side of the ridge, ran among them, and many ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... best, At ignorance and carelessness and sin— An indignation which is promptly curbed: As when in certain travel I have feigned To be an ignoramus in our art According to some preconceived design, And happed to hear the land's practitioners Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, 240 Prattle fantastically on disease, Its cause and cure—and I must ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... entirely in the head ornaments; the only difference in the scanty covering which is bestowed on the other parts of the person, lies in the choice of the wearer, who either ties the piece of linen, blue or white, under the arms and across the breasts, or fastens it rather fantastically on one shoulder, leaving one breast naked. The Kanamboo women have small plaits of hair hanging down all round the head, quite to the poll of the neck, with a roll of leather, or string of little brass beads in front, hanging down from the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... couple of volumes from the thinly-furnished shelves that hung on the wall, and went back to his work. Huerlin had no inclination to read, but he took one of the books in his hand and opened it. It was an almanac, and he began to look at the pictures. The first was a fantastically dressed ideal woman's figure depicted as an ornament for the title-page, with bare feet and flowing locks. Huerlin remembered that he had a stump of lead-pencil in his pocket. He took it out, wet it in his mouth, and drew two large round breasts on the woman's bodice, which he continued to ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... little they separated. On cat's feet four of them stole around the sides of the house. The fifth, drawing the black, pointed tube from his slash, crept up to the front entrance-port and held the tip to it. Blue light sparkled fantastically, revealing his impassive face, outlining his crouching body. Then, quite suddenly, the port appeared to melt inward, and he disappeared into the blackness ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an obstructive ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... promote their well-being. Or if the Dean chose to champion the man, Morewood was ready for him again. If Quisante were good, were moral, were deserving of defence, then the merely natural process lugubriously described as death, and fantastically treated with black plumes and crape, would, so far as he himself was concerned, be no more than a transition to a better state of existence, while certain solid and indisputable benefits would accrue to those who were condemned to wait a little longer for their summons. Whether the Dean elected ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... table in the light of the three- cornered brazen lamp which, stood at his elbow. The principal chamber of the presbytery was cross-vaulted and divided into two by a low round arch supported on slender double columns with capitals fantastically carved. The smaller portion of the room beyond the arch made an alcove for sleeping, which could be completely shut off by a heavy curtain; the larger part was paved with stone, and in one corner a low wooden platform, on which stood a heavy table before a carved bench ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... set themselves to scramble among the rocks, each surface turned to the sea-breeze exquisitely and fantastically tinted by coloured lichens, and all interspersed with the classical acanthus' noble leaves, the juniper, and the wormwood. On they went, winding upwards as Bertha hoped, but also sideways, and their circuit had lasted a weary while, and made them exhausted and breathless, when looking round ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... closely cropped hair, one would have said that the face with its dreamy wistful eyes, and its delicate scarlet lips, was the face of a girl. In manner, and especially in the treatment of the hands, the picture reminded one of Francois Clouet's later work. The black velvet doublet with its fantastically gilded points, and the peacock-blue background against which it showed up so pleasantly, and from which it gained such luminous value of colour, were quite in Clouet's style; and the two masks of Tragedy and Comedy that hung somewhat formally from the marble pedestal had that hard severity of touch— ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... from the schist, limestone, and old red sandstone of the walls. It might have been thought that we were passing through a section of Wales, of which an ancient people gave its name to this system. Specimens of magnificent marbles clothed the walls, some of a greyish agate fantastically veined with white, others of rich crimson or yellow dashed with splotches of red; then came dark cherry-coloured marbles relieved by the lighter tints ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... towards Chiltern. But they lie out of the parish of Bullhampton. Altogether he is a man of about fifteen hundred a year, and as he is not as yet married, many a Wiltshire mother's eye is turned towards Hampton Privets, as Mr. Gilmore's house is, somewhat fantastically, named. ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... may not step on the ground, and boards are laid for them to tread on.[13] At a funeral ceremony observed by night among the Michemis, a Tibetan tribe near the northern frontier of Assam, a priest fantastically bedecked with tiger's teeth, many-coloured plumes, bells, and shells, executed a wild dance for the purpose of exorcising the evil spirits; then all fires were extinguished and a new light was struck by a man suspended by his feet from a beam in the ceiling; "he did not touch the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... morning. It was bordered by a low stone wall along which two peacocks strutted with almost ridiculous self-consciousness of their beauty. In the very centre was a flight of steps which descended to the bowling-green beneath, where the yew hedge which grew round it had been fantastically cut into the shape of an embattlemented parapet, framing the distant view into a series of charming little pictures: here a glimpse of the river, there a delightful vignette ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... wide cathedral for some solemn function rather than in a throne room to welcome a victorious soldier. Vast tapestries, dim and rich in the thick air, covered the walls between the tall Moorish windows, and above them the great pointed vaulting, ornamented with the fantastically modelled stucco of the Moors, was like the creamy crests of waves lashed into foam by the wind, thrown upright here, and there blown forward in swift spray, and then again breaking in the fall to thousands of light and exquisite shapes; and ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... outskirts. On both sides of the highway rose low, flat-roofed dwellings, built on a revolving wheel to follow the precious sun, and constructed of pure Titan crystal. Farther ahead and looming magnificent in the late afternoon sun was the first and largest of Venusian cities, Venusport. Like a fantastically large diamond, the startling towers of the young city shot upward into the misty atmosphere, catching the light and reflecting it in ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... called him Sprite; qualifying the name, however, by the epithets "most fantastic, but most human." To me the essential humanity was always the thing most apparent. In a fire well nourished of seasoned ship-timber, the flames glance fantastically and of many colours, but the glow at heart is ever deep and strong; it was at such a glow that the friends of Stevenson were accustomed to warm their hands, while they admired and were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dimension. It is an aggregate of universal experience, nor, other things being equal, is any man's judgment so thin and weak as the judgment of a man who knows nothing of the past. But history, if it is to be kept just and true and not to become a set of airy scenes, fantastically coloured by our later time, must be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... may it be alleged that, if this imagining of matters be so fit for the imagination, then must the historian needs surpass, who bringeth you images of true matters, such as indeed were done, and not such as fantastically or falsely may be suggested to have been done. Truly Aristotle himself in his discourse of poesy, plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry is philosophoteron and spoudaioteron, that is to say, it is more philosophical, and more studiously ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... 30th of July, Caillaux, Carson, strikes, and all the common topics of life had been swept out of the front page of the paper altogether; the stock exchanges were in a state of wild perturbation, and food prices were leaping fantastically. Austria was bombarding Belgrade, contrary to the rules of war hitherto accepted; Russia was mobilising; Mr. Asquith was, he declared, not relaxing his efforts "to do everything possible to circumscribe the area of possible conflict," and the Vienna Conference ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Thimbleby, which consists of a “street” of small cottages and two or three larger dwelling-houses. There is here an old manor, called “Hall-garth,” with an interesting old house with gables, thatched roof, some panelled rooms, a large fish pond, an old-time garden with yew hedges fantastically trimmed, and a fine old tree or two. In a field called “the Park,” at the east end of the parish, are some fine trees, remnants of a former avenue. The ancient well, said to be Roman, in the rectory grounds, has already been mentioned. The church was re-fashioned in ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... copies of Dickens' books, containing merely the author's signed inscription, realised 4870 dollars. To continue, in Wanamaker's old curiosity department I found little but English furniture and odds and ends, at prices which in their own country would have been fantastically high. In the "Vanity Fair" department, however (as I think it is called), the source was French. I suppose that French influence must be at the back of all the costumiers and jewellers of New York, but the shops themselves are far more spacious than those in Paris and not less well-appointed. ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... that Shakespeare was [Greek: myrionous anaer]—"the myriad-minded man"; a sort of demi-god who was every one and no one, a Proteus without individuality of his own. The theory has held the field for nearly a century, probably because it flatters our national vanity; for in itself it is fantastically absurd and leads to most ridiculous conclusions. For instance, when Coleridge had to deal with the fact that Shakespeare never drew a miser, instead of accepting the omission as characteristic, for it is confirmed by Ben Jonson's ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the glass, melting and running down; and over the watery panes yellow light from shop windows played fantastically, distorting vision. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... and bric-a-brac! Mina was surprised that Blent did not on the instant punish the blasphemy by a revengeful earthquake or an overwhelming flood. Cecily caught her by the arm, a burlesque apprehension screwing her face up into a fantastically ugly mask. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... black and white cattle fantastically marked. One beast, with a white head and the rest of the body glossy black, came to the edge to drink, and stood gravely twitching his ears at me as I went by, like some sort of preposterous clergyman in a play. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... twin-motor Caudron going in the opposite direction. It was fantastically painted, the wings a bright yellow and the circular hoods, over the two motors, a fiery red. As it approached, it looked like some prehistoric bird with great ravenous eyes. The thing startled me, not so much because of its weird appearance ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... There was no hope of digging through that mass of fantastically piled ice to reach the airship, and, even if they could have done so, it would have been crushed beyond all hope of repair. Nor could they dig down for more food, though what they had hastily saved ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... we are startled at the magnitude of the change. The Pantheon is largely new; old deities have been superseded; other deities have taken their place. There has been both accretion from without and evolution from within. The thirty-three gods of the Vedas have been fantastically raised to three hundred and thirty millions. Siva, Durga, Rama, Krishna, Kali—unknown in ancient days—are now mighty divinities; Indra is almost entirely overlooked, and Varuna has been degraded from his lofty throne and turned into a ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... that a single man can do, a sublime faith that it must be done, the power to concentrate, patience illimitable; contempt for danger, disregard of death, the intention to live; a final, weary estimate of the fact that mere things are as unimportant here as there, no matter how quaintly or fantastically they are dressed or named, and a corresponding emptiness of anticipation for the future—these items are only a random few of the price given by the ancient lands for that which the northern races bring to them. What other alchemical changes have been wrought only these lean and ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... hands she tore off her tumbled muslin dress, and arrayed herself in the flaming evening robe which Olga had once condemned. Olga raised no protest now. She gave her silent assistance. The horrors of that day had so closed in upon her that she felt fantastically convinced that nothing she did or left undone could make any difference, or hinder for the fraction of an instant the fate that so remorselessly pursued them and was surely every moment drawing nearer. The fear at her heart had so wound itself into her very ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... cautious and jealous distance, might lead to something like an accommodation.—What was the event? A strange, uncouth thing, a theatrical figure of the opera, his head shaded with three-colored plumes, his body fantastically habited, strutted from the back scenes, and, after a short speech, in the mock-heroic falsetto of stupid tragedy, delivered the gentleman who came to make the representation into the custody of a guard, with directions not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and slip into the water, cold, colder than that of the pool she loved at home, and for a moment regain the feeling of the past. He saw her once more as the strange, wild spirit of the stream, and it seemed to him fantastically that the running water called her. That afternoon he went along to the river. He made his way cautiously among the trees and the grassy path deadened the sound of his steps. Presently he came to a spot from which he could see the pool. Ethel ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... two lines were perceived to be excellent, and the fourth also. These enforced you, for the pleasure of recalling them, to recall the whole, and so of necessity to be hospitably minded toward the fifth and sixth lines, which at first repelled as being too obscurely and almost fantastically expressed. Having once passed it in, I find 'You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent,' with its delicate labial pause and its delicate consonantal chime, one of the most fascinating lines in the stanza. And since, after being the hardest of all ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sun, the deeply-indented edges of the Wolds begin to appear, and the roads generally make great plunges into the valley of the Derwent. The weather, which has been fine all day, changes at sunset, and great indigo clouds, lined with gold, pile themselves up fantastically in front of the setting sun. Lashing rain, driven by the wind with sudden fury, pours down upon the hamlet lying just below, but leaves Wharram-le-Street without a drop of moisture. The widespread views ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... where the farmers were well-to-do, and in hamlets and villages, young men used to go about fantastically dressed, and with fifes and drums serenade and salute the inhabitants, for which they were generally rewarded with eggs, butter, and bacon. These they would afterwards dispose of for money, and then ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Mme. de Bargeton tried to arrange a suitable toilette in which to call on her cousin, Mme. d'Espard. The weather was rather chilly. Looking through the dowdy wardrobe from Angouleme, she found nothing better than a certain green velvet gown, trimmed fantastically enough. Lucien, for his part, felt that he must go at once for his celebrated blue best coat; he felt aghast at the thought of his tight jacket, and determined to be well dressed, lest he should meet ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... on favoring them. The limestone cliff, fantastically eroded, offered a score of shelters, some shallow and needing to be walled up in front, others deep and tortuous. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... path were marked "Dangerous." The earth had given way, creating fearful chasms, over which trees leaned dangerously or hung out fantastically by a few roots. In the dell below there stood a small green painted table, and the young people leaning on the protecting railing wondered at this mysterious piece of furniture. There was in them and about them an illusive ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... the fire had time to reach them. Windows melted in their frames, pillars fell to the ground, ironwork bent as wax; nay, the very pavements around glowed so that neither man nor horse dared tread upon them. And the flames, gradually gaining ground, danced fantastically up and down the scaffolding, and covered the edifice as with one blaze; whilst inside transom beams were snapped asunder, rafters fell with destruction, and the fire roaring through chapels and aisles as in a great furnace, could be ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... colour had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides, and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the kitchen, save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls and ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and pans. The rain pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney; the lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed. And Peter looked at the Duchessa—and ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... redoubted father, It is most meet we arm us 'gainst the foe: And let us do it with no show of fear; No, with no more than if we heard that England Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance: For, my good liege, she is so idly king'd, Her sceptre so fantastically borne By a vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth, That fear ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... open space behind, or selecting the toys and amulets made to please them by the dainty-tentacled jewellers who work in kennels below, the mothers of the moon world—the queen bees, as it were, of the hive. They are noble-looking beings, fantastically and sometimes quite beautifully adorned, with a proud carriage, and, save for their mouths, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... not the pleasantest of thoughts, that he had laid a beautiful human creature, so fit for the enjoyment of life, there, when his own dark brow, his own troubled breast, might better, he could not but acknowledge, have been covered up there. [Perhaps there might sometimes be something fantastically gay in the language and ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... knight-errantry and monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the fashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in 'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in 'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and so enormously fat that she moved about with evident difficulty. She was dressed in a loosely hanging purple calico garment of the mother Hubbard type—known as a volante amongst Louisiana Creoles; and on her head was knotted and fantastically twisted a bright tignon. Her glistening good-natured countenance illumined ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... reason has its personifications, so has passion.—Every passion has its Object, tho' often distant and obscure;—to be brought nearer then, and rendered more distinct, it is personified; and Fancy fantastically decks, or aggravates the form, and adds "a local habitation and ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... always paused to admire the picturesque old Grange, with its curious gables and fantastically twisted chimneys, its mullion windows and red-brick walls half smothered in ivy, while all sorts of creepers festooned the deep, shady porch, with its long oaken benches that looked so cool and inviting on a hot summer's day, ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... where they stood lay a wondrous panorama, an ascent of fields of gilded snow, oranged by the sun, or else of a deep, cold blue, a piling up of mounds of ice, fantastically structured into towers, fleches, aiguilles, aretes, and gigantic heaps, under which one could well believe that the lost megatherium or mastodon lay sleeping. All the tints of the rainbow played there and met in the bed of vast glaciers rolling down ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... little window and handed him the food in silence. And that which he was experiencing was not the fear of death; death was now rather welcome to him. Death with all its eternal mysteriousness and incomprehensibility was more acceptable to his reason than this strangely and fantastically changed world. What is more, death seemed to have been destroyed completely in this insane world of phantoms and puppets, having lost its great and enigmatic significance, becoming something mechanical and only for that reason terrible. He would ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... the market-square he went straight to a juggler, fantastically dressed, who was keeping three brass balls in the air, and took them from him and faced around upon the approaching crowd and said: "This poor clown is ignorant of his art. Come forward and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... first as a little square haze of yellow light far up in the sky. I didn't realise the sharp rise in the ground immediately in front of us, and that rectangular beacon, high in the air, seemed a fantastically impossible thing. I pointed it out to Jervaise who was holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do some serious injury ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... thoughts been distracted by the extraordinary behavior of a silk underskirt hanging on a peg at the foot of the bed. It was swinging to and fro with the regularity of a pendulum, and that which is regular in a pendulum is fantastically irregular in an underskirt. She sat up quickly, and listened. There was a swish of water outside. Now and again she heard a slight movement of the rudder chains in their boxes. Then, all aglow with wonder and excitement, she jumped out of bed and drew the curtain ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy |
