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Monumental   Listen
adjective
Monumental  adj.  
1.
Of, pertaining to, or suitable for, a monument; as, a monumental inscription.
2.
Serving as a monument; memorial; preserving memory. "Of pine, or monumental oak." "A work outlasting monumental brass."
3.
Of lasting significance; as, a monumental work of literature; a monumental accomplishment.
4.
Exceptionally large in quantity, quality, or degree; as, a monumental amount of work to be done






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Monumental" Quotes from Famous Books



... that of Australia published in 1867 in seven volumes octavo. At the same time the "Genera Plantarum" was being planned; it was begun, with Dr. Hooker as a collaborator, in 1862, and concluded in 1883. With this monumental work his labours ended; "his strength...suddenly gave way...his visits to Kew ended, and lingering on under increasing debility, he died of old age on September 10th last" (1883.) The amount of work that he accomplished was gigantic and of the most masterly character. In speaking of his ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... Dane's-blood. One of the bell-flower tribe, the clustered bell-flower, has a similar legend attached to it; and according to Miss Pratt, "in the village of Bartlow there are four remarkable hills, supposed to have been thrown up by the Danes as monumental memorials of the battle fought in 1006 between Canute and Edmund Ironside. Some years ago the clustered bell-flower was largely scattered about these mounds, the presence of which the cottagers attributed to its having sprung from the Dane's blood," under which name ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... pleasure—taking what our grandfathers were wont to call the Grand Tour—were recreations almost unknown to the ancient world. If Plato went into Egypt, it was not to ascend the Nile, nor to study the monumental pictures of a land whose history was graven on rocks, but to hold close colloquy on metaphysics or divinity with the Dean and Chapter at Memphis. The Greeks indeed, fortunately for posterity, had an incredible itch for Egyptian yarns, and no sooner ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne

... will go on; if you advise me to stop, I will go no further." The young historian's letter teems with bad spelling and bad grammar, but it is saturated with the spirit of his age. The chapters as they came to Raynal's hands are not in existence so far as is known, and posterity can never judge how monumental their author's assurance was. The abbe's reply was kindly, but he advised the novice to complete his researches, and then to rewrite his pieces. Buonaparte was not unwilling to profit by the counsels he received: soon after, in July, 1786, he gave two ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... the Yugoslav average. Croatian Serb Nationalists control approximately one third of the Croatian territory, and one of the overriding determinants of Croatia's long-term political and economic prospects will be the resolution of this territorial dispute. Croatia faces monumental problems stemming from: the legacy of longtime Communist mismanagement of the economy; large foreign debt; damage during the fighting to bridges, factories, powerlines, buildings, and houses; the large refugee ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... heart was full of anguish when he thought of Theodora. To have known such a woman and to have lost her! Why should a man live after this? Yes; he would retire to Muriel, once hallowed by her presence, and he would raise to her memory some monumental fane, beyond the dreams ever of Artemisia, and which should commemorate alike her wondrous ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli

... How unlike timid modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive; the greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he is a monumental failure, more interesting than ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... at Or San Michele is, as Symonds has expressed it, "a monumental jewel," and "an epitome of the minor arts of mediaeval Italy." On it one sees bas-relief carving, intaglios, statuettes, mosaic, the lapidary's art in agate; enamels, and gilded glass, and yet all in good taste and harmony. The sculpture ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... for weeks there had been accumulating evidence, which we could see pointed to a monumental success or an avalanche failure. The copper market was literally boiling, and investors from one end of America to the other and throughout Europe were on the qui vive for the anticipated announcement. At intervals in history great "booms" are started, which bloom into iridescent bubbles, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... pages withdrew into the palace with every sign of the most profound respect. The king at his peep-hole was pleased to observe that his commands were being obeyed most strictly and that no hint of any secret mirth, no obvious consciousness of a hidden joke marred for one moment the monumental gravity of the parts which Olivier and ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... way into regions where he, in another life, might follow and sing beside her in liquid, throbbing notes to pierce the stars. He ended by saying that he was not very fit—the opera season had been a monumental experience this year—and he was taking refuge with an English brotherhood to lead, for a time, a cloistered life instinct with beauty and its worship, but that there as everywhere he was hers eternally. How glad I was of the verbal memory ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo

... modified from the ordinary cemetery. The burial ground is artificially made of a fine carboniferous earth. Vegetation of rapid growth is cultivated over it. The dead are placed in the earth from the bier, either in basket work or simply in the shroud; and the monumental slab, instead of being set over or at the head or foot of a raised grave, is placed in a spacious covered hall or temple, and records simply the fact that the person commemorated was recommitted to earth in ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson

... exterior of the walled city, has found its finest use in the far-western city of St. Francis. Quite apart from their frequent occurrence in the mission architecture of old Alta California, these simple wall spaces well befit the monumental structure that honors an achievement so important to all Spanish America as the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... arrived, but Paris was still a city of absentees. The weather was warm and charming, and a certain savour of early autumn in the air was in accord with the somewhat melancholy aspect of the empty streets and closed shutters of this honorable quarter, where the end of the monumental vistas seemed to be curtained with a hazy emanation from the Seine. It was late in the afternoon when Bernard was ushered into Mrs. Vivian's little high-nestling drawing-room, and a patch of sunset tints, faintly red, rested softly upon the gilded wall. Bernard had seen ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... above inscription was first written and inscribed in the former edition, the brave and benign "Christian knight," the Coeur- de-Lion of our own times, has also been gathered to the tears of his country, and his monumental statue, as if standing on the victorious mount of St. Jean d'Acre, is now preparing to be set up, with its appropriate sacred trophies, in the great Naval Hall at Greenwich. It is understood that his mortal remains will be removed from the Pere la Chaise ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... the member from the mountain districts, and the old negro, and the popular minister who will have carried it through if it passes," said Senator Milner to his daughter. "It is a monumental thing at this crisis of affairs—a huge, unpopular claim on a resenting government carried through by persons impelled solely by the most purely primitive and disinterested of motives. An ingenuous county ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... was suggested by the appearance in one of our streets of a venerable relic of the Revolution, said to be one of the party who threw the tea overboard in Boston Harbor. He was a fine monumental specimen in his cocked hat and knee breeches, with his buckled shoes and his sturdy cane. The smile with which I, as a young man, greeted him, meant no disrespect to an honored fellow-citizen whose costume was out of date, but whose patriotism never ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... feet. I had loved her then—I thought I loved her more than anything or anyone in this world—but a dying father's wish had come between us. The poor old Dad had made a life study of the Islands—how monumental a study it was let his three volumes of Solomon Island Ethnology bear witness—yet he died before he had quite completed his notes. Though he had said nothing to me I knew the wish that lay nearest his heart, and I made his dying hour almost the happiest of his ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... of poetical fire. Bale makes him Equitem Auratum & Poetam Laureatum, but Winstanly says that he was neither laureated nor bederated, but only rosated, having a chaplet of four roses about his head in his monumental stone erected in St. Mary Overy's, Southwark: He was held in great esteem by King Richard II, to whom he dedicates a book called Confessio Amantis. That he was a man of no honour appears by his behaviour when the revolution ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber

... In his monumental history of the "Downfall of the Ancient World" (Der Untergang der Antikenwelt) Dr. Otto Seeck of the University of Munster in Westphalia, treats in detail the causes of such decline. He first calls ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... free from flesh that made the Jews rebel: And Moses' laws he held in more account, For forty days of fasting in the mount. To speak the rest who better are forgot, 630 Would tire a well-breathed witness of the plot. Yet Corah, thou shalt from oblivion pass; Erect thyself, thou monumental brass, High as the serpent of thy metal made, While nations stand secure beneath thy shade. What though his birth were base, yet comets rise From earthly vapours, ere they shine in skies. Prodigious actions may as well be done By weaver's issue, as by prince's son. This arch attestor ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... followed the lessons of the learned professors, among whom later Galileo figured, one of whose bones is preserved there as a relic, a relic of a martyr who suffered for the truth. The facade of the University is very beautiful; four Doric columns give it a severe and monumental air; but solitude reigns in the class-rooms where to-day scarcely a thousand ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... When the gust hath blown his fill, Ending on the rustling leaves With minute drops from off the eaves. And when the sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me, goddess, bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown, that Sylvan loves, Of pine, or monumental oak, Where the rude axe, with heaved stroke, Was never heard the nymphs to daunt Or fright them from their hallow'd haunt. There in close covert by some brook Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from day's garish eye, While the bee with honey'd thigh, That at her flowery work doth sing, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... sounds; The chilly wind was sad with moans; Black hearses passed, and burial-grounds Grew thick with monumental stones. ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... of this was an appalling mental agony: "It seemed to me after a day or two that there was no truth in religion, that Jesus Christ was not God, that the whole of life was an empty sham, and that I was, if not the chiefest of sinners, at any rate the most monumental of fools." He went to the Advent services feeling, he says, like a soul in hell. But matters mended after that, and the ordination itself seemed to him a true consecration. He read the Gospel, and he remembered gratefully the sermon of Canon Mason, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson

... most laborious and protracted mental effort was entailed in the writing of Revues. He had calculated that the amount of brain force he had spent on his last masterpiece was fully as large as that expended by GIBBON on his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In evidence of the strain he added the following interesting statistics. He had worn out thirteen of the costliest gold-nibbed fountain pens; seven expert typists had been so exhausted that they had to undergo a rest-cure; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various

... furnish for help. It is not much. The French have been shockingly negligent of their greatest artistic glory. One knows not even where to seek. One must go to the National Library and beg as a special favour permission to look at the monumental work of M. Lasteyrie, if one wishes to make even a beginning of the study of French glass. Fortunately there exists a fragment of a great work which the Government began, but never completed, upon Chartres; and another, quite indispensable, but not official, upon Bourges; while ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... of the primitive god-idea as manifested in monumental records in various parts of the world; through scientific investigation into the early religious conceptions of mankind as expressed by symbols which appear in the architecture and decorations of sacred edifices and shrines; by means of a careful examination ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... most eminent son should be neglected to sleep in an undistinguished grave. But this neglect does not extend alone to Mr. Crawford. I believe, of all her distinguished men, James A. Meriwether is the only one whose grave has been honored with a monumental stone by the State. Crawford, Cobb, Dooly, Jackson, Troup, Forsyth, Campbell, Lumpkin, Dawson, Walker, Colquitt, Berrien, Daugherty, and many others who have done the State some service and much honor, are distinguished in their graves only ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... Abbey some of the most important are by Pope. Like everything else from his pen, they are carefully written, but viewed as monumental inscriptions, not distinguished for any striking excellence. Among the best of them is that on the Honourable James Craggs, a secretary of state, rather discreditably mixed up with the South ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... that Lockhart had not compared the texts in The Minstrelsy with the mass of manuscript materials which are still at Abbotsford. These, copied by the accurate Mr. Macmath, have been published in the monumental collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, in ten parts, by the late Professor Child of Harvard, the greatest of scholars in ballad-lore. From his book we often know exactly what kinds of copies of ballads Scott possessed, and what alterations he made in his ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang

... resplendent sunset skies, of poetic association, of artistic beauty. In spirit he is again lingering through long afternoons in St. Peter's till the golden light through the far windows of the tribune is merged into the dusk of twilight in which the vast monumental groups gleam wraith-like. Again he is ascending the magnificent Scala Regia, and lingering in the Raphael Stanze, or in the wonderful sculpture galleries of the Vatican, or sauntering in the sunshine on the Palatine. In memory he is again spellbound by ancient ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... convincing as Gathorne Hardy, and, to all men, less gifted with charm and melody of voice than Mr. Bright; but fine in the extreme, with no serious drawbacks except a little too much satisfaction with himself; a very able man, as his monumental book upon the Eastern Question will suffice to show. In philosophy he dabbled, and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... number gravely declared that trout could there be caught and boiled in the same lake, within a radius of fifteen feet, the House of Representatives broke forth into roars of laughter, and thought the man a monumental liar. We cannot be surprised, therefore, that enthusiastic fishermen almost go crazy here. I have seen men, after a ride of forty miles, rush off to fish without a moment's rest as if their lives depended on it. Some years ago, General ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... is!" cried KENRICK, looking on with monumental suavity; "almost sorry he left us. Sometimes, at his best, he equals our JOE." Business done.—A ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various

... tokens which oft deceive. Not all runes monumental can we believe: But an honest heart, O Helge, of pure endeavor, With Odin's runes ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner

... know what secret influence I feared to dissipate by breaking silence, but we followed the great deserted drives without speaking, looking at the crosses, the monumental columns, and the mortuary wreaths awaiting ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... arrived. A grand stairway had been built, so that the King and his ministers could mount to the summit of this monumental tart. Thence the King, amid a deep silence, thus ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... me; and, compared with you, what is the value of heraldic honours and traditionary glory heaped upon the dead, which is, in truth, too often only as the phosphorescent glimmer that hangs upon decay: what are these gauds to me, who count you to be far above the worth of monumental effigy, or marble mask, my living love; whom I will set,—not in the tomb of cold, pale porphyry, nor in a sable, slabbed sarcophagus, but breathing, and enshrined in fortune's framing gold. Fastidious girl, and prouder than the proud Montignys, listen to me, listen. We are two stranger ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... said, 'Well, now, old man, what about going up to this room of yours and having a look at this monumental history?' Saw him shoot a glance in his wife's direction, and he said, 'Oh, no, not now, Hapgood. Never mind now.' And his wife said, 'Mark, what can there be for Mr. Hapgood to see up there? It's too ridiculous. I'm sure he doesn't want ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... answer as Tibby himself would have given. The cheque was returned, the legacy refused, the writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this to Helen, adding in the fulness of his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a monumental person after all. Helen's reply was frantic. He was to take no notice. He was to go down at once and say that she commanded acceptance. He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited them. The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... deserved the name of the monumental year in our parish; for the young laird of the Breadland, that had been my pupil, being learning to be an advocate among the faculty in Edinburgh, with his lady mother, who had removed thither with the young ladies her ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... she saw him standing shy, grave, and monumental, with nervous hands clasped over the back of a chair, neither advancing nor retreating, 'what a ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... is a mighty hunter before the face of the Lord in the land of Masonry, and through the whole country of Hiram; great also is Diana of the Palladians. After their monumental revelations and confessions, those of all other seceders and penitents who have come out of the mystery of iniquity, "are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine." My readers in the two previous chapters ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... reaching over five thousand years. As Bunsen remarks, from the known portion of the curve of history we may determine the whole. The Egyptians, old as they are, belong to the middle ages of mankind, for there is a period antecedent to monumental history, or indeed, to history of any kind, during which language and mythology are formed, for these must exist prior to all political institutions, all art, all science. Even at the first moment that we gain a glimpse ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... as though, having given the genius something to play with, he must not spoil the game. The game included twelve thousand pounds paid to budding sculptors for monumental groups of a symbolic tendency; it included forests of onyx pillars and pillars of Carrara marble; it included ceilings painted by artists who ought to have been R.A.'s, but were not; and it included a central court of vast dimensions and many fountains, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... of the man was monumental. No one else could have looked upon that slight figure, huddled down in the big old rocker, without having experienced a feeling of restraint; no one could have observed the drawn, frowning brows, and the hard lines ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... replaced by a gulf of divergence which there is no possibility of bridging. The great divergence occurs in the well-known dark period of Egyptian history between the Twelfth and the Eighteenth Dynasties, where monumental evidence is extremely scanty, almost non-existent, and where historians have to grope for facts with no better light to guide them than is afforded by the History of Manetho, and the torn fragments of the Turin Papyrus. ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... Nestorian missions. Recent discoveries have largely added to our knowledge. It is clear that in the sixth century, {98} apparently before 540, Nestorian bishoprics were founded in Herat and Samarkand. Monumental inscriptions date back as far as 547. [Sidenote: in the Far East.] Merv, as early as 650, is spoken of as a "falling church" [9] amid the triumphs of Islam. China has been already mentioned, and though it is not clear that only Nestorian missions prospered in the far land, ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... literature has grown up around the lovely Ines, and many more than a hundred items of interest could be enumerated. The best authority is J. de Araujo, whose monumental Bibliographia Inesiana was published in 1897. Mrs. Behn's novel was immensely popular and is included, with some unnecessary moral observations as preface, in Mrs. Griffith's A Collection of Novels (1777), Vol. III, which ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn

... in wonder to witness one of Her Majesty's judges forsake— on very insufficient provocation—the gossamer of recreative conversation, to upraise a few monumental, I may say memorable, judgments on the subject of lithography. Now, there are many red rags in the various arts with which to encompass the discomfiture of the Philistine's bull, and the raven will always appropriate the feathers of the peacock ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett

... not have to return to the trenches. I have found many who do not want to go back. Fierce partisans of French courage deny this, reading in my contention a lack of bravery, but to me it is valor of a glorious color. For they do return without resentment, and, what is more difficult in this day of monumental deeds and minute ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... him, he could not very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand, which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the d'Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life's battle as yet, even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest peasantry. So much for Norman ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... mere imagination, took place. To the fact thus indefinitely stated, that hallowing of Sunday as a day of sacred and joyful observance which is coeval with the earliest traditions, and antedates all records, is an attestation as significant as any monumental marble. No hallucination theory, no gradual rise and growth of hope in the minds of a reflective few, can account for that solid primeval monument. But what occurred, the reality in distinctness from any legendary accretions, we shall ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... penult couplet is not uncommon, the idea of retributive justice, of others performing the last offices for the clerk who had so often done the like for his neighbours. The same notion is expressed in the epitaph of Frank Raw, clerk and monumental mason, of Selby, Yorkshire, which runs ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe. Here, in a broad thoroughfare, once the abode of wealthy City merchants, we found the sculpture works for which we searched. Outside was a considerable yard full of monumental masonry. Inside was a large room in which fifty workers were carving or moulding. The manager, a big blond German, received us civilly, and gave a clear answer to all Holmes's questions. A reference to his books showed that hundreds of casts had ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... campaign, the need of writing up which was the reason for the collection of the events of previous years which were not in themselves worthy of special commemoration. The first of these is the one which ends with the famous battle of Qarqara in 854. This has come down to us in a monumental copy which was set up at Kirkh, the ancient Tushhan, and which has been named the Monolith inscription. [Footnote: III R 7f; Rasmussen, cf.; 2 ff. Photograph, Rogers, 537; Hist., op. 226. Amiaud-Scheil, passim; Peiser, KB. I. ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead

... The books represented nearly all that he could carry away from his old rooms, but they were a solid addendum to the garnishing of home. For a moment he thought of selling a few score of volumes. Would he ever really want those monumental tomes—the six folios of Muratori, for instance, which he liked to possess, but had never used? Thereby hung the great, the unanswerable question: How was he going to spend his life as a married man? Was it probable that he would become a serious student, or even that he would study as much as ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... that the result is here a partly accidental one, and not a matter of art. But domestic architecture is only half-way a fine art. It does not aim at a beauty of the monumental kind, as a statue, a triumphal arch, or even a temple does. Its primary aim is shelter, to house man in nature,—and it forms, as it were, the connecting link between him and the outward world. Its results, therefore, are partly the free artistic production, and partly retain unmodified ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... aedilis hic fuit apud vos. But Cicero's words (nolum ... sepulcro) seem to imply a longer inscription than one of three lines; the analogy of the Scipionic inscriptions points the same way. The older monumental inscriptions of Rome were written in the Saturnian metre, which depended partly on accent. The normal line ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... hook, hung a rack of tattered, time-out-of-mind hatchments; and in the centre of the tomb might be seen the effigies of Sir Ranulph de Rokewode, the builder of the mausoleum, and the founder of the race who slept within its walls. This statue, wrought in black marble, differed from most monumental carved-work, in that its posture was erect and lifelike. Sir Ranulph was represented as sheathed in a complete suit of mail, decorated with his emblazoned and gilded surcoat, his arm leaning upon the pommel of a weighty curtal-axe. The attitude was that of stern repose. A ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... the historical writers stand the antiquarians, who wrote during this period in large numbers, and whose treatises filled the library from which, in the age of Cicero, Varro compiled his monumental works. As numerous probably were the writers of the school of Cato, on husbandry, domestic economy, and other practical subjects, and the grammarians and philologists, whose works formed two other large sections ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... of the first importance more than two thousand years ago, is still one of the largest places in the empire, being exceeded in population probably by Canton alone. Each of its four walls, facing the cardinal points, is over six miles long and is pierced in the center by a monumental gate with lofty pavilions. It was here, among the ruins of an old Nestorian church, built several centuries before, that was found the famous tablet now sought at a high price by the British Museum. The harassing mobs gathered from its ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... busied itself with the countless experiences that had been recorded, and the scenes and pageants he had witnessed but of which he had made no record. I wondered if he had enjoyed the changing of seasons. I knew that he had often boomed or hymned in the storm or in the breeze. Many a monumental robe of snow-flowers had he worn. More than a thousand times he had beheld the earth burst into bloom amid the happy songs of mating birds; hundreds of times in summer he had worn countless crystal rain-jewels in the sunlight of the breaking ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... through the porch, and there I see a stray sheep—I don't mean a sinner, but mutton—half making up his mind to come into the church. I feel that if I looked at him any longer, I might be tempted to say something out loud; and what would become of me then! I look up at the monumental tablets on the wall, and try to think of Mr. Bodgers late of this parish, and what the feelings of Mrs. Bodgers must have been, when affliction sore, long time Mr. Bodgers bore, and physicians were in vain. I wonder whether they called in Mr. Chillip, and he was in vain; and if so, how he ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... with the period is that of the brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, and the work which naturally comes to the mind, when thinking of them, is the monumental altarpiece which they painted for Jos. Vyt, lord of Pamele, to be placed in his chapel in the Cathedral of St. John in Ghent. This work, generally known as the "Mystic Lamb," is composed of ten smaller pictures, but the partitions separating the various divisions of the wings and the wings from ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... that the countries which were earliest and most deeply touched by the Renaissance should excel in the designing of these noble and costly pieces of furniture. The cabinets of Italy, France and the Netherlands were especially rich and monumental. Those of Italy and Flanders are often of great magnificence and of real artistic skill, though like all other furniture their style was often grievously debased, and their details incongruous and bizarre. Flanders and Burgundy were, indeed, their lands of adoption, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he too would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he would wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts." Such indications there certainly are in them. He was [29] meant—we see it in the variety, the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the gravity, of one after ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... does, and wine, And grief dies smothered in thy purple fold. Let one greater than I, Kiss, and more bold, Rear thee a classic, monumental line. ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine

... nobility conferred on them by Henri IV. Their ancient coat—parted per pale azure and argent, with a dame of the fourteenth century bearing in her hand a rose, all counterchanged—is carved in wood and monumental marble on the churches and old houses hereabouts. And from immemorial antiquity the Buol of Davos has sat thus on Sylvester Abend with family and folk around him, summoned from alp and snowy field to drink grampampuli ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... to the comet's mass, the pure and mighty sea rises indignant from its bed, by drowning to cleanse the foul and mighty land—how easy an engulfing of the corpses; how awful that universal burial; how apt their monumental epitaph written in water, "The wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot rest;" how dread the everlasting requiem chanted for the whelmed race by the waves roaring above them: yea, roaring above them still! for in that chaotic hour it seems probable to reason that ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... remember that it was one of his earliest productions, having been submitted for the Chancellor's prize in 1862, when Green was but 26 years of age, the maturity of both style and contents seems remarkable. It is in fact a monumental piece of literary criticism, sufficient to establish the reputation of many a lesser writer. At the same time, however, there is about it an air of constraint which shows that the author was not at ease in ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green

... dim twilight of that day, another form was kneeling beside that monumental couch. It was Robert Selwyn; and when he rose, there were tears on that sweet marble face. All night long they glistened in the pale moonlight, and sad starlight, shining through that high church window; but in the ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... opposite to each other, on either side of the fire—the monumental matron whose black bodice heavily overhung the table, whose large rounded face was creased and wrinkled by what seemed countless years of joy and disillusion; and the young, slim girl, so fresh, so virginal, so ignorant, with all the pathos of an ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... less than our men. If the capital at Washington is founded on pygmy manhood, it will be blown away like thistledown before some passing wind of revolution. Russia, Turkey, Spain, will tell you that. If our men are giants, the nation will be lasting as adamant. England and Germany and America are monumental testimonies. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... magnitude and height of these towering masses one should examine them not only by travelling along the brink, but by descending to the river level in order to examine them from below. Then only will the awful grandeur and immensity of this monumental architecture of nature begin to dawn ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... paths between the flowerbeds they walked to the boxwood hedge which bordered the park on the southern side. They passed before the orange-grove, the monumental door of which was surmounted by the Lorraine cross of Mareuilles, and then passed under the linden-trees which formed an alley on the lawn. Statues of nymphs shivered in the damp shade studded with pale lights. A pigeon, posed ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... With spoils and altars every temple graced. Three shining nights and three succeeding days, The fields resound with shouts, the streets with praise. Great Caesar sits sublime upon his throne, Before Apollo's porch of Parian stone; Accepts the presents vowed for victory; And hangs the monumental crowns on high. Vast crowds of vanquished nations march along, Various in arms, in habit, and in tongue. ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke

... conscriptions, the barter of offices and the leasing of custom houses, slavery and the vices of the east, together with the energy, indomitable will and marvelous luck of Mehmet Ali, all combined in one grand achievement—I mean the monumental tyranny, never yet equalled, under which the fellahs today are groaning in Egypt and the Arabs in Syria, and under which a whole country has been transformed into a private domain, and a whole ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... to believe any body of men could be guilty of such an act of barbarism! There is still standing in this town, the house of a Roman senator, now inhabited by a shoe-maker. In the cathedral they have a marble-stone, on which there is engraved, in Arabic characters, a monumental inscription ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse

... Occident and the Orient, posterior and posterior, sitting tight, holding fast the culture dumped by them on to primitive America, Atlantic to Pacific, were monumental colophons a disorderly country fellow, vulgar Long Islander. not overfond of the stench choking native respiration, poked down off the shelf with the aid of some mere blades of grass; and deliberately climbing up, brazenly usurping one end of the new ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... Duchesse had in the meanwhile followed Hector along the corridor and down the finely carved marble staircase. At a monumental door on the ground floor the man paused, his hand upon the massive ormolu handle, waiting for Madame la ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... altogether. Others persisted, however, and new schools have been founded by these and similar organizations, by private philanthropy, and also by negro churches. As a result there are independent schools, state schools, and Federal schools. The recent monumental report of the Bureau of Education reports 653 schools for negroes other than regular public schools[1]. Of these 28 are under public control, 507 are denominational schools (of which 354 are under white boards and 153 under negro boards), and 118 are ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson

... The muffled tramp of the Museum guard Once more went by me; I beheld again Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street; Again I longed for the returning morn, The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds, The consentaneous trill of tiny song That weaves round monumental cornices A passing charm of beauty: most of all, For your light foot I wearied, and your knock That was the glad reveille of my day. Lo, now, when to your task in the great house At morning through the portico you pass, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... most? Our inflated monumental style is only fit to trumpet forth the praises of pygmies. The ancients showed men as they were, and it was plain that they were men indeed. Xenophon did honour to the memory of some warriors who were slain by treason during the retreat of the Ten Thousand. "They ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... of the dead, exhibit a much greater variety of monumental architecture than the dwellings of the living can boast of. Some indeed deposit the remains of their ancestors in houses that differ in nothing from those they inhabited while living, except in their diminutive size; others prefer a square vault, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... gunnybags filled with sand which we piled up in a wall some six feet through and about ten feet high. This barricade was about twenty feet from the building. Guards were stationed at the passageways through it as well as at the stairs and Committee by the members of the Monumental Fire Engine Company No. 6, stationed on the west side of Brenham Place, opposite the "Plaza." Our small field pieces and arms were kept on the ground floor, and the cells, executive chamber and other departments were ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley

... genius. In the vehement passions of the magnanimous, compassionate hero in tatters, in the aristocracy of his soul, and in his constant thirst for Freedom, Gorky sees the rebellious and irreconcilable spirit of man, of future man,—in these he sees something beautiful, something powerful, something monumental, and is carried away by their strange psychology. For the barefooted dreamer's life is Gorky's life, his ideals are Gorky's ideals, his pleasures and pains, ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... are gone, Alike without their monumental stone! The first, all efforts vainly strove to wean From lingering where her Chieftain's blood had been: Grief had so tamed a spirit once too proud, Her tears were few, her wailing never loud; But furious would you tear her from the spot Where yet she scarce believed ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... fortifications extending twenty-one miles in circuit, according to the measurement of Ammon as adopted by Gibbon, and forty- five miles according to other authorities. Let him enter any of the various gates which opened into the city from the roads which radiated to all parts of Italy—they were of monumental brass covered with bass- reliefs, on which the victories of generals for a thousand years were commemorated. Let him pass up the Via Appia, or the Via Flaminia, or the Via Cabra—they were lined with temples and shops and palaces. Let him pass ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... Tomb (Vol. viii., p. 411.).—I fancy that the much mooted question, as to the existence of a monumental tomb over the remains of King Henry I. in Reading Abbey, may at once be set at rest by referring to Tanner's Notitia Monastica, edit. 1744, in the second column of p. 15.: where it is evident that a tomb and an effigy of King Henry ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various

... with the special exhibition of the works of his long life, that was made some few years back to mark the completion of his last great picture for the House of Lords, "The Judgment of Daniel." That exhibition, which most people, who know anything about painting in its highest style of religious and monumental art, thought a most interesting display of a painter's career, is described by this most genial of critics as "acres of pallid purple canvases, with wizened saints and ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... him Equitem Auratum & Poetam Laureatum, proving both from his Ornaments on his Monumental Statue in St. Mary Overies Southwark. Yet he appeareth there neither laureated nor hederated Poet, (except the leaves of the Bays and Ivy be wither'd to nothing, since the erection of the Tomb) but only rosated, having a Chaplet of four Roses ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... publicly as the "reception parlor," and privately to the pupils as "purgatory." His keen eyes had taken in the various rigid details, from the flat steam "radiator," like an enormous japanned soda-cracker, that heated one end of the room, to the monumental bust of Dr. Crammer, that hopelessly chilled the other; from the Lord's Prayer, executed by a former writing-master in such gratuitous variety of elegant calligraphic trifling as to considerably abate the serious value of the composition, to ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... praise. Let the luckless one ask of me no more; let him call only upon the succulent; let him recruit among the full ranks of the adipose. Be it mine to lay these spare-ribs athwart no gridiron more fervid than the pavement of his own monumental Escurial. Suum cuique. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... this most Reverend and Renowned Antiquary has been showing us Monumental Rarities ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn

... late my royal sire; scarce in these halls Are stilled the echoes of the funeral wail; Another corpse succeeds, and in the grave Weighs down its fellow-dust—almost our torch With borrowed lustre from the last, may pierce The monumental gloom; and on the stair, Blends in one throng confused two mourning trains. Then in the sacred royal dome that guards The ashes of my sire, prepare with speed The funeral rites; unseen of mortal eye, And noiseless be your task—let all ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... could only repeat the phrases: no scandal, only a few of us in the office knew, never got to the newspapers. For ten years he had hidden himself in wildernesses, avoided hotels, read no American newspapers, never called for mail. Oh, monumental fool! ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... learn charity and modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I remember to have observed two working- women with a baby halting by a grave; there was something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I overheard their judgment on that wonder. "Eh! ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... her past history and her present condition, in the regal palaces she has reared. Upon these monumental walls are inscribed, in letters more legible than the hieroglyphics of Egypt, and as ineffaceable, the long and dreary story of kingly vice, voluptuousness and pride, and of popular servility and oppression. The unthinking tourist saunters through these ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott

... retort, she seemed to realize the monumental irony of what she had just said, and she burst ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton

... the main street, we can walk a long way without finding anything interesting in the way of architecture, or of a monumental character until we reach the East Gate, which is probably the largest gate of all. One of the peculiarities of this gate is that on the outside it has a semi-circular wall protection, and in this wall ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... homesick. What has a pretty young girl to regret in such a life as she has left? It's the most arid and joyless existence under the sun. She has never known anything like society. In the country with us, the social side must always have been somewhat paralyzed, but there are monumental evidences of pleasures in other days that are quite extinct now. You see big dusty ball-rooms in the old taverns: ball-rooms that have had no dancing in them for half a century, and where they give you a bed sometimes. There used to be academies, too, in the hill towns, where they furnished ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... Chief of a hundred chiefs o'er all the pert! Rescued an orphan babe from common sense, I gave his mother's milk to Confidence; She with her own ambrosia bronz'd his face, And changed his skin to monumental brass. Whom rage nor sword e'er mortally shall hurt, Chief of a hundred chiefs o'er all the pert! Rescued an orphan babe from common sense, I gave his mother's milk to Confidence; She with her own ambrosia bronz'd his face, And changed his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... distance of about two miles rose a colossal mass, in shape somewhat like a monumental mound or tumulus, and apparently of the brightest silver. As I came in view of it, the sun was just covered by a passing cloud, from the lower edge of which the bright rays shot down obliquely upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... had to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner, with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. A high door ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... most prosperous was the renowned Amenothes III., who is immortalised by the wonderful monumental relics of his long and peaceful reign. Amenothes devoted immense energy to the building of temples, palaces and shrines, and gave very little ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... of reflection, I will mention a case of monumental tree-planting in New England, not very widely known there. A small town, in the heart of Massachusetts, was stirred to the liveliest emotion, with all the rest in her borders, by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Different communities expressed their sense ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... completed. By the middle of the century patronage was almost wholly vested in the magnates of commerce and politics: if a chapel were painted or a memorial statue set up, in most cases the artist worked for the donor, and not for the church authorities. The monumental type of sculpture became more rare, bric a brac more common. Well-known men like Donatello received the old kind of commission to the end of their lives, while younger men, though fully occupied, were seldom entrusted with comprehensive ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... are Hindoos, and the remainder nominally Mahometans, in creed. Around the wall stretches a wide, barren, irregular plain, covered, mile after mile, with the ruins of earlier Delhis, and the tombs of the great or the rich men of the Mahometan dynasty. There is no other such monumental plain as this in the world. It is as full of traditions and historic memories as of ruins; and in this respect, as in many others, Delhi bears a striking resemblance to Rome,—for the Roman Campagna ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... had not been voted. As a result the application was withdrawn. Though this may have been a bad thing for the Library, it was a good one for other reasons. Today Sir John Fortescue is known as the author of the monumental History of the British Army as well as other books, and for having been ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)

... true of the Africa continent has been emphatically true of the people. The world has always seen the African race in its lowest form. This seems true as far back as Egyptian monumental times. One is struck, when looking at copies of ancient hicroglyhics, with the degraded type of negro feature which always appears when these captive people are delineated. The African race seems to have been fated to be always represented by a slave, and, as was inevitable, it has been judged by ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman

... in his "History of Human Marriage," has given us a monumental work, which is remarkable, not only for the richness and exactness of its material, but also for the clearness and good sense of its criticism. I shall give a resume of Westermark's results, as the subject is beyond the domain of my special studies. The author has collected ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... dealing with Turkish officials. During the interval, however, archaeologists and philologists were kept fully engaged studying the large amount of material which had been accumulated. Sir Henry Rawlinson began the issue of his monumental work The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia on behalf ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... domestic. The first thing is to assemble a suitable number of young animals, all of which are mentally bright and physically sound. Most adult animals are impracticable, and often impossible, because they are set in their ways. The elephants are monumental exceptions. A large, well-lighted and sunny room is provided; and around it are the individual cages for the student animals. The members of the company are fed wisely and well, kept scrupulously clean, and in all ways made comfortable ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... pit accident at Hartley a few years ago. They were grouped in families of two, three, four, or five, and these family groups were arranged in extended rows; but all were nameless. Near them slept the dust of the hereditary owners of the soil under monumental marble, loaded with statuary and inscriptions. Subjects of Christ's kingdom, "it shall not be so among you." Nor is the law which obtains in the heavenly the direct reverse of that which obtains in the earthly kingdom; it is not the poor, but the "poor in ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... warrior with his hand on his sword-hilt, lie open-eyed, waiting the summons of the trumpet. One cannot help fancying that the artist's long vigils among the Abbey tombs, during his apprenticeship to James Basire, must have been present to his mind when he selected this impressive monumental subject. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... Ammon as adopted by Gibbon, and forty-five miles according to other authorities. Let him enter any of the various gates that opened into the city from the roads which radiated to all parts of Italy and the world,—they were of monumental brass covered with bas-reliefs, on which the victories of generals for a thousand years were commemorated. Let him pass through any of the crowded thoroughfares,—he saw houses towering scarcely ever less than seventy feet, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... Among the monumental stones for the dead are several with caps figured on them. The like are to be seen at Nimes, Avignon, and elsewhere. These are freedmen's caps. When a noble Roman died he left in his will that so many of his slaves were to be given their ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... Central Empires in their God-given right to rule the plain people than those few words of Maximilian written before his ill-fated expedition to Mexico. Speaking of the Palace at Caserta, near Naples, he wrote, "The monumental stairway is worthy of Majesty. What can be finer than to imagine the sovereign placed at its head, resplendent in the midst of these marble pillars,—to fancy this monarch, like a God, graciously permitting ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... the decisive papers, and Tatistcheff has printed many important documents in various periodicals. Other sources have been already indicated: the published correspondence of Napoleon and of Pozzo di Borgo, the histories of Bignon, Lefebvre, and Rambaud, and the monumental work of Vandal: Napoleon et Alexandre Ier, are all of the first importance. Bertrand: Lettres inedites de Talleyrand a Napoleon, contains the replies of the minister to his chief. Duckworth's check at Constantinople is fully explained by Juchereau de Saint Denys: Revolutions de Constantinople ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane



Words linked to "Monumental" :   important, significant, monument, large, massive, monolithic, big



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