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More "Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suppose I was a little morbid that night. Perhaps one was excusable, for all knew that we were on the eve of the most desperate battle of the war. I shall not attempt to describe the beauty of the landscape, or the fantastic shapes taken by the huge boulders that were scattered about. My body seemed almost paralyzed with fatigue, but my mind, for a time, was preternaturally active, and noted every little detail. Indeed, I felt a strange ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... and encourage a dangerous commerce with evil spirits, who were supposed to take upon themselves, at these unhallowed altars, the names and characters of these foul deities. Not only, therefore, the temple of Cybele, with its gigantic portico, its huge and inelegant statues, and its fantastic hieroglyphics, was thrown down and defaced when the empire was converted to the Christian faith, but the very ground on which it stood was considered as polluted and unhallowed; and no Emperor having ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Moravian preacher happening to come to that quarter where they lived, insinuated himself into their family, and partly by conversation, and partly by the writings of Jacob Behman, which he put into their hands, filled their heads with wild and fantastic ideas. Unhappily for the poor family those strange notions gained ground on them, insomuch that in one year they began to withdraw themselves from the ordinances of public worship, and all conversation with the world around ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... but in the next edition he contrived to introduce them in a manner so easy and so exquisite, as to remind you of the variations which occur in dreams, where one wonder seems softly to slide into the bosom of another, and where beautiful and fantastic fancies grow suddenly out of realities, like the bud from the bough, or the fairy-seeming wing of the summer-cloud from the ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... fantastic livery was playing away in the marble hall; but Pocket had no ear for their music, though he was fond enough of a band. And though history was one of his few strong points at school, the glittering galaxy of kings and queens appealed to him no more than the great writers at their little desks ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... how ancient it is! though its age strikes one less, perhaps, than the quaintness of its structure, which is curious and fantastic to the last degree. Little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames, predominate; while the body of the building is in the ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... capable of such legislation must frame fantastic definitions of Liberty. Here is an old one whose sentiments have been often parroted by unthinking humans of modern times. It reads: "True Liberty consists in a freedom of doing and receiving good under ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... hat with a fantastic politeness. For me, my astonishment grew as I regarded him more closely. A mass of lanky, white hair drooped on either side of a face pale, pinched, and extraordinarily wrinkled; the clothes that wrapped his diminutive body were threadbare, greasy, and patched in all ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... de Janeiro, being one of those who was convinced that the reason why the Jesuits guarded their territories so religiously was that they had mines, bethought him of a plan. His plan, like most of those conceived on the fantastic reasons which are called 'of State', took no account of sentiment, and therefore, as mankind are and will ever be a thousand times more influenced by sentiment than by hard reasoning, was from the first bound of itself ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... gleam the stone on which they were sitting, making it look like an immense pedestal, surmounted by two bronze statues. Any traveller suddenly entering the valley would have recoiled in terror before this fantastic apparition; and if any wild beast had been prowling near us, our gigantic shadows would certainly have made it keep ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... philosopher myself, and do Some good at last in this benighted world! Now how like demons on the ascending smoke, Making grimaces, leaps the laughing flame, Filling the room with a mysterious haze, Which rolls and writhes along the shadowy air, Taking a thousand strange, fantastic forms; And every form is lit with burning eyes, Which pierce me through and through like fiery arrows! The dim walls grow unsteady, and I seem To stand upon a reeling deck! Hold, hold! A hundred crags are toppling overhead. I faint, I sink—now, let me clutch that limb— Oh, devil! It breaks to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... fields that were hundreds of yards across; and feeling as if they had escaped a horrible danger, and in perfect ignorance of the fact that their position was as perilous as ever, Steve feasted his eyes on the glorious spread of fantastic beauty before him, and felt as if he had just awakened in a world where everything was silver, even to the vessel in which ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... Yellowstone National Park and revel in the wonders thereof, walk in the garden of the Gods and listen to the voice of the Giant Geyser as it sends forth its torrents of boiling water. Bathe in the life-giving springs and mud baths. Note the fantastic forms of the rocks and trees, carved by the hand of nature, then go to Colorado Springs and climb Pikes Peak and behold the world stretch out before you in valley, mountain and plain. Visit the mines of Leadville and Cripple Creek, the store houses of a part ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... noticed, seldom remained the same for a whole year together. This desire (since the thing was iniquitous) seemed quite natural to the boy, though why the affair was iniquitous he did not know. Afterwards, with advancing wisdom, he managed to clear the plain truth of the business from the fantastic intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea, vampires, and ghouls, which had lent to his father's correspondence the flavour of a gruesome Arabian Nights tale. In the end, the growing youth attained to as close an ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... which left only the face exposed; and this too might be covered by a species of veil or mask, which, however, was now fastened back on the headpiece, after the manner of a visor. The front of the tunic was embroidered with fantastic devices in gold thread, brightened here and there with precious stones; and other devices appeared on the hood. The face of this figure was pale and calm, with great dark eyes beneath black brows. The stature was no ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... drunken bastard of the multitude, (Begot when father Judgment is away, And, gossip-like, says because others say, Takes news as if it were too hot to eat, And spits it slavering forth for dog-fees meat,) Make me, for forging a fantastic vow, Presume to bear what makes grave matrons bow? Good vows are never broken with good deeds, For then good deeds were bad: vows are but seeds, And good deeds fruits; even those good deeds that grow From other stocks than from th' observed vow. That ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... the genius to invent a comic device. This was a very wild creature, half beggar, half laborer, the last of a rapidly dying class in Ireland. He had got hold of a wretched nag of whom the knacker had been defrauded for many years and seated on this in fantastic dress he cudgelled it unmercifully, amid screams of laughter, for around its neck was a placard with the words, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... desert palms. I wondered if the men who carved the stone had travelled in the East and had seen palm trees rising from pale sand, black against a paler sky. And I wondered, too, if queer knots and fantastic holes in the gray trunks of oak had not put into men's minds ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... discussion of questions in which her happiness and destiny are involved. A senseless, though a false fondness, denies her a participation in all questions of the actual world around her. The novel writers therefore create a fictitious world, filled with fantastic and hollow characters, for her to range in. Awhile she believes she is an angel, till some unfortunate husband finds her to be a moth on his fortune, and a baleful shadow stretching across his ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the document in question,' he said. 'Those crooked and fantastic characters are terrible. I often wonder if the writers were able to ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... That's just it—what things? What have I to say, after all? I am going to-morrow because I am a fantastic, capricious ass. Also ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... marionette became a popular subject for the artist's pencil and the storyteller's invention. Brought across the seas, he was welcomed by American children and now appears in a new volume which sets forth his travels in Africa. The lessons underlying his fantastic experiences are clear to the youngest readers but are never allowed to become obtrusive. The amusing illustrations of the original are fully equaled in the present edition, while the whimsical nonsense which delights Italian children has been reproduced as closely as ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... may be compared to that which would be felt, if we should detach the songs of the artificial drama from their original impulse and feeling, (for instance, the willow dirge of Desdemona, and the fantastic moans of Ophelia,) and produce them in a parlor. Not but that these lyrics have a universal fitness, and a value which no time can change or circumstance diminish; but as we are looking at them simply in a dramatic view, we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... varied and wonderful gifts? Susan's big box from Virginia City was not for her alone, and from the other packages at least a dozen came to her. Betts, a wonderful embroidered kimono slipped on over her house dress, looked like a lovely, fantastic picture; and Susan must button her big, woolly field-coat up to her chin and down to her knees. "For ONCE you thought of a DANDY present, Billy!" said she. This must be shown to Mother; that must be shown to Mother; ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... sickening present conditions, the future long-lasting woe and misery, the barbarous neutrality violations has so made me blush for my mother's country as the "scrap of paper" incident; and it has been most bitter to listen to the extravagant, fantastic eulogies on England, with which we've been so favored without feeling honestly able to make any ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... clear that some miracles require more evidence than others and many old stories are so fantastic that they may justly be put aside because those who reported them did not see, as we can, what difficulties they involve and hence felt no need for caution in belief. Among ancient Indians or Hebrews tales of seven headed snakes ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... their own wild will, while over all the wall and along the woodwork of the roof trailed passion-flowers, roses, honeysuckles, fragrant clematis, ivy, and those tropic vines whose long dead names belie their fervid luxuriance and fantastic growth; great trees of lemon and orange interspaced the vines in shallow niches of their own, and the languid drooping tresses of a golden acacia flung themselves over and across the deep glittering mass ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... was a shrewd and knavish sprite, that used to play comical pranks in the neighbouring villages; sometimes getting into the dairies and skimming the milk, sometimes plunging his light and airy form into the butter-churn, and while he was dancing his fantastic shape in the churn, in vain the dairymaid would labour to change her cream into butter: nor had the village swains any better success; whenever Puck chose to play his freaks in the brewing copper, the ale was sure to be spoiled. When ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Mosaic account of creation. Though he knew no Greek, and was not an easy or elegant writer of Latin, he was allied to the humanists by his desire to return to the real sources of Christianity, and by his search for the historical sense of his texts. Though in some respects he was under the fantastic notions of the Areopagite, in others his interpretation was rational, free and undogmatic. He exercised a considerable influence on Erasmus and on a few choice spirits of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... smiled again and gave a signal to the little negro girl. Whereupon the black eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and apparently she began to sing, keeping time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time; and finally, turning a somersault or two, she came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of meekness and solemnity over her face, only broken by the ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... light was out and darkness made the most fantastic project appear practical, Mark had an inspiration to take the habit of a preaching friar. Why should he not persuade Dorward to join him? Together they would tramp the English country, compelling even the dullest ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... told you four years ago that you'd be a bum hauled off to a concentration camp, you'd have said that was fantastic too." ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust. There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams. The haggard aspect ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... false concepts.—Mr. H.G. Wells[2] bitterly complains against the wrong concept of God that was allowed to grow in his mind as a child. These are his words: "He and his hell were the nightmare of my childhood.... I thought of him as a fantastic monster perpetually waiting to condemn and to strike me dead!... He was over me and about my silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic." It was only as the child grew into youth, and was able to discard this false idea of God ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... a stormy dawn. Clouds in fantastic masses hung upon the ocean. One of them was like a great mountain, and we watched it idly. It changed its shape, the crest of it grew hollow like a crater. From this crater sprang a projecting cloud, a rough pillar with a knob or lump resting on its top. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... and when temporal rewards and punishments were the immediate consequences of their piety or disobedience, they perpetually relapsed into rebellion against the visible majesty of their Divine King, placed the idols of the nations in the sanctuary of Jehovah, and imitated every fantastic ceremony that was practised in the tents of the Arabs, or in the cities of Phoenicia. [9] As the protection of Heaven was deservedly withdrawn from the ungrateful race, their faith acquired a proportionable degree ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... fired so much better than the last miserable failure," observed she, going to a shelf and reaching after a dusty vase, massive and fantastic, which had been ruined in ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... delightful day for a sleigh-ride, for every bush and tree was covered with a white fleece of snow, and the morning sun added a tiny sparkle to every crystal. A thicket of spruce was changed to a grove of towering white cones and an alder swamp to a fantastic fairyland. It was all new to Frank, and as he drove away with that bright and vivacious girl for a companion it is needless to say he enjoyed it to ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... round little person, complete in her miniature beauties, and now her blue eyes sought him with an extremity of emotion very honest and also timid. She had wrapped herself in a little red shawl, and her hands, holding it tight about her, gave a fantastic impression of being clasped in mute appeal. Jerry looked at her in wonder. For an instant they both stood as still as two wood-creatures surprisingly met and, so far, undetermined upon the degree of hostility it would ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... the doors were shut at last on the noise and the crowd, and Daddy sat, with his full cash-box open on his knee, while the solitary gaslight that remained threw a fantastic and colossal shadow of him over the rough floor of the restaurant, Dora came up to him dropping with fatigue. He looked at her, his gaunt face ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the girl's fantastic vagaries; her sound common sense rallied to her aid. "They are the people who remember; sane folk forget. Work is the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... however, recall a few facts to show how fruitless, for the cause of Christendom in the East, was the prolongation of his stay and what strange deeds—at one time of savage barbarism, and at another of mad pride or fantastic knight-errantry—were united in him with noble instincts and the most heroic courage. On the 20th of August, 1191, five weeks after the surrender of St. Jean d'Acre, he found that Saladin was not fulfilling with sufficient ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a lesson—the fitting of thoughts and remembrance, namely—which he applies to his intent of revenge. Or may it not rather be meant that the putting of these two flowers together was a happy hit of her madness, presenting the fantastic emblem of a document or writing—the very idea of which is the keeping of thoughts ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... prominent position. It was quite bad enough to have to pass through that scene of pillage and riot, but to pose as the partner of an excitable half-breed in the execution of the Red River jig was more than the girl had bargained for. The fantastic shuffling and capering of the long-legged metis were wonderful to behold. The tassel of his long red tuque dangled and bobbed behind him like the pigtail of a Chinaman trying to imitate a dancing Dervish. His flushed face, long ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... my life to revisit the United States. Not once, but fifty times, have I dreamed that the ocean (which loomed absurdly large even in my waking thoughts) was comfortably crossed, and I was landing in New York. I can clearly recall at this moment some of the fantastic shapes the city put on in my dreams—utterly different, of course, from my actual recollections of it. Well, that dream is now realised; the gates of the Western world are opening to me. What experience ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... east coast has become a gamble in which fortunes may be made and lost. Many a boat earns over 2000 pounds from October to December. A lucky skipper may take 200 pounds for his share of the home fishing alone. But such figures would have sounded fantastic in FitzGerald's day, for I have been assured over and over again by herring fishers that in the sixties and seventies, ay, even in the eighties of last century, 20 pounds was a "good season's share" for a prominent ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... in story-telling he simply talks about persons and things and makes them perform in his story. He comes breathless into the house with a harrowing tale of being pursued by a hippopotamus in the woods; or he gives a fantastic account of the doings of his acquaintances. For this he is sometimes accused of being a "little liar"—as indeed he {483} probably is when circumstances demand—and sometimes, more charitably, he is described ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... not do to say that by adopting vulgar methods and appealing to vulgar people, General Booth established his universal kingdom of emotional religion. Let the person inclined to think in this way dress himself in fantastic garments, take a drum, and march through the streets shouting 'Hallelujah.' There is no shorter cut to humility. Many have tried to do what William Booth did. Many men as earnestly and as tenderly have sought to waken ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... for beauty than for expression, and Saskia's face was very expressive, at times merry and almost roguish, and again quite serious. She had also a brilliant complexion and an abundance of silky hair, waving from her forehead. The painter had collected in his studio many pretty and fantastic things to use in his pictures,—velvets and gold embroidered cloaks, Oriental stuffs, laces, necklaces, and jewels. With these he loved to deck Saskia, heightening her girlish charms with the play of light upon ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... discovery," I said non-committally, for the whole thing seemed too fantastic for aught but ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... much conflicting evidence regarding Washington's later dancing exploits. Some writers say that he never tripped the light fantastic after the Revolution and that one of his last participations was at the Fredericksburg ball after the capture of Cornwallis when he "went down some dozen couple in the contra dance." It is certain, however, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... his desk lost in thought. He held a pencil in his hand and mechanically drew fantastic figures on a large sheet of white paper which lay before him. He suddenly came out of his revery. He had just solved a last difficulty; his plan was now entire and complete. He ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... descending from the hills, dressed in a fantastic way, with her robes scorched and partially consumed by fire. She was followed by a band of women and girls, dressed in the same manner. As she drew near, she shouted with a loud voice that she was come to warn the followers ...
— The Voyage of the "Steadfast" - The Young Missionaries in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... the world; that his skill is won by grassers innumerable; that, in short, there is no royal road to the riding of a proper outlaw—a horse that, not with any view of showing-off before girls, but with the confirmed intention of flattening out his antagonist, plays such fantastic jigs before high heaven ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... that the sunrise alone was worth the journey, and the pure air of dawn which, though cold, seemed perfumed by mysterious rose-fields. Just at sun-up the desert was lily pale—then, as the horizon flamed, a dazzling flood of gold poured over the dunes. The sun was a fantastic brooch of beaten copper, caught in a veil of ruby gauze, while here and there a belated star was a dull, flawed emerald sewn into the veil's fringe. Shadows swept westward across the desert like blue water, showing a glitter of drowned jewels underneath; and though last night it ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... as they were, contented with their lot, and receiving all things so unquestioningly and thankfully, filled my life, and brought a great calm to a mind that had, hitherto, been somewhat self-centred and troubled by pessimistic doubts and fantastic dreams culled ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... all discussed in the most bald, prosaic manner, with abundance of Latin phrase, scriptural allusion, and commonplace precept, unenlivened by a single spark of true poetic fire, and presenting altogether a farrago of the most fantastic pedantry. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... intelligent; all the Orgreaves were lovable. The glance of Edwin Clayhanger, and the sincerity of his smile, had affected her in a manner absolutely unique.... But would she ever go back? It seemed to her fantastic, impossible, that she should ever go back. It seemed to her that she was netted by destiny. In any case she knew that she could not, meanwhile, give to that group in Bursley even a part of herself. Hilda could never give a part of herself. Moreover, she was a bad letter-writer. And so, if ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... her return to "Heidelberg," her aunt's interest in these ivories seemed to wane and disappear. Was there not a bowl of specimens in the drawing-room already consigned to oblivion and dust? Aunt Flora's character exhibited an amazing combination of fantastic caprice and invincible ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... wonderfully artistic felicity of expression, he talked on and on, wandering from country to country, and age to age, till it all seemed to her like a strangely beautiful poem, full of yellow light and gleaming shadow, sometimes passionate and intense, at others fantastic and almost ethereal. Now and then she half closed her eyes, and his words, and their meaning, the form and the substance, seemed to come to her like richly blended music, stirring all her senses and quickening ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not to be silly, and to think no more about it. But her dreams that night were very fantastic and rosy-hued. She awoke in the morning from a vision of a wonderful room of which the walls were painted all over with robins, which suddenly burst out singing her name, 'Jacinth, Jacinth,' to find that Frances was awake and calling ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... and those who had known Hester Prynne before were astonished to perceive how her beauty shone out. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A, and it was that scarlet letter which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... therefore will I live betwixt two shapes; When as I list, in this transform'd disguise, I'll fright the country-people as they pass; And sometimes turn me to some other form, And so delude them with fantastic shows. But woe betide the silly dairymaids, For I shall fleet their cream-bowls night by night. And slice the bacon-flitches as they hang. Well, here in Croydon will I first begin To frolic it among the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Fantastic chatter! hasty, glad, and gay, Whereof the meaning was not ill to tell: "Gossip, how wags the world with you to-day?" "Gossip, the world wags well, the world ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... boiled capons: more I remember not,—except also that he would suffer no mention of the word Death by any mortal. [Hormayr,—OEsterreichischer Plutarch,—iv. (3tes), 231-283.] A most high-sniffing, fantastic, slightly insolent shadow-king;—ruled, in his time, the now vanished Olympus; and had the difficult glory (defective only in result) of uniting France and Austria AGAINST the poor old Sea-Power milk-cows, for the purpose of recovering Silesia from Friedrich, a few years ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... stories, we should prepare ourselves to see Hetty pass through a season in drudgery and hardship, with the ultimate quintessence of joy as the reward for her trials and tribulations. Happily, this is not a fairy tale. There are some things more fantastic than fairy tales, if they are not spoiled in the telling. Hetty did not go forth to encounter drudgery, disdain and obloquy. By no manner of means! She went with a well-filled purse, a definite purpose ahead and a ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... Such was the fantastic and almost incredible talk I listened to, but in which, as I say, I found much more meaning than my neighbours. For one thing, although they knew that the Vicar had come from Oxford to this remote College living, they knew ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... no word, as far as I can learn, for "busy." So, when I cannot entertain her, I have to make the nearest approach I can to the truth, and tell her I am sick, or something of that kind; but nothing avails, with her, short of the absolute truth. She is so very fantastic and entertaining, that I should cultivate her acquaintance more, if it were not for this deficiency in the language, which makes it impossible to convey the idea to her when I want to get rid of her. As old as she is, she still ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of fantastic shape. Our way led on past a bottomless pit and along and over the main stream of the latest ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... origins; the last guess I have heard is, that the name merely denotes antiquity; the witty name in Norway for a man growing old having been, in those times, that he was now "becoming a gray-goose." Very fantastic indeed; certain, however, that Gray-goose is the name of that venerable Law Book; nay, there is another, still more famous, belonging to Iceland, and not far from a century younger, the Iceland Gray-goose. ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... various phantoms keep; Of ev'ry one; whence flit, to mock the brain, Of winged lies a light fantastic train; The gate opposed pellucid valves adorn, And columns fair, encased with polished horn; Where images of truth for passage wait." See Pope's Homer's "Odyssey," bk. xix., 1. 637. See also Virgil, who has pretty closely imitated ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... adorn themselves, whether to maintain the fitness of their estate, or even by adding something thereto, in order to please their husbands, it follows that those who make such means of adornment do not sin in the practice of their art, except perhaps by inventing means that are superfluous and fantastic. Hence Chrysostom says (Super Matth.) that "even the shoemakers' and clothiers' arts stand in need of restraint, for they have lent their art to lust, by abusing its needs, and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... and smiled, and offered it me again; but when I refused it, he asked me 'What he should do with money?' I left him to overcome his modesty as he could; but a servant coming after me, saw him give it to a little girl that opened the church door, as she passed by him; which made me reflect upon the fantastic calculation of riches and poverty that is current in the world, by which a man that wants a million, is a prince; he that wants but a groat is a beggar; and this was a poor man ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... as the head of France, was accustomed to think and act vigorously for herself in time of revolution. But experience proved no less plainly that the limbs, that is, the country districts, generally refused to follow the head in these fantastic movements. Hence, after a short spell of St. Vitus' activity, there always came a time of strife, followed only too often by torpor, when the body reduced the head to a state of benumbed subjection. The triumph of rural notions accounts for the reactions of 1831-47, and 1851-70. Paris ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... indeed like many other old laws, of England and of other countries, were not over-mild. Was not a woman first strangled and then burned in England for 'coining' in the year 1789, while the States-General were performing at Paris their fantastic overture to the ghastly drama of the Terror? Yet England in 1789 knew a great deal more of personal liberty than France knows now in 1889. The tradition of the seignorial right of hanging boys for killing rabbits originated, it is probable, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... was squat and burly and immensely broad across the shoulders. What made him grotesque was a growth of beard which swept almost to his waist and covered his face like a hairy curtain. In it were tied bright streamers of crimson ribbon. Evidently this fantastic monster was proud of his whiskers and ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... to be made acquainted with my change of sentiment; and of my being once more destitute of any plan for my future guidance. It was necessary that he should not deem me a man of unsettled principles; frivolous in propensity, and fantastic in conduct. For, though perhaps my pride would have felt gratification at no longer considering myself a dependent on the favourable opinion or calculations which another might form concerning me, and my good or ill qualities, yet I could not endure ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... reader will believe no one of the fantastic legends here recorded; possibly they were not believed by their very fabricators. They are useful only as tending to show the moral atmosphere of the house and its occupants. There is sometimes a subtile symbolic element inwoven with such tales, which—though not the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... channels and chambers, through which rolls for ever the hoarse murmur of multitudinous waters. It would require the conception of a Milton or the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime horror ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... that the use of dialect makes the appeal of poetry provincial instead of national or universal. This is only true when the dialect poet is a pedant and obscures his meaning by fantastic spellings. The Lowland Scots element in 'Auld Lang Syne' has not prevented it from becoming the song of friendship of the Anglo-Saxon race all the world over. Moreover, the provincial note in poetry or prose is far from being a bad ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... the western dyke by means of a board laid from bank to bank, and struck into the sand-dunes beyond. Even in the summer, when the air was still and flowers bloomed and larks sang, these dunes were fantastic and almost unnatural in appearance, with their deep, wind-scooped hollows of pallid sand, their sharp angles, miniature cliffs, and their crests crowned with coarse grasses. But now, beneath the dull pall of the winter sky, no spot in ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... presence of death, convinced him that he was the sport and prey of unseen and malignant powers. The strange and frightful diseases to which he was subject, the freezings and burnings of fever, the contortions of epilepsy, the sudden palsies, the darkness of night, and the wild, terrible and fantastic dreams that filled his brain, satisfied him that he was haunted and pursued by countless spirits of evil. For some reason he supposed that these spirits differed in power—that they were not all alike malevolent—that the higher controlled the lower, and that his very existence depended upon ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in itself the true charm of St. Mammes. It has a fine ambulatory, and a range of eight monolithic columns, removed, says tradition, from an ancient Pagan temple. Their capitals are ornamented with carven foliage, grimacing heads, and fantastic animals. ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... scorner—our Lord here addresses. He deals with such elsewhere. It is rather vaunting hypocrites—wearing the garb of religion—the trappings and dress of outward devotion to conceal their inward pollution; like the ivy, screening from view by garlands of fantastic beauty—wreaths of loveliest green—the mouldering trunk or loathsome ruin! We may well believe none are more obnoxious to a holy Saviour than such. He (Incarnate TRUTH) would rather have the naked stem than the counterfeit blossom. He would ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... if we read the gospels without prejudice. When I was young it was impossible to read them without fantastic confusion of thought. The confusion was so utterly confounded that it was called the proper spirit to read the Bible in. Jesus was a baby; and he was older than creation. He was a man who could be persecuted, stoned, scourged, and ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... her opinion of "falling in love" over mutual hair-brushes, but Judith evaded the tentative suggestion. By then she was feeling that the word was a meaningless string of four letters, and the thing she supposed it stood for as fantastic and far-off as the recurring fragment of a dream, which seems so vivid in the dreaming and is a broken kaleidoscope of ill-fitting colours on awaking. She went to bed and slept soundly, better than she ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... one who could speak of his own knowledge concerning Nyssia, having never spoken of her, the Sardians were left to their own conjectures in her regard; and their conjectures, it must be confessed, were fantastic and altogether fabulous. The beauty of Nyssia, thanks to the veils which shrouded her, became a sort of myth, a canvas, a poem to which each one added ornamentation ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... it; and we were fully repaid for our labor by the prospect which we gained. The Seine, full of green willowy islands, flows beneath the rock in large lazy windings: the peninsula below is flat, fertile, and well wooded: on the opposite shores, the fantastic chalky cliffs rise boldly, crowned ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... Which, meeting me upon the way, These secrets didst to me bewray, Which now I am in telling; My pretty, light, fantastic maid, I here invoke thee to my aid, That I may speak what thou hast ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... study everything was dark-colored, massive, grand in its proportions, of great price, but not flashy. Not the least object was showy or fantastic; nothing was visible save dignity and comfort. There were books behind the glass of a splendid bookcase, two great pictures on the wall, a desk with piles of papers, in the middle of the room a round table ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... Logically, the "Social Contract" is full of gaping flaws. Like its author's other books (see vol. vii, p. 176), it is an outpouring of the heart very imperfectly regulated by a brilliant but eccentric brain. As a political essay it is a tissue of fantastic arguments, based on unreal hypotheses. But it set men's minds on fire; it was the literary inspiration of one of the most tremendous events in history, and those who would comprehend the French Revolution can unravel many of its perplexities by studying the "Social Contract." After its ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... whimsical humor, but there was certainly nothing for him to smile at in this interview. She had so plied the lash that it cut to the quick. His pride and self-confidence were deeply wounded;—his wife's elderly aunt did not believe in his omnipotence! This was a shock in itself; but what fantastic nonsense ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... colonies on Mars and Venus. Talking about something he calls the Terran Federation, some kind of a world empire. Or something he calls Operation Triple Cross, that saved the country during some fantastic war ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... in the most fantastic flights of fancy. They were interminable stories, astounding inventions, from the day of his birth until his final triumph. In the unsophisticated, passionate and moving fancy of this extraordinary little creature, who now lived chastely ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... emissaries there, and—whether or not at their instigation cannot certainly be said—conceived a scheme to capture the President and take him to Richmond. He passed a great part of the autumn and winter pursuing this fantastic enterprise, seeming to be always well supplied with money; but the winter wore away, and nothing was accomplished. On March 4 he was at the Capitol, and created a disturbance by trying to force his way through the line of policemen who guarded the passage through ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... sketch of its contents, but it is remarkable for coherence and self-restraint no less than for vigor of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the wonder is that she is not more often fantastic and unreal. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... talk to, for her brain seethed with conjectures as to what had happened, was happening and would happen, and discussion was the best method of simplifying a problem, of narrowing it down to the limits of probability, whereas when she was alone now with her own imaginings, the most fantastic of them seemed plausible. She had, however, handed a glorious suggestion to the Padre, the one, that is, which concerned the cause of the duel, and it had been highly satisfactory to observe the sympathy and respect with which he had imbibed it. She had, too, been so discreet about it; she had ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... his troubled lady, who is unaccountably saddened by the untimely farce, struggles with a hysterical desire to laugh—it is all so like a fantastic dream. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... guilty, was, curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it was only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic and he wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in the fantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimes flashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these are the dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and true things he really had to say he generally managed to say quite simply. Thus he ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... leading part in the later and inferior romances, and another distinguishing feature is caricatured in Don Quixote's blind adoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of chivalry love is either a mere animalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a coarse-minded man would care to make merry with the former, but to one of Cervantes' humour the latter was naturally an attractive subject for ridicule. Like everything else in these romances, it is a gross exaggeration of the real sentiment of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... keep your distance," said Alice, laughing, "for the bite of a dog, possessed by the ghost of a jealous lover, cannot be very safe." And the King carried on the dialogue in the same strain—which, while it led Alice to apprehend nothing more serious than the apish gallantry of a fantastic boy, certainly induced the supposed Louis Kerneguy to think that he had made one of those conquests which often and easily fall to the share of sovereigns. Notwithstanding the acuteness of his apprehension, he was not sufficiently ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... men passing from one bed to another,—to such as these, the road through which we have been traveling will appear to be a delusive passage, and the objects which we have surveyed to be nothing more than fantastic visions, seen only by the eye of imagination, and when seen, idle and vain as ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... to be the breathing of the ocean. But such sounds did not disturb the universal stillness of the hour; neither did the gambols of yonder group of seals and walruses that were at play round some fantastic blocks of ice; nor did the soft murmur of the swell that broke in surf at the foot of yonder iceberg, whose blue sides were seamed with a thousand watercourses, and whose jagged pinnacles rose up like needles of ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... our forces, leaders and speech-makers. When we secure the Crown Prince, he will be put into costume until he can be concealed. They will seek, if there be time, the Prince Ferdinand William Otto. Who will suspect a child, wearing some fantastic garb of the Carnival?" ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... from her the hearts of the Russians. They felt that it was no Russian who reigned over them; and because they had no occasion to tremble and creep in the dust before her, they almost despised her, and derided the idyllic sentiments of this good German princess who wished to realize her fantastic dreams by treating a horde of barbarians ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... these years no petitions were presented against granting the suffrage to women. These numbers were undoubtedly a surprise to many members of parliament who were inclined to look upon woman suffrage as an "impracticable fad," "the fantastic crochet of a few shrieking sisters." But the collection and arrangement of the signatures took up incalculable time, and after a few years this method of agitation was discarded to a great extent in the large political centres. Friends ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... base of the rampart,—a true covered way,—we see but the rampart alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe,—the fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,—the masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen from above, and lie scattered at its base,—the extreme loneliness of the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... interview with the queen. He had named one of his children for her majesty, and the other for Prince Albert, and had transmitted photographs of them to the illustrious godmother, which had been acknowledged by her secretary. He also had a fantastic notion that he was rightful heir to a rich English estate. The cause of this particular insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American heart. We still have an unspeakable yearning towards England, and I might fill many pages with instances of this ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... them a decidedly Oriental appearance. On most of them were signs displayed in the Chinese language. You also see scrolls by the doors of the private houses and on the shops. The signs are a study in their bright colours and their mythological and fantastic adornments. Yellow is the predominant colour, and the dragon is in evidence everywhere. This emblem of the Celestial Empire is represented in gorgeous array and with a profusion of ornament. A splendid dragon is the sign and trade mark of "Sing Fat and Co.," who keep a Chinese ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... and dripping meshes slipped down from his ghostly hands into the ghostly movement that was flickering about him, and the circles tipped with light widened towards sea and shore, there was a miracle of delicate and fantastic beauty delivered up tenderly like a marvellous gift to the wanderers of the dark hours. But Sicily scarcely wonders at Sicily. Gaspare was intent only on the catching of fish, and his companions smote the night with their ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... his "Royal and Noble Authors," designates the Marquis as a "fantastic protector and fanatic," and describes the " Century of Inventions" as "an amazing piece of folly;" and Hume, who does not even know the title of the book, boldly pronounces it "a ridiculous compound of lies, chimeras, and impossibilities." ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... suspended, in massy frames, the family portraits, painted by Dutch and Italian artists. Near the dais, or upper part of the hall, there projected an oriel window, which, as you beheld, you scarcely knew what most to admire, the radiancy of its painted panes or the fantastic richness of Gothic ornament, which was profusely lavished in every part of its masonry. Here too the Gothic pendent and the Gothic fan-work were intermingled with the Italian arabesques, which, at the time of the building of the Chateau, had been recently ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... aggregation of precipitated matter has gone on to but a small extent, will be found in nebulae of wide diffusion. Again, the irregularity of these large, irresolvable nebulae, might also have been expected; seeing that their outlines, compared by Arago with "the fantastic figures which characterize clouds carried away and tossed about by violent and often contrary winds," are similarly characteristic of a mass not yet gathered together by the mutual attraction of its parts. And once more, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... moment, made her shrink and quiver. His words were often unintelligible to her, until Miss Merriman, silent-footed and efficient, translated them into action, as, before the wide eyes of the mountain child, there began to unfold the swift drama of modern surgical science at its pinnacle, amid that fantastic setting. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... shall be considered very fantastic—but do you know what I thought of at that very moment? Some years ago, I stood at Epsom close to the ropes and saw Fred Archer pass me as he swept like the whirlwind to the winning-post in the last Derby he ever rode. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... the northern coast of Ireland, and the Isle of Staffa off the western coast of Scotland. The latter, which, around its whole sea-girt outline, presents ranges of basaltic columns, some of them disposed in curious fantastic groups, most nearly resembles the Sicilian pair. These differ from it chiefly in their having the columns piled in terraces, one above another. Staffa, however, can boast of a far more striking feature —the celebrated Cave of Fingal—its stately basaltic ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... transmitted to the sovereign: they came accompanied with many rare and curious articles, grateful to the taste of one who was not only a religious reformer but a dilettante; golden candlesticks and costly chalices; sometimes a jewelled pix; fantastic spoons and patens, rings for the fingers and the ear; occasionally a fair-written and blazoned manuscript—suitable offering to the royal scholar. Greymount was noticed; sent for; promoted in the household; knighted; might doubtless have ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... that it was by no means certain or even likely that Ibsen was as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All the stupid people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw nothing in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant self-conceit of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself. Fortunately, in taking exactly the same position now with regard to Wagner, I can claim his own authority to support me. "How," he wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... Per), in one ship of three hundred toneladas—[why,] there is no one who will even express an opinion that such a ship can be found that can hold so much. Hence, it is inferred that the above sums are imaginary, fantastic, and fabulous, and consequently, [so is] whatever ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... to stop him. Hibbert recalls only a single incident until he found himself beyond the houses, searching for her along the fringe of forest where the moonlight met the snow in a bewildering frieze of fantastic shadows. And the incident was simply this—that he remembered passing the church. Catching the outline of its tower against the stars, he was aware of a faint sense of hesitation. A vague uneasiness came and went—jarred unpleasantly ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... never beheld a more ferocious scene but he felt in it, too, a sort of fierce and shuddering attraction. His veins were still warm with the fire of battle, and his head throbbed wildly. Everything took on strange and fantastic shapes, and colors became glaring and violent. The moonlight, pouring down on the lake, made it a vast sea of crumbling silver, the mountains on the farther shores rose to twice or thrice their height, and the forests on the slopes ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... military[7]—career, when, in January, 1652, a treaty had been concluded between Monsieur her father, Conde, and the Duke de Lorraine, the Duchess d'Orleans had signed in her brother's name, and the Count de Fiesque in the name of Conde. On her part, Mademoiselle, somewhat fantastic but loyal and courageous, had joined her mother-in-law, and declared for the Fronde, partly through her liking for eclat and the notoriety of parading at the head of the troops, with her two ladies of honour, the Countesses of Fiesque and Frontenac, transformed into aides-de-camp; ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Lawrence to the very heart of North America; and, until the Straits of Belle Isle and of Cabot were discovered, did certainly arrest the voyages of the earliest pioneers. Newfoundland, as you can see on the map, has been cut into and carved by the forces of nature until it has a most fantastic outline. Long peninsulas of hills alternate with deep, narrow gulfs, and about the south-east and east coasts there are innumerable islets, most of which in the days of the early discoverers were the haunt of millions of sea birds who resorted ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... work at the easel, his human model before him. He was employed on a nymph,—the Nymph Galatea. The subject had been taken before by Salvator, whose genius found all its elements in the wild rocks, gnarled, fantastic trees, and gushing waterfalls of the landscape; in the huge ugliness of Polyphemus the lover; in the grace and suavity and unconscious abandonment of the nymph, sleeking her tresses dripping from the bath. The painter, on a larger canvas (for Salvator's picture, at least ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rode up the broad avenue that led to the Chateau, and halted at the main gate—set in a lofty hedge of evergreens cut into fantastic shapes, after the fashion of the Luxembourg. Within the gate a vast and glowing garden was seen—all squares, circles, and polygons. The beds were laden with flowers shedding delicious odors on the morning air as it floated by, while the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... funeral eulogy, though a little hyperbolical, is not untrue in the main. Magellan had need of singular constancy and perseverance to penetrate, despite the fears of his companions, into regions peopled by the superstitious spirit of the time with fantastic dangers. Peculiar nautical science was also necessary to achieve the discovery at the extremity of that long coast of the strait which so justly bears his name. He was obliged to give unceasing attention to avoid all untoward ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... all very "dramatic." It is exciting to think of an English lord nursing a grievance about a grasshopper for months and months, seeing grasshoppers in every corner, dreaming about grasshoppers.... But we must not waste time over the fantastic tale. We have not yet solved our principal problem. Why did Mr. Lloyd George call him a grasshopper—a modest friendly little grasshopper? Did he mean to suggest that Lord Northcliffe hears with his stomach or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... the month of March the pupils at the Villa Camellia celebrated a carnival of their own. It coincided with a local festival at Fossato, on which occasion the inhabitants were wont to make merry, dressing themselves in fantastic costumes, parading the streets, and letting off fireworks. Originally the girls had been taken to see the gay doings, but the town was often so rough that Miss Rodgers had decided it was an unsuitable entertainment for young ladies, ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... of Canada. The use of this name, destined to mean so much to later generations, here appears for the first time in Cartier's narrative. The word was evidently taken from the lips of the savages, but its exact significance has remained a matter of dispute. The most fantastic derivations have been suggested. Charlevoix, writing two hundred years later, even tells us that the name originated from the fact that the Spaniards had been upon the coast before Cartier, looking for mines. Their search proving fruitless, ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... intended for dancing, thickly carpeted, with old Gobelin tapestry on all the walls and doors; inlaid tables, ebony tables, and silk, satin, and tapestry in every conceivable form. A glass door, half-covered by a portiere, gave a glimpse into a well-lighted winter garden, full of fantastic plants in beds, bushes and pots. On the left of the large drawing-room was the dining-room, with white varnished walls divided into squares by gold beading, and decorated by a number of bright pictures of symbolic ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... arranged the forks, tines up, also in the order of use, beginning at the left, with the butter plate, on which rests the butter knife, a little above the forks. The napkin—which should be folded four times in ironing and never tortured into fantastic shapes, restaurant fashion—lies either at the left of the forks or on the plate at the center of the cover. If many spoons are to be used, the soup spoon alone rests beside the knife, with the others above the plate. Individual salt cellars ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... hats were of all shapes and sizes, and fillagreed with the most tawdry superfluity of ribbons. Beneath these gaudy bonnets were glossy ringlets, false and real, clustering in tropical luxuriance. This fantastic display was evidently a rude attempt to follow the example set them ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sipping from the small coffee cup in his hand, now setting it down to move excitedly about the room, he talked of his life, his book, his plans. He told anecdotes, strange adventures; he drew his own inverted morals; he sketched his fantastic opinions; he was in truth fascinating, a speaking face, a lithe, brilliant presence, a voice of edged persuasion. He turned witty phrases. Poor Joan! One sentence in ten she understood and answered with her slow smile and her quaint, murmured, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... go; you can find them in any good encyclopedia, and also in Harper's Magazine for April, 1891, and in other places. Our fishing clashed with Canada's. We assumed jurisdiction over the whole of the sea, which is a third as big as the Mediterranean, on the quite fantastic ground that it was an inland sea. Ignoring the law that nobody has jurisdiction outside the three-mile limit from their shores, we seized Canadian vessels sixty miles from land. In fact, we did virtually what we had gone to war with England for doing in 1812. But ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... stampings, and somersaults like those of the boneless clowns in the circus. Diana, joining in the dance, and howling in her turn, jumped to the top of the projectile. An unaccountable flapping of wings was then heard amid most fantastic cock-crows, while five or six hens fluttered ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... meadows and Alpine pastures, and always adding to their beauty; another, growing in all sorts of places, very ugly itself, and adding to the ugliness of its indiscriminated haunts; and a third, growing mostly up in the air, with as little root as possible, and of gracefully fantastic forms, such as this kind of nativity and habitation might presuppose. For the present, I am satisfied to give names to these three groups only. There may be plenty of others which I do not know, and which other people may name, according ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... bare succession of sensations, but also the fact that they were succeeding one another, and so allowing a sense of temporal relation. But further than this he refused to go. The idea of a continuous self was fantastic. There was nothing beneath the ideas to connect them. The notion of causal connection was equally chimerical. Each sensation was distinct and existed in its own right. It could therefore occur alone. There was nothing to link together ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... his leaps, draping himself in fantastic curves, lighting on a slant with his side arched out, sunfishing and swapping ends, then threw himself over and smashed down on his back. Harris ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... it seems fantastic to explain the circumstances by the theory that poets in a late age sometimes did and sometimes did not interpolate the military gear of four centuries posterior to the things known by the original singer. These rhapsodists, we reiterate, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Babington, a young man of education and ambition, in whom throbbed the pulse of chivalrous devotion to Mary, was informed of this design by a priest of the seminary, and was fired with a kind of emulation which has something highly fantastic about it. Thinking that so great an enterprise ought not to be confided to one man, he sought and found new confederates for it; when the murder was effected, and the Spanish troops landed, he was to be the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... more primitive ages; but it was now for the first time openly avowed as a professed principle of action. The spirit of chivalry had in it this point of excellence, that, however overstrained and fantastic many of its doctrines may appear to us, they were all founded on generosity and self denial, of which, if the earth were deprived, it would be difficult to conceive the existence of ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... older theory. It sounds late and elaborate but still it follows easily if the dialectic of Gotama is applied uncompromisingly not only to our mental processes but to the external world. Yet even in India the result was felt to be fantastic and sophistical and it is not surprising if after the lapse of a few generations a new system of idealism became fashionable which, although none too intelligible, was ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Canadian team at the World Championship in 1992, and intend to do it again in 1995. I do not find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it is great fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age group competitors from all over the world who look and feel fantastic. It does my soul good to see a group of people aging so gracefully, not buying into the popular notion that old age is inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings a degree of balance to my life after spending so much time in ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... their first stage of existence; and it flowed in black waves, for ever bubbling along the cave, the extent of which had never been explored. From the sides and top, water distilled, and, petrifying as it fell, took fantastic shapes, that soon divided it into apartments, if so they might be called. In the foam, a wearied spirit would sometimes rise, to catch the most distant glimpse of light, or taste the vagrant breeze, which the yawning of the rock ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... alone to get through the interminable days as best he might, and ever afterward the week remained in his memory as a sort of nightmare. Lying idle in his bed, he evolved many surprising and fantastic schemes for escape, for getting word to the outside world of his presence here, and one by one he gave them up in disgust as their impossibility forced itself upon him. Plans and schemes were useless while he lay bedridden, unfamiliar even with the house wherein he dwelt, with the garden and ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... capering on the green in their fantastic dresses, jingling with hawks' bells, with a boy dressed up as Maid Marian, and the attendant fool rattling his box to collect contributions from the bystanders. The gipsy women, too, were already plying their mystery in by-corners of the village, reading the hands of the simple country ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... that if I hoped to work my way in this wicked world, I must suspect a scoundrel in every man I met, and forestall mischief by suspicion. As I sat and thought, I sifted the beans through my fingers, and saw that there were lots of strange seeds mixed with them, some of very fantastic shapes; and I wondered what countries they came from, and with what shape and scent and colour the plants blossomed, and thought how Charlie would like some of them to sow in pots and watch. As I drove my hands deeper into the heap, I felt that it was ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... "Our aim must be to bring them together and to combine them with Turkey in a common ideal of defence of their national and economic development." A cordial union between the Slav States and Turkey now seems a fantastic notion; but it was possible then, under pressure of the Austro-German menace, which the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... other respects, it was such as to match with that of the most courtly nobles. His bonnet displayed a medal of gold, he wore a chain of the same metal around his neck, and the fashion of his rich garments was not much more fantastic than those of young gallants who have their clothes made in the extremity of ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... mentioned her smiled dreamily and wondered where on earth she'd come from. I kept hearing, just as you probably did, odd scraps of things she had said, droll adventures in which she had figured, extraordinary and fantastic tales about the house in which she lived. And presently, when it was too late, I found myself listening to regretful murmurings of scores of baffled persons who couldn't find out what had become of her. She suddenly vanished, leaving nothing behind ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... after we had gone over the pass, as we were wending our way from one narrow gorge into another, between high rocks and cliffs and mountains of most fantastic forms. We passed the little village of Huruh, and at dawn the picturesqueness of the scenery increased tenfold when the cold bluish tints of the moon gradually vanished in the landscape, and first the mountains ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... by appearing in that wonderful costume that night? It was not a toilet for the opera, even on a Melba night; even on a "Romeo and Juliet" night, unless, indeed, the wearer meant to appear on the stage as Juliet, was the thought which occurred to the girl. Her fantastic thought—she thought it was a fantastic thought—made ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... often heard of the horrors those gloomy walls could reveal. He knew that thousands of his fellow-creatures had been confined within them; that very many had never again seen the light of day; that others had been brought forth as spectacles to be mocked at, dressed in fantastic costumes, and thus had ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... said Harley to himself, "are fantastic; they are not in nature! that beggar walks over the sharpest of these stones barefooted, whilst I have lost the most delightful dream in the world, from the smallest of them happening to get into my shoe." The beggar had by this time come up, and, pulling off a piece of hat, asked charity ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... is as simple as the one nearer the surface is fantastic. It is the manifestation of that "rock-firm Certitude" to which I have already referred. And nothing will bring us nearer to it than Strindberg's own confession of faith, given in his "Speeches to the Swedish Nation" two years ago. In that pamphlet there is a chapter ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... particular difficulty, and send him into prompt, leaden slumber—but the early mornings remained as torturing as ever. In the twilight he awoke oppressed and sick at heart with gloom—and then dozed at intervals through fantastic new ordeals of anguish and shame and fear, till it was decently possible ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... saving in width meant much on streams having such narrow channels as the Missouri and the Platte, especially when barges were to be towed. Then, too, its machinery, which was covered over or boarded up, was shrouded in mystery. A fantastic figure representing a serpent's open mouth contained the exhaust pipe. If the New Orleans alarmed the population of the Ohio Valley, the sensation caused among the red children of the Missouri at the sight of this gigantic snake belching fire and smoke ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... at the half-seen image of a sort of obscene beast at the conservatory window, and there was the silence of breathless horror when it bounded into the room and seized its victim. Until the impression wore off the Mansfield Hyde was almost as horrible as the fantastic things born of the cruel imagination and brilliant pencil of Mr S.H. Sime, whose work is sometimes so richly embellished by imagination as well as by superb technique that one cannot deny its claim to be ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... days past, there have been tokens of the coming Carnival in the Corso and the adjacent streets; for example, in the shops, by the display of masks of wire, pasteboard, silk, or cloth, some of beautiful features, others hideous, fantastic, currish, asinine, huge-nosed, or otherwise monstrous; some intended to cover the whole face, others concealing only the upper part, also white dominos, or robes bedizened with gold-lace and theatric splendors, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and arranging for repairs, throughout the length and the breadth of Bursley and Turnhill, she, under pretence of marketing, had been flinging away ten-pound notes at Brunt's. The whole business was fantastic, simply and madly fantastic; so fantastic that he had not yet quite grasped the reality of it! The whole business was unheard of. He saw, with all the clearness of his masculine intellect, that it must cease. The force with which he decided within himself that it must cease—and instanter!—bordered ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... contrast between what I saw and heard now, and what I had seen and heard only a few minutes since, was so extraordinary and so startling that I almost doubted whether the veiled figure with the harp, and the dance of cats, were not the fantastic creations of a dream. I actually asked my friend whether he had found me awake or asleep when he came into ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... letters to mail which were addressed to that nobleman. He wondered savagely what was in them; he posted them with a vicious shove; and, for the time, they caused him acute twinges of misery. But not for long; no, for, in sober earnest, if some fantastic sequence of events had made his one chance of winning Patricia Stapylton dependent on his spending a miserable half-hour in her company, Rudolph Musgrave could not have ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... an address lasting four hours on hypnotic suggestion. He undertook to prove that, not only Gabrielle Bompard, but Troppmann, Madame Weiss, and Gabrielle Fenayrou also, had committed murder under the influence of suggestion.(18) In replying to this rather fantastic defence, the Procureur-General, M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire, quoted a statement of Dr. Brouardel, the eminent medical jurist who had been called for the prosecution, that "there exists no instance ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... imagination receives its food, sense and thoughts, from the spirits of the stars, and, finally, the immortal soul, which finds its nourishment in faith in Christ. Hence natural philosophy, astronomy, and theology are the pillars of anthropology, and ultimately of medicine. This fantastic physic of Paracelsus found many adherents both in theory and in practice.[2] Among those who accepted and developed it may be named R. Fludd (died 1637), and the two Van Helmonts, father and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... midnight air. Finally he reached the corner of the passage that led to luckless Washington's room. For a moment he paused there, the wind blowing his long grey locks about his head, and twisting into grotesque and fantastic folds the nameless horror of the dead man's shroud. Then the clock struck the quarter, and he felt the time was come. He chuckled to himself, and turned the corner; but no sooner had he done so, than, with a piteous wail of terror, he fell back, and hid ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... not till he awoke was he clearly aware that he had been but dreaming; for he had felt persuaded that Veronica was actually beside him, complaining with an expression of keen sorrow, which pierced through his inmost soul, that he should sacrifice her deep, true love to fantastic visions, which only the distemper of his mind called into being, and which, moreover, would at last prove his ruin. Veronica was lovelier than he had ever seen her; he could not drive her from his thoughts: and in this perplexed ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... extraordinary view!" Ned said. "What fantastic buildings! What an immense variety of palaces and mosques! What is that strange building nearest to us?" he ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... North of Germany (where his Freyschuetz was played in 1823) to England, induced the managers to offer him liberal terms for an opera on the subject of Oberon, the well-known fairy tale on which Wieland has reared his fantastic, but beautiful and touching comic Epos. He received the first act of Planche's manuscript in December, 1824, and forthwith began his labours, though he seems to have thought that the worthy managers, in the short time they were disposed to allow ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... passing up the Strada Larga, the inner High Street, running parallel with the Marina. After Turkish fashion, trades flock together, shoemakers to the south and vegetable-vendors to the north. There are two good specimens of Venetian palazzetti, one fantastic, the other classical; and there is a rough pavement, which is still wanting in Patras. A visit to the silk-shop of Garafuglia Papaiouanou was obligatory: here the golden-hued threads reminded me of the Indian Tussur-moth. Also de rigueur was the purchase of nougat and raki, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... as if, in vital matters, Russia started the war in a satisfactory condition. The most vital of all questions in a country of huge distances must necessarily be that of transport. It is no exaggeration to say that only by fantastic efforts was Russian transport able to save its face and cover its worst deficiencies even before the war began. The extra strain put upon it by the transport of troops and the maintenance of the armies exposed its weakness, and with each succeeding week of war, although ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... this fantastic scenery are vast ranges of walls, which seem the productions of art, so regular is the workmanship. They rise perpendicularly from the river, sometimes to the height of one hundred feet, varying in thickness from one to twelve feet, being as broad at the top as below. The stones of which ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... that will evolve the descent into the world of so many pleasure-bound spirits of retribution and the experience of fantastic destinies; and this crimson pearl blade will also be among the number. The stone still lies in its original place, and why should not you and I take it along before the tribunal of the Monitory Vision Fairy, and place on its behalf its name on record, so that it should descend ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... inlaid desk where she stored up her keepsakes, took from it a small miniature. It was in a very slight gold frame, with a ring to it, as if intended to be worn on a chain; and under the glass at the back were two locks of hair, one dark and the other auburn, arranged in a fantastic knot. It was Anthony's secret present to her a year ago a copy he had had made specially for her. For the last month she had not taken it from its hiding-place: there was no need to heighten the vividness of the past. But now she clutched ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... and the burlesque poem of Trivia any man fond of lazy literature will find delightful, at the present day, and must read from beginning to end with pleasure. They are to poetry what charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture: graceful, minikin, fantastic; with a certain beauty always accompanying them. The pretty little personages of the pastoral, with gold clocks to their stockings, and fresh satin ribbons to their crooks and waistcoats and bodices, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stranger, come not nigh me; Joy is not for me, nor festive cheer. Ah! such bliss may ne'er be tasted by me, Since my mother, in fantastic fear, By long sickness bow'd, To heaven's service vow'd Me, and all the hopes that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... clothed in rags. He is urging onward a team of four thin and exhausted horses; the plowshare sinks into a stony and ungrateful soil. One being only is active and alert in this scene of toil and sorrow. It is a fantastic creature. A skeleton armed with a whip, who acts as plowboy to the old laborer, and running along through the furrow beside the terrified horses, goads them on. This is the specter Death, whom Holbein has introduced allegorically into that series of religious and philosophic ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... which Dan understood but dimly—a plan for the disarmament of the world, or something like that. As he remembered them here in the cold light of day, her words of the night before seemed more than a little fantastic; but perhaps he had not understood, or perhaps she had spoken figuratively. "The nations of the world in the hollow of his hand"—that, of course, was figurative. And, equally of course, Vard's plan ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... observing that it was an object of interest to me, unloosened the great bang, when the thick tangled ringlets spread over the old man's shoulders and reached down below his waist. To further gratify my curiosity, the chief put on a portion of his fantastic regalia, and executed a medicine dance. The doctor then dressed me in his wildest and most barbaric costume, when by special request I imitated his performance, in a manner which ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... by the credulity of the public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors. He had been the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even lunatics. Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of Patagonia, quarries in Labrador—such like speculations. Fisheries to feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them. A principality to be bought in Madagascar was another. As the grotesque details of these ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... of the great barranca of Regla. A ride over the hills brought us to a wood of oaks, with their branches fringed with the long grey Spanish moss, and a profusion of epiphytes clinging to their bark, some splendidly in flower, showing the fantastic shapes and brilliant colours one sees in English orchid-houses. Cactuses of many species complete the picture of the vegetation in this beautiful spot. This is at the top of the barranca. Then imagine a valley a mile or two in width, with ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... moonlight on Lake Lucerne. In Vienna a tradition that Beethoven had composed it in an arbor gave rise to the title "Arbor sonata." Titles of this character work much mischief in the amateur mind by giving rise to fantastic conceptions of the contents of the ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... and seated herself again, weakly. It was true, she knew the fantastic rigmarole, which made absurd the secret dictates of these illiterate desperadoes. But that absurdity meant death, none the less—death for the one she loved. In her misery, she listened almost apathetically as Hodges went on talking in his ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... up among fantastic blocks of stone, which would have tempted an artist to draw out his sketch-book, they got excellent shots at the party below them, and as there was no chance of a return, they being entirely concealed, and their presence merely indicated by the little puffs ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... for although, at the time, it was justly looked upon as a very serious affair, it afterwards proved a great source of mirth. No one could recall to mind, without laughing, the ludicrous figure necessarily cut by our shipmates, when to amuse the natives, they figured on the light fantastic toe; and the readers, who look at the plate representing this really serious affair,* will behold two men ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... always knew I should write a book. Something to help tired minds lay aside the cares of the day. But I always say you never can tell what's around the corner till you turn it, and everyone has become so accustomed to fantastic occurrences in the last twenty one years that the inspiring and relaxing novel I used to dream about would be today as unreal as Atlantis. Instead, I find I must write of the things which have happened ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... bared head and inhale the fragrance of the dew-drenched grass and the scarlet balsams; to walk with hushed step through the wide forests, communing with the powerful sylvan spirits that labor there, watching with what miraculous delicacy of touch their unseen fingers weave the rich fantastic shrouds of fern and moss that deck the dead and fallen trees or anon give to the living their faint and mottled tints of green and gray;—to live thus through the summer hours, and through autumn, winter, spring watch the unrolling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Under all the fantastic grimness, all the mysticism, all the discredited and riotous vagaries of his insubordinate soul, Franklin possessed a saving common sense; yet it was mere freakishness which led him to accept a vagrant impulse as the controlling ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... and her eyes would follow Sissy with compassion to the door. Mr. Gradgrind usually improved these occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes. Yet it did seem (though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could take as ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... chewing a blade of grass, lay idle and withdrawn, her fair brows unpuckered by the afternoon sun (because it was July, 1920), her blue eyes on Barry, who was so different; or else she would be withdrawn but not idle, for she would be drawing houses tumbling down, or men on stilts, fantastic and proud, or goblins, or geese running with outstretched necks round a green. Or she would be writing something ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... when her father came out and was pleased with the lad, there should be no more talk of Newbury Street; that the little yellow house should become his home; that he should swing the fantastic gate, and plant the nasturtiums; that his life should grow to be one with hers and the old man's, his future ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... of expectation" hanging to the little girl was not quite as fantastic as might seem. It must be remembered that old Samuel before his death, in pressing need of ready money to finance some foolish venture of his son, had leased a good part of Clark's Field to some speculative builders, who had covered that portion of the old pasture that bordered the South Road ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... instance, Wilson's review of Don Juan, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, August, 1819, vol. v. p. 512, sq.: "To confess ... to his Maker, and to weep over in secret agonies the wildest and most fantastic transgressions of heart and mind, is the part of a conscious sinner, in whom sin has not become the sole principle of life and action.... But to lay bare to the eye of man—and of woman—all the hidden convulsions ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Mountains covered with pines and cedars, and the "Albatross" was over the appropriately named Bad Lands of Nebraska—a chaos of ochre-colored hills, of mountainous fragments fallen on the soil and broken in their fall. At a distance these blocks take the most fantastic shapes. Here and there amid this enormous game of knucklebones there could be traced the imaginary ruins of medieval cities with forts and dungeons, pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... myself to this fantastic position, as well as to the comparative darkness which surrounded us. The soil of the forest seemed covered with sharp blocks, difficult to avoid. The submarine flora struck me as being very perfect, and richer even than it would have been in the arctic or tropical zones, where ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Independence. Copies of the same books, mostly bound in calfskin, were to be found in the library below, and I courageously resolved that I too would read them all and try to understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course of reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some fantastic notion of chronological order and early legendary form. Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's "Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I longed, and I finally gave them up for a thick ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... revolutions and political movements—unless when they have been conducted with the most guarded caution and moderation—have generally terminated in results just the opposite of what was expected from them, the angry ape will still play his fantastic tricks, and put in motion machinery, the action of which he no more comprehends or foresees than he comprehends the mysteries of infinity. The insect that is borne upon the current will fancy that he directs ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... said. "There was a very bad outbreak of crime in Shanghai, mostly under the leadership of a notorious criminal whom I was instrumental in getting beheaded. He ran a gang called 'The Cheerful Hearts'—you know the fantastic titles which these Chinese gangs adopt. It was their custom to leave on the scene of their depredations the Hong, or sign-manual of the gang. It was worded exactly as this slip, only it was written. These visiting cards of 'The Cheerful Hearts' ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... put in, glancing down at his fantastic attire, "I don't quite see myself going back to Gablehurst in this get up. Wish I knew what had become of the kit we ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... To three bottles with red seals succeeded three bottles with green seals, in the midst of which shortly appeared one which by its neck topped with a silver helmet, was recognized as belonging to the Royal Champagne Regiment—a fantastic Champagne vintaged by Saint Ouen, and sold in Paris at two francs the bottle as bankrupt's stock, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... matters that interested that age seem now superfluous, the recreations of a holiday rather than the business of life. But coming from the dust and din of the fifteenth century, it looks differently. It was, in whatever dim or fantastic shape, a recognition of universal brotherhood,—of a common ground whereon all mankind could meet in peace and even sympathy, were it only for a picnic. In this villeggiatura of the human race the immediate aim is no very lofty one,—not truth, not duty, but to please ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... slanting roof, where the green moss clung in patches to the moldy shingles, or formed a groundwork for the nests the swallows built year after year beneath the decaying eaves. Long, winding piazzas, turning sharp, sudden angles, and low, square porches, where the summer sunshine held many a fantastic dance, and where the winter storm piled up its drifts of snow, whistling merrily as it worked, and shaking the loosened casement as it went whirling by. Huge trees of oak and maple, whose topmost limbs had borne and cast the leaf for nearly a century of years, tall evergreens, ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... perfect and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the water. Their gods may have been much besides this, for we know them from fragments of mythology picked out with trouble from a fantastic history running backward to Adam and Eve, and many things that may have seemed wicked to the monks who imagined that history, may have been altered or left out; but this they must have been essentially, for the old stories are confirmed by apparitions ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... widely different from what he expected. There arose, within twenty yards of him, a sound that might have been the cry of a child or the scream of a trapped animal. Assuming it to be the latter, Will again hesitated. Often enough he had laughed at the folk-tales of witch hares as among the most fantastic fables of the old; yet at this present moment mystic legends won point from the circumstances in which he found himself. He hurried forward to the edge of a circle from which the sound proceeded. Then, looking before him, he started violently, sank to his knees behind a rock, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... his mind? Or was it but the fever? Was the end coming?—and far from home, too—Home?—he had no home. One place was as good as another to him. He had no distinct recollection how he got to the usual hayloft, nor how long he lay there. It was one confused mass of pains and dreams and fantastic shapes. Then the fever must have burned out, for he awoke one night with a clear ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... the fantastic world, forever changing; within were gentle if strict rules and customs securely fixed. Without was the ceaseless ebb and flow of the financial tide; within were content and sweet poverty and no disturbing ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... to this dazzling elevation, and it was only too much in accordance with the frailty of human nature that they should lose head—feel as if they were under no responsibility to their fellow-men—and, as Shakspeare says, 'play such fantastic tricks before high Heaven, as make the angels weep.' Such rapid and ill-founded prosperity never lasts; and generally he who has ascended like a blazing rocket, tumbles to the earth like its charred ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... when I came. The fire was out. The water running over the edge of the tank had frozen into huge icicles that hung like a great white shroud over the bier of the two dead heroes. It was a gas-fixture factory, and the hundreds of pipes, twisted into all manner of fantastic shapes of glittering ice, lent a most weird effect to the sorrowful scene. I can still see Chief Gicquel, all smoke-begrimed, and with the tears streaming down his big, manly face,—poor Gicquel! he went to join his brothers ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... height and twenty feet in width. This striking object was named by Stuart Chambers Pillar, to commemorate a friend who had assisted him greatly in his explorations. It stood amongst other elevations of fantastic shapes and grotesque formations, resembling ruined forts and castles. On the 9th of April they sighted two remarkable bluffs, and on the 12th reached the range of which the bluffs formed the centre. The eastern bluff was called Brinkley Bluff and the western Hanson Bluff; the range, which ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... through the diamond panes of the window, throws rhomboids of light on to the polished floor. It looks like some enchanted chessboard. Leaning back and gazing with half-closed eyes, he peoples it with fantastic rooks, and knights and bishops, when suddenly the strangely penetrating voice of Angela ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... of last night's dissipation. The ball was not over at twelve o'clock, as the invitations had intimated it would be, but had gone on into the wee small hours of morning. It was not often that Ryeville had the chance to trip the light fantastic toe to the music of a Louisville band and the eager dancers had begged for more and more. The old people had dropped out, one by one, but the youngsters danced ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... moon had now soared high above the mountain, and a spectacle, wonderfully and wildly beautiful, was revealed. Kellson walked into the garden and gazed on it. The mist, no longer smooth and clinging, but drawn and curled into fantastic wreaths, was rising slowly into the windless sky. The tired-out man took one lingering look, and then walked quickly into the house. He locked the front door and went ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... character, though naturally she could not appreciate this fact. But there was always something a bit eerie and fantastic about her, something not exactly of the everyday world—her high cheekbones and thin, emotional face with its scarlet lips and intense expression faintly ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... stir; do not go, I implore you! Rose, only hear me!" And fiercely and passionately seizing her by the hand, he poured out the whole story of his love, heaping her with every fantastic epithet of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... business and energy the country stretched lone and uninhabited; a great waste of naked, hot, resplendent land blotched with white and red, showing not a green spot except the course of the Platte; with scorched, rusty hills rising above its fantastic surface, and, in the distance, bluish mountain ranges that appeared to float and waver in ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the willful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... not one of the magistrates interposed. He remained in this man's house a whole year, rewarding his hospitality by readings from the Italian poets whom he loved. Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantastic leaning towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities of Italy. But about the portals of its vast unfinished churches and its dark shrines, half hidden by votive flowers and candles, lie some of the sweetest works of the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa and Jacopo della Quercia, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... of the Fathers, and, Origen excepted, of the Ante-Nicene Fathers in particular, in all that respects Hebrew learning and the New Testament references to the Old Testament, is shown in this so early fantastic misinterpretation grounded on the fact of our Lord's reminding, and as it were giving out aloud to John and Mary the twenty-second Psalm, the prediction of his present sufferings and after glory. But the entire passage in Tertullian, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... different book, and it would be a catholic palate indeed that would relish equally the story of the Paris grisette and the story of the Manx deemster. In "Trilby" the blending of the novel and the romance, of the real and the fantastic, is as much of a stumbling-block to John Bull as it is, for example, in Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea." "The central idea," he might exclaim, "is utterly extravagant; the transformation by hypnotism of the absolutely tone-deaf girl into the unutterably peerless singer ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... procession through the mist, which gave the boats a fantastic, unreal appearance, while the shores looked, where the fog broke or floated up, strange, dark, and full of mystery. Every now and then there was a low echoing splash in the water, which told of some great reptile disturbed from its resting-place ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... unreturning tides. Those silent waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering masses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure world, a shifting world, Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled, Or serpentine, or driving arrows, Or serene slidings, or March narrows. There slipping wave and shore are one, And weed and mud. No ray of sun, But ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... opened immediately into a room. It was large and low. The floor was paved with red tiles, and the walls were of wood, varnished. Around the walls hung numerous pictures without frames. In different places there were confused heaps of clothing and drapery. The clothing was rich, though fantastic. In one corner was a frame with armor suspended; while over this, on the wall, he saw arms of different kinds—pistols, carbines, daggers, and blunderbusses. The fashion of all these was somewhat antique, and there was a richness in their ornaments which ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... revealed, though it must be borne in mind that it was originally drawn up for the use of a Japanese student. The book is full of acute perceptions, fine judgments, felicitous epigrams—but it is too allusive, too fantastic; neither has it the balance and justice required for so serious and comprehensive a task. At the same time the learning it displays is extraordinary. It was written almost without books of reference, and out of the recollections of a man of genius, who remembered all that ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... vagaries, the feelings are very indifferent to the mere intellectual forms around which the same feelings in others have gathered, if only by their means they hint at, and sometimes express themselves. Now I understood this old fantastic verse, and knew that the foam-bells on the torrent of passionate feeling are iris-hued. And what was more—it proved an intellectual nexus between my love and my studies, or at least a bridge by which I could pass from the one ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... I but close my eyes One fleeting moment in forgetful slumber, I'm tossed about in strange, fantastic dreams. Here on my couch I lay now, half asleep, When these same visions reappeared again, More strange than ever,—more mysterious And puzzling—. Ah, if I could only know What this ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... that of St. Peter's at Rome! One exclaims to himself, this is the true Christian temple! Four rows of enormous eight-sided pillars, close together, seem like a serried hedge of gigantic oaks. Their strange capitals, bristling with a fantastic vegetation of pinnacles, canopies, foliated niches and statues, are like venerable trunks crowned with delicate and pendent mosses. They spread out in great branches meeting in the vault overhead, the intervals of the arches ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... wonder. The entire face of the building could now be seen to be covered with a mass of carvings; for the most part they were statues in bas relief. All were fantastic in the extreme, but whether purposely so or not, there was no way to tell. Certainly any such work on the part of an earthly artist would have branded him either as insane or as ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... throughout this crisis were confronted with divided responsibilities. It was their duty to interpret a mass of more or less fantastic rumors at a time when nerves were overwrought and points of view magnified and distorted. They wished to prevent the publication of anything of an incendiary nature, while at the same time a necessity arose for presenting to the public the news to which it was entitled. ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... handicraft soon riveted attention. The room had been originally papered, but Riccabocca had stretched canvas over the walls, and painted thereon sundry satirical devices, each separated from the other by scroll-works of fantastic arabesques. Here a Cupid was trundling a wheelbarrow full of hearts, which he appeared to be selling to an ugly old fellow, with a money-bag in his hand—probably Plutus. There Diogenes might be seen walking through a market-place, with ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... will be asked at the outset, what possible connexion can there be between the practice of so fantastic and gruesome an art as the embalming of the dead and the building up of civilization? Is it conceivable that the course of the development of the arts and crafts, the customs and beliefs, and the social and political organizations—in fact any of ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... "Triumph," of the Medici. Great golden cars, richly decorated, and drawn by curious beasts; horses dressed in the skins of lions and tigers and elephants; shaggy buffaloes and timorous giraffes from the Medicean villa at Careggi; fantastic monsters made up of mingled men and boys and horses, with other surprising figures as riders; dragons and dwarfs, giants and genii; beautiful young girls and boys dressed in antique costumes to represent goddesses and divinities of the old mythologies; ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... beneath Hans' feet. Next his strokes grew shorter, ending oftimes with a jerk, and finally, he lay sprawling upon the ice, kicking against the air with many a fantastic flourish. ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... whose mystery holds the promise of joy and beauty, yet contains nothing but poison and decay. He had been frightened by the vague perception of danger before, but now, as he looked at that life again, his eyes seemed able to pierce the fantastic veil of creepers and leaves, to look past the solid trunks, to see through the forbidding gloom—and the mystery was disclosed—enchanting, subduing, beautiful. He looked at the woman. Through the checkered light between them she appeared to him with the impalpable distinctness ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... dissonances are absolutely enthralling. Charles Boner, in his work on Transylvania, says that even the aged find it impossible to resist the dance when a gypsy band invites them to it. Their prelude is slow and sonorous, the music quickens, there is a rush of tones, the fantastic melody hastens on at a head-long pace—every one, old and young, is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... on the mantel-piece steadily registered the progress of time, and Winterfield's fantastic attentions were ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... Marhai is held, at which much liquor is drunk and all classes disport themselves. In Damoh on this day the Ahirs go to the standing-place for village cattle, and after worshipping the god, frighten the cattle by waving leaves of the basil-plant at them, and then put on fantastic dresses, decorating themselves with cowries, and go round the village, singing and dancing. Elsewhere at the time of the Marhai they dance round a pole with peacock feathers tied to the top, and sometimes wear peacock feathers themselves, as well as aprons sewn all over with ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the proletary. Classic and nondescript, marble and brick, granite and iron, unite to form the most heterogeneous collection of fashions the earth's surface anywhere exhibits. Even Milton's blind eyes pictured nothing so fantastic as this architectural chaos of Manhattan, so hopeless of eventual order. And yet are there not lacking signs that the quaint pot-pourri of whimsicalities will one day coalesce into a well-defined, artistic composition, a twentieth century City ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... capacity for really assimilating or adapting it. At first, it was supposed that we had somehow undergone a sudden transformation, but it was gradually perceived that such could not be and was not the case; and a crop of books on Japan and the Japanese, deep and superficial, serious and fantastic, interesting and otherwise, has been put forth for the benefit of those who were curious to know the reason of this strange phenomenon. But among so many books, there has not yet been, so far as I know, a history of Japan, although a study of its history was most essential for the proper understanding ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... with high pitched roofs and pointed towers, which, in good taste or bad, did its best to be everywhere ornamental, from the gorgon heads which frowned from its turrets to the long row of stables and the fantastic dovecotes. It stood (as became such a castle) upon an eminence, and looked down. Very beautiful indeed was what it looked upon. Terrace below terrace glowed with the most brilliant flowers, and broad flights ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... on its merely imitative power, than the close of the thirteenth century. No painting or sculpture at that time reached more than a rude resemblance of reality. Its despised perspective, imperfect chiaroscuro, and unrestrained flights of fantastic imagination, separated the artist's work from nature by an interval which there was no attempt to disguise, and little to diminish. And yet, at this very period, the greatest poet of that, or perhaps of any other age, and the attached friend of its greatest painter,[49] who must over and over again ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... thing they are not nearly so superior as they suppose they are. They think "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" always comes from "the hardening of the heart." But youth has some fantastic as well as some noble dreams, so that docility is a better quality than independence in a very young person. If a worldly minded mother inculcates worldliness in her daughter, the daughter certainly ought to stand firm against the teaching; ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... tell, these supernatural manifestations seem less marvelous and less fantastic than they did some centuries ago; and we are at first a little disappointed. One would think that even the mysterious has its ups and downs and remains subject to the caprices of some strange extra mundane fashion; or perhaps, to be more exact, it is evident that ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the summer evenings they passed them when out for the walks which they took together, since Anthony spent most of his days at the Temple, studying law in the chambers of a leading barrister. Thus their somewhat fantastic gateway became impressed upon Barbara's mind, as did the character of the people who frequented them. As, however, their proximity reduced the rent of their own and neighbouring houses by about one-half, personally they were grateful to these Gardens, since the noise ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... sound of distant voices and footsteps. Memory and fancy were inert; only the senses were faintly alive. Consciousness gradually contracted to a dim vision of the narrow cell, then to a haze, in which the gaslight shone like a star, and finally died out. But by one of those fantastic tricks the imps of dreaming play us, the last patch of consciousness changed into my wife's face. It was too dim and distant to stir grief or regret; like the vague vision of a beloved face hovering over eyes ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... hoary registers of time, Unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar. Wisdom disdains the word, nor holds society With those who own it. 'Tis Fancy's child, and Folly is its father; Wrought of such stuff as dreams are, and as baseless As the fantastic ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Don Adriano de Arma'do, the fantastic Spaniard. He is cunning and versatile, facetious and playful.—Shakespeare, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of his time, fantastic, unfashioned—all this was his material. But all this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame. The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, his sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations, his veriest self, the whole ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... transparency; the rock is dissolved in the water; and the gorges cut by water in such rocks often resemble those cut in the ice of glaciers by glacier streams. To the solubility of limestone is probably to be ascribed the fantastic forms which peaks of this rock usually assume, and also the grottos and caverns which interpenetrate limestone formations. A rock capable of being thus dissolved will expose a smooth surface after the water has quitted it; and in the case of the Via Mala it is the polish of the surfaces ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... special information, and I deem it best to make them now, when the most fantastic descriptions of the all-absorbing desire of conquest on the part of Germany have circulated in the press ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of his party, the most experienced and accomplished public men of the day, were made to stand aside; were sent to the rear, whilst this fantastic figure was led by unseen hands to the front and given the reins of power. It is immaterial whether we were for him, or against him; wholly immaterial. That, during four years, carrying with them such a weight of responsibility as ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... over-heated by the morning chase, Narcissus on the grassy verdure lies: But whilst within the crystal fount he tries To quench his heat, he feels new heats arise. For as his own bright image he surveyed, He fell in love with the fantastic shade; 20 And o'er the fair resemblance hung unmoved, Nor knew, fond youth! it was himself he loved. The well-turned neck and shoulders he descries, The spacious forehead, and the sparkling eyes; The hands that Bacchus might not scorn to show, And hair that round Apollo's head might flow, With all ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the light of the moon behind the clouds lessened the surrounding darkness. He could dimly distinguish the mountain ridges, outlined against the sky. The rain had ceased. The mist had lifted from the heights; but it still hung in fantastic layers between the walls of ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... statement of the main principles of the new philosophy with some account of the philosopher's life and character. Thus the work took the form of a "Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdroeckh," and as such it was offered to the world. Here, of course, we reach the explanation of its fantastic title—"Sartor Resartus," or the Tailor Patched: the tailor being the great German "Clothes-philosopher," and the patching being done by Carlyle ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... rugs in the great room were rolled up, and the young folks danced to Laura's music, which could inspire unwilling feet. But there were none such that night. Tom and Kate led off in the newest and most fantastic waltz, others followed, and Polly and I were the only spectators. An hour of this, and then we gathered around the hearth to hear Polly read "The Christmas Carol." No one reads like Polly. Her low, soft voice seems never to know fatigue, but runs on like a musical brook. When the reading was ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... Mediterranean, but it was at the same time much more irregular and less rich in capes, promontories, points, bays, or creeks. Its strange form caught the eye, and when Gideon Spilett, on the engineer's advice, had drawn the outline, they found that it resembled some fantastic animal, a monstrous leviathan, which lay sleeping on the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... it is an inside view of a commonplace French household which incompatibility of temper has made unsupportable. And then take the following acts, and see how on this foundation of fact, and screened by an outward semblance of realism, there is erected the most laughable superstructure of fantastic farce. I remember hearing one of the two great comedians of the Theatre Francais, M. Coquelin, praise a comic actor of the Varietes whom we had lately seen in a rather cheap and flimsy farce, because he combined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... his nose, surveyed his brother's performances "on the light fantastic" very much as a benevolent Newfoundland would the gambols of a toy terrier, receiving with thanks the hasty hints for his guidance which Steve breathed into his ear as he passed and forgetting all about them the next minute. When not thus engaged ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... in his lot with insurgent youth, not as a competitor or rival, but as an advocate, an admirer and an adviser. Indeed, if he might venture to say so, he sometimes acted as a brake on the wheels of the triumphal Chariot of Free Verse. He was not an adherent of the fantastic movement known as "Dada." He had no desire to abolish the family, morality, logic, memory, archaeology, the law and the prophets. A little madness was a splendid thing, but it must be methodic. Still, for the rest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... were seen by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to make room for the new "Hotel St. Nicholas"); the Gothic turret had not vanished from the angle of the Place de la Pucelle, the Palais de Justice remained in its gray antiquity, and the Norman houses still lifted their fantastic ridges of gable along the busy quay (now fronted by as formal a range of hotels and offices as that of the West Cliff of Brighton). All was at unity with itself, and the city lay under its guarding hills, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... prowling about the streets, and crossing over the bridges and back again. At such a time the streets are alive with story-tellers, magicians and comedians, who delight the nocturnal sight-seers with wonderful fairy-tales, jokes and fantastic plays. ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... a snail's pace, surrounded by the mysterious air characteristic of Russian officialdom. For several years the High Commission had to work its way through the sad inheritance of the defunct "gubernatorial commissions," represented by mounds of paper with the most fantastic projects of solving the Jewish question, endeavoring to bring these materials into some kind of system. It also received a number of memoranda on the Jewish question from outsiders, among them from public-minded Jews, who in most cases used Baron Horace Guenzburg as their go-between—memoranda ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... play, is to mark the same line for all the players, either by pressing down very hard with a hard pencil so that the line can be traced from one piece of paper to another, or with carbon copy paper between the sheets. Thus each person has the same line, and the one who uses his in the most fantastic and unexpected way is the winner. The only rule about making the line is that a circle shall not be made. The two ends must be left ready to add the rest of the design. It is well sometimes to limit the pictures to human faces, ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... beards, and girls that be Big[8]as old women, wanting gravity. Then do not blame me, 'cause I thus describe them. Flatter I may not, lest thereby I bribe them To have a better judgment of themselves, Than wise men have of babies on their shelves.[9] Their antic tricks, fantastic modes, and way, Show they, like very boys and girls, do play With all the frantic fopperies of this age, And that in open view, as on a stage; Our bearded men do act like beardless boys; Our women please themselves with childish toys. Our ministers, long ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... every conceivable intermediate hue; while the clear portions of the sky itself were of the purest and most ethereal blue—the whole sea glowing with the same varied and beautiful colours. But still more beautiful and wonderful seemed the vast mountain of ice on which we floated, as in every fantastic form it appeared, towering above us. The pinnacles and turrets of the summit were tinted with the glowing hues of the east; while, lower down, the columns and arches which supported them seemed formed of the purest alabaster of almost a cerulean tint; and a round us, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... towered the crater-walls, while we journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of fantastic shape. Our way led on past a bottomless pit and along and over the main stream of the latest lava-flow ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... house a fantastic figure of the gibbon is carved on the ends of all the main crossbeams of the house, and the chief said that this has been their custom for many generations. He told us that it is the custom, when these beams are being put up, to kill a pig and divide its flesh among the men who are working, and ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... with war-club, spear, or rifle, and wrapped in red, green, or brown blankets, their heads close shaven except the erect and bristling scalp-lock, adorned with long eagle-plumes, while both heads and faces are painted with fantastic figures in blue, white, ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... practise medicine, but studied it as a branch of philosophy, and instead of observing and investigating, attempted to solve the problems of health and disease by intuition and speculation. His conceptions were inaccurate and fantastic. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... himself to be killed by it. But a young man little dreams what he must inevitably encounter in the course of a life ambitious of public notice. My indignation at Mr. Keats's depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which, malgre all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus. He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... truth given in my volume entitled Pragmatism, continues to meet with such persistent misunderstanding that I am tempted to make a final brief reply. My ideas may well deserve refutation, but they can get none till they are conceived of in their proper shape. The fantastic character of the current misconceptions shows how unfamiliar is the concrete point of view which pragmatism assumes. Persons who are familiar with a conception move about so easily in it that they understand each other at a hint, and can converse without anxiously attending to ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... effectively to strengthen the forces of right. The Golden Rule should be, and as the world grows in morality it will be, the guiding rule of conduct among nations as among individuals; though the Golden Rule must not be construed, in fantastic manner, as forbidding the exercise of the police power. This mighty and free Republic should ever deal with all other States, great or small, on a basis of high honor, respecting their rights as jealously as it safeguards ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Advantage is of course taken of what a lion has done, and they go and bring home the buffalo or antelope killed when he was a lion, or rather found when he was patiently pursuing his course of deception in the forest. We saw the Pondoro of another village dressed in a fantastic style, with numerous charms hung round him, and followed by a troop of boys who were honouring him ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... to have cured me of my fantastic amours, and they were perhaps the means offered me by Heaven to prevent their destructive consequences; but my evil genius prevailed, and I had scarcely begun to go out before my heart, my head, and my feet returned to the same paths. ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... more apparent than real, for the introduction and the conclusion of a poem should comprehend six of its thirteen cantos," leaving, therefore, the cabalistic numeber seven for the body of the poem. And all this regulation not being sufficiently meaningless, fantastic, and oppressive, he invents an elaborate system for compelling each of his sections and groups to begin with a letter of the alphabet, determined beforehand, the letters being selected so as to compose words having "a synthetic or sympathetic ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... the crowd that now pressed upon her went like wine to her head; her cheeks flamed, her eyes brightened, and she lifted her small hands in fantastic gesture and danced, crying, "We are cast down, but not destroyed, because God Almighty has given to us a ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... are made of pewter, terra-cotta, or wood, in every shape of bird, or beast, or fish. Rafael had a bird-whistle, Edith's was a yellow butterfly, and the tops which they spun were dressed like dolls, in many fantastic costumes. ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... master! to our favoured isle, Already partial to thy name and style; Long may thy fountain of invention run In streams as rapid as it first begun; While skill for each fantastic whim provides, And certain science ev'ry current guides! Oh, may thy days, from human sufferings free, Be blest with glory and felicity, With full fruition, to a distant hour, Of all thy magic and creative power! ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... gratin and boiled potatoes, were good to look at and good to eat, although neither of them had ever seen a garden. There was a salad, too, with an incomparable dressing. Finally, an excellent pudding. The wines and mineral waters, the liqueurs and the coffee, were genuine. The fantastic cuisine of my hostess extended only to the solid portions of the repast, and for this I was secretly thankful. I don't like chemical burgundies, and the "health-food" mochas and javas are only surprisingly good imitations of exceedingly ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... just awfully sorry about—banging up my racket like this. The second time it came down on this club. Why do they carry those things? Perfectly fantastic, I'll say, going around with a club. But as long as you were asking me what I ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... hidden in the moss, ran a streamlet, covered with sunny speckles, where parted leaves admitted the sunshine. Flowers grew along its banks in wild profusion, and it held its wayward course with many a rippling fall and fantastic turn, until it was lost in the ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... purity divine: Sublime her reason, and her native wit Unstrain'd with pedantry and low conceit; Her fancy lively, and her judgment free, From female prejudice and bigotry: Averse to idle pomp, and outward show, The flatt'ring coxcomb, and fantastic beau. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... be a worse state than its existence." His own remedy for the depression prevailing at the time when he wrote, was to divert a large proportion of the slaves from the glutted business of staple agriculture into manufacturing, for which he thought them well qualified.[11] Equally fantastic were the ideas of H.C. Carey of Pennsylvania who dealt here and there with slavery in the course of his three stout volumes on political economy. His lucubrations are ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... as already intimated, that the forgoing interpretation of the Promise of American life will seem fantastic and obnoxious to the great majority of Americans, and I am far from claiming that any reasons as yet alleged afford a sufficient justification for such a radical transformation of the traditional national policy and democratic creed. All that can be claimed is that if a democratic ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Did it mean a battle? She sat up, straining eye and ear. The jubilant voices shouted greetings that just missed being intelligible. The sun, glancing from moving weapons, flashed through the doorway in fantastic shapes. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... in the Chinese saloon, which was of moderate dimensions, but bright with fantastic forms and colors, brilliantly lit up. It was the privilege of Lothair to hand the duchess to her seat. He observed that Lord Carisbrooke was placed next to Lady Corisande, though he ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... children?' he repeated. 'What a fantastic idea! Do you think I should take all this trouble to come and request your assistance and spend hours of valuable time looking for a book that's ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... some kind of similar delusion of the senses. I was mad, deluded, dreaming! The excitement of the day, and this dim light of stars and bewildering mist combined to trick me. I had been amazingly imposed upon by some false wizardry of the senses. It was all absurd and fantastic; it would pass. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... others, "the good boys," whose collars and socks were always immaculate, romantic little natures that would kiss your hand with so much ceremony and politeness, blushing if one addressed them affectionately, spending whole days at a time lost in fantastic reveries. ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... morbid curiosity to see what experiences can be in store for me that are worse than those I have gone through already. Besides, I do not believe what Seraphine says—it is contrary to my reason, it is altogether fantastic. And, even if it were true, even if I really am in the horrible peril that she describes, what difference does it make where I go or what I do? I am just a spiritual outcast, marked for suffering—a little more or less je ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... them form a long chain, the extreme end of which was brought up by old Onucz in whose hand he placed a slender conducting rod which hung down from the altar. Then he recited the fantastic oath before them all once more, whilst they repeated every syllable of it after him. The comedy was concluded by a violent electric shock which instantly sent a spasm of pain through the muscles and sinews of every member of the living chain. The poor untaught ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... the government. Beyond question their "Excellencies" and "His Honor," were amply remunerated. The Governor General and his Lieutenant were absent on business. Indeed, while the Legislative Assembly, in defence of imaginary privileges, were cutting such fantastic capers before high heaven, the confidential secretary of Lord Dorchester and of his successors so far, the Honorable Herman Witsius Ryland,—who, having been Acting Paymaster General to His Majesty's Forces captured by the ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastic foppery, to which my kindness for a man of learning and virtue wishes him to have been superior.' Johnson's Works, viii. 482. See post, under ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... issue had been involved in previous campaigns; but the statement of the case by the party opposed to "government of, by and for plutocracy" had been fantastic, extreme, entangled with social, economic and political lunacies. And Howard had strengthened the News-Record by refusing to permit it to "go crazy." Now, however, there was in honesty no reason for refusing support to the advocates ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... almost fiercely, "you wish to be happy. You are still very young; life is sweet. You have just forsaken wealth, friends, love, because you have a fantastic attachment for my cause. You will live to repent of your boyish decision. You will wish to win back all you have lost. Well, I will give you the chance; do what I tell you, and you shall ride into Rome ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... mental states, big with the sense of corresponding misdeeds; and pointing among these to some glaring infidelities to Pauline, the man's constant love and friend; but on the whole conveying nothing beyond an impression of youthful excesses, and of an extreme and fantastic self-consciousness which has inspired these excesses, and which now magnifies ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... other, and losing your hearts by an unaccountable fascination, and being as miserable as the principals in the second last chapter of one of Conny's three volumes? or were you to atone to him in some mysterious, fantastic, supernatural fashion, for the unintentional wrong? Because if you have done so, I'm afraid it is all mist and moonshine, poor Jack, quite as much as ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... journey to New Orleans, where he hoped to set on foot a scheme to seize either Texas or Mexico, and set up a republic with himself at the head. He interested the susceptible Blennerhassetts in his plans, the import of which they probably little understood; but the fantastic Englishman had suffered a considerable reduction of fortune, and was anxious to recoup, and Burr's representations were aglow with the promise of such rewards in the golden southwest as Cortes and Coronado sought. Blennerhassett's ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... of fiction and attempt to depict to it the fascinating world of an Indian jungle, the weird beasts that people it, and the stranger humans that battle with them in it. The magic pen of a Kipling alone could do justice to that wonderful realm of mountain and forest that is called the Terai—that fantastic region of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas, that harbours in its dim recesses the monsters of the animal kingdom, quaint survivals of a vanished race—the rhinoceros, the elephant, the bison, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... Freud's theory is weird and fantastic is a self-evident fact. Perhaps the Clark University student who very carefully worked it up a few years ago went a little too far when he said it was a chaotic inferno, but at any rate, it is far ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... about him now, a silent, pitying group, appearing fantastic, perhaps, by the dim light of that single lanthorn, he attempted to raise his head, and then with a groan he dropped it back upon the straw that pillowed it. From out of a face white, as in death, and drawn with haggard lines of pain, a pair ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... A fantastic, waggish crew—yet Francis minded them not, so long as they observed sufficient etiquette to keep their distance from his royal person and immediate following. This nice decorum, however, be it said, was an unwritten law with these waifs and scatterlings, knowing the merry monarch ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... nations, and send embassies, and make believe to have a navy, and bark and snap at the heels of the great German Empire. But Becker could not prevent the hunted Laupepa from taking refuge in any hole that offered, and he could afford to smile at the fantastic orgie in the embassy. It was another matter when the Hawaiians approached the intractable Mataafa, sitting still in his Atua government like Achilles in his tent, helping neither side, and (as the Germans suspected) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... people began to be reconciled presently to their lady, who was generous and kind, though fantastic and haughty, in her ways; and whose praises Dr. Tusher, the Vicar, sounded loudly amongst his flock. As for my lord, he gave no great trouble, being considered scarce more than an appendage to ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... grass and the trees, the gleam of the distant James, and a tremendous and fantastic show of clouds, piled along the horizon and flushed by the declining sun, streamed the crowd. Excited and voluble, lavish of opinions that had been pent up for hours, and drinking in greedily the fresher air, it made no haste to quit the Capitol portico or ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... Pothier rode up the broad avenue that led to the Chateau, and halted at the main gate—set in a lofty hedge of evergreens cut into fantastic shapes, after the fashion of the Luxembourg. Within the gate a vast and glowing garden was seen—all squares, circles, and polygons. The beds were laden with flowers shedding delicious odors on the morning air as it floated by, while the ear was soothed by the hum of bees and the songs of birds ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... works, namely, as Marlowe's Elegies of Ovid, which appeared in company with Davies's Epigrammes, Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, Hall's Satires, and Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum; or, The Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its insipidity than for the reasons which justified the cleansing process applied to the others, the youthful productions of men who were destined to attain celebrity ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... where the main business street intersects with the Best Residence Street. Its main entrance opened into the flattened corner of the building where the roof rose to a fantastic facade. For the rest, the hotel was of yellowish-brick, half-surrounded by a wooden porch where at milder seasons of the year in deep wicker chairs men and women were always rocking with the air of people engaged ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... and Wordsworth, "two living poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried forward their ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... offered a more tempting prize than the wilds of Baccalaos. Eager for glory and for plunder, a swarm of restless nobles followed their knight-errant King, the would-be paladin, who, misshapen in body and fantastic in mind, had yet the power to raise a storm which the lapse of generations could not quell. Under Charles the Eighth and his successor, war and intrigue ruled the day; and in the whirl of Italian politics there was no leisure to think of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... days at Chela, we descended the stream in canoes, shooting over pebbly rapids, and amongst rocks of limestone, water-worn into fantastic shapes, till we at last found ourselves gliding gently along the still canals of the Jheels. Many of these rapids are so far artificial, that they are enclosed by gravel banks, six feet high, which, by confining ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... her short, and with dilated eyes she stared, terror-stricken, at that part of the strange capital, that violet-tinted apparition of a fantastic city. The rain had ceased falling. On the opposite bank of the Seine was the Quai des Ormes, with its small grey houses variegated below by the woodwork of their shops and with their irregular roofs boldly outlined above, while the horizon suddenly became clear on the left as far as the blue slate ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Egyptian Cairo's streets crowded into one Chicago Cairo Street. It was a splendid sight with its gardens and squares, its temples, its towers and minaret made in the most Arabesque architecture and ornamented with the most fantastic draperies. The inhabitants had been directly transported from old Cairo across the sea to Midway Plaisance. There were the importunate street venders, the donkey boys begging and pulling at the clothing of the visitors, the pompous drivers of camels beseeching the visitors to try their "ship of ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... forest put on a beauty, austere, yet fantastic, bizarre. Above it hung a pale blue sky; within it, a perpetual, pale blue haze, through which blazed the scarlet and gold of the trees—great bonfires which did not warm, flaming pyres which were never consumed. Morning and evening a ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... tell him all when Sir Oliver had broken in upon them. Perchance Sir Nigel, with his love of all the dying usages of chivalry, might have contrived some strange ordeal or feat of arms by which his love should be put to the test. Alleyne smiled as he wondered what fantastic and wondrous deed would be exacted from him. Whatever it was, he was ready for it, whether it were to hold the lists in the court of the King of Tartary, to carry a cartel to the Sultan of Baghdad, or to serve a term against the wild heathen of Prussia. Sir Nigel had said that his birth was ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from them. Frau von Greifenstein had no public, and to a nature that is fond of show the privation is a great one. She could dress herself as gorgeously as she pleased, but there was no one to envy her splendour, nor even to admire it. For years she had played to an empty house. If, by any fantastic combination of events, it were possible that a fairly good actress should ever be obliged to play the same part every night for five and twenty years in an absolutely empty theatre, and if she did not go mad under the ordeal, she would perhaps turn out very like the Lady of Greifenstein. ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... judicial order. The wing to the left was devoted exclusively to the care and control of untried prisoners. The whole building was built of a smooth, light-colored stone, which on a snowy night like this, with the few lamps that were used in it glowing feebly in the dark, presented an eery, fantastic, almost ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... the first annual report of the United States Commissioner of Labor is given a long catalog of theories that have been suggested, many of them quite fantastic.] ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... seem sometimes to fill the air above them. Here, according to native legends, repose the Pandavas, the heroes of their great Homeric poem, the Mahabharata, whose names they have transferred to the valley of the Nerbudda. Every fantastic appearance of the rocks, caused by those great convulsions of nature which have so much disturbed the crust of the globe, or by the slow and silent working of the, waters, is attributed to the god-like power of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... solitude there was something weird and eerie that shook her courage. Nor was the danger all fantastic imaginings. The Indians might yet discover her. She might wander far from beaten trails of travel and die of thirst as so many newcomers had done. Possibilities of ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... Temporarily out of the bill at the theatre, and a long holiday being hers to enjoy, she had suggested a little trip to Manitou to see the far-famed Garden of the Gods, a place of scenic marvels, where, by a strange freak of Nature, great rocks and boulders, fantastic in shape and coloring, are thrown together in all kinds of curious formations. The plan was to go by train as far as Colorado Springs, and then finish the journey ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... such female groups, Were mixt no less fantastic troops Of male exhibitors—all willing To look even more than usual killing;— Beau tyrants, smock-faced braggadocios, And brigands, charmingly ferocious:— M.P.'s turned Turks, good Moslems then, Who, last night, voted for the Greeks; And Friars, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... course, that the signs of death were clearly evident on your poor boy before what we had to do was done. But the bare thought must have shocked Mary. We know emphatically that Hardcastle is dead, and we need not mention to her this fantastic theory ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... of the odd, fantastic feeling had been favoured by the slumber beginning to encroach on tody and brain. While he stood looking at the one creature, all the wonderful creatures began to get mixed up together, and he thought it better to go and search for some field of sleep, where he might ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... Here sometimes they waded in the water to escape the tangled thickets of alder interspersed with the prickly "devil's club," peculiar to all Alaska—a fiendish sort of plant covered with small spines, which grows in all fantastic shapes, but which manages to slap one somewhere, no matter where one steps upon it, and whose little prickly points detach themselves and remain in the flesh. Our young explorers, however, were used to Alaska wilderness travel, and they took all of this much as matter ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... watch the army of England lying below, and to know his uncle Albany close at hand, and to feel himself incapable—with nothing but a limited garrison at his command and no doubt the wise Douglas and the other great noblemen holding him back—of meeting the invader except by some such fantastic chivalrous expedient, must have ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... vegetation, there were waving sea-fans, solid masses of sponge-coral, clubs of Hercules, madrepores, like elegantly-formed vases filled with flowers, dome-like groups of astraeae, studded with green and purple spangles, and a thousand other shapes, so fantastic and peculiar, that they can be likened to ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... considered very fantastic—but do you know what I thought of at that very moment? Some years ago, I stood at Epsom close to the ropes and saw Fred Archer pass me as he swept like the whirlwind to the winning-post in the last Derby he ever rode. Between Mr. Carson and Mr. Fred Archer, especially in the profile, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... on this side of the water in the fantastic plot to have Mexico and Japan declare war upon the United States. During the trial of Rintelen in New York City in May, 1917, it was testified "that he came to the United States in order to embroil it with ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... border-land between games and sweets are the stalls of the itinerant batter-sellers. At these the tiny purchaser enjoys the evidently much appreciated privilege of himself arranging his little measure of batter in fantastic forms, and drying them upon a hot metal plate. A turtle is a favorite design, as the first blotch of batter makes its body, and six judiciously arranged smaller dabs soon suggest its ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... entrancing voice he loved the best. They would have thought, who heard the strain, They saw, in Temp's vale, her native maids, Amidst the festal-sounding shades, To some unlearned minstrel dancing; While, as his flying fingers kissed the strings, Love framed with Mirth a gay fantastic round. Strike—till the last armed foe expires; Strike—for your altars and your fires; Strike—for the green graves of your sires,— God.—and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... would have to fight to clear himself; nevertheless, he was not seriously concerned over the outcome. Public feeling was high, to be sure; the men of Sheep Camp were in a dangerous frame of mind and their actions were liable to be hasty, ill-considered- -their verdict was apt to be fantastic—but, secure in the knowledge of his innocence, Pierce felt no apprehension. Rather he experienced a thrill of excitement at the contretemps and at the ordeal which he knew ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... to know you in real life as well as in masquerade. Whether your whim calls for this fantastic and shaggy disguise or for the impeccability of evening dress, you are still only a handsome beast of prey. You are so incorrigible and so devoid of conventional morality that, in being fond of you, I wonder ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... are in the habit of shaving off a little from one side of the horns of these animals when still growing, in order to make them curve in that direction and assume fantastic shapes. The stranger the curvature, the more handsome the ox is considered to be, and the longer this ornament of the cattle-pen is spared to beautify the herd. This is a very ancient custom in Africa, for the tributary tribes of Ethiopia are seen, on some of the most ancient Egyptian monuments, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... mountain-side, and on reaching a brow of high land, what a noble prospect appeared! a river winding amongst meadows that were fully a mile broad and green as an emerald. Above them rose swelling hills of fantastic shapes, but all smooth and thickly covered with rich verdure. Behind these were higher hills, all having grass on their sides and trees on their summits, and extending east and west throughout the landscape as far as I could see. I hastened to ascertain ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... seemed the land, For birds on dazzling many-colored wings Made the trees blossom—parrots red, green, blue, Humming-birds like live jewels in the air, Strange ducks with spoon-shaped bills,—and overhead Like some fantastic frieze of living gold, The little yellow monkeys leaped and swung Chattering of Setebos in ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... ignorant, though wondrous proud, Though very turbulent and very loud; The crazy composition shows, Like that fantastic medley in the idol's toes, Made up of iron mixt with clay, This crumbles into dust, That moulders into rust, Or melts by the first shower away. Nothing is fix'd that mortals see or know, Unless, perhaps, some stars above be so; And those, alas, do show, Like all transcendent excellence ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... palazzo a corner of this studio-salon was dedicated to a peculiar member of their family. From that corner she seldom moved save as she swept away in some such elegant costume as the others wore only upon gala-occasions, or in some picturesque or wildly-fantastic garb that would have lodged her in a policeman's care had she ever been suffered to escape thus from the palace. All day long, day after day, she tarried in her corner mute and motionless, eying all comers and goers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... old man, comes home. On the heath around his old hut he finds (in a passage which the translators call "fantastic," intending, I hope, approval by this word) the thoughts he has missed thinking, the watchword he has failed to utter, the tears he has missed shedding, the deed he has missed doing. The thoughts are thread-balls, the watchword withered leaves, the tears dewdrops, etc. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... room—a room so high that its carved ceiling refused itself to exact scrutiny—travelled, with the wistful, cold curiosity of the dawn, over a fantastic storehouse of Time. Light, unaccompanied by the prejudice of human eyes, made strange revelation of incongruities, as though illuminating the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... moss-grown gate, ill-poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled and decayed, swings to and fro before its glass 5 like some fantastic dowager: while our own ghostly likeness travels on, through ditch and brake, upon the plowed land and the smooth, along the steep hillside and steeper wall, as if ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the example I have chosen from Rossetti with Leonardo's "Monna Lisa." Pater has admirably brought out, without dwelling too much upon it, the charm that is eternal in her face as well as the fantastic imagination of the great artist who created her for all time. He says: "The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one.... Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea." In a similar sense ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... amethyst and topaz—and the place Lit up, most royally, with the pure beam That dwells in them. Or haply the vast hall Of fairy palace, that outlasts the night, And fades not in the glory of the sun;— Where crystal columns send forth slender shafts And crossing arches; and fantastic aisles Wind from the sight in brightness, and are lost, Among the crowded pillars. Raise thine eye; Thou seest no cavern roof, no palace vault; There the blue sky and the white drifting cloud Look in. Again the wildered fancy dreams Of spouting fountains, frozen as ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... therefore, was confined to the garden—a pleasant spot, now that midsummer had come, and inhabited with winged and crawling creatures, with whom I claimed companionship, especially with the red, furry caterpillars, that have, alas, nearly passed away, and given place to a variegated, fantastic tribe, which gentleman farmers are ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... of the canyon, the train stopped, giving the passengers an opportunity to alight and enjoy the scenery. On all sides rose masses of rock, some fashioned in wondrous beauty, others in forms weird and fantastic; some gray and rugged, some tinted with intermingling shades of color, and others sparkling in the sunlight as though studded with gems innumerable. Here and there were piles of rock, crimson and green and golden, resembling the moss-grown, ivy-covered castles of the olden time. Farther on ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... things at Rome, and after the rise of Byzantium under Constantine at Byzantium likewise, was one altogether fantastic, abnormal, utterly unlike anything that we have seen, or can imagine to ourselves without great effort. I know no better method of illustrating it, than quoting, from Mr. Sheppard's excellent book, The Fall of Rome and the Rise of New Nationalities, a passage ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... had spread for the undisciplined and wandering multitude. No, not even struggling now. That Clifton had fought through solitary days against the wretched enervation which invited him, I had reason to know. But he had dared to tamper with the normal functions of mind and body, to try fantastic tricks with that mysterious agent through which the healthy will commands the organism. And when the mental disorder, mocked at and preached against in happier years, at length ran through Foxden, the morbid condition of his system was powerless to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... affectation of a shrewd Irish humorist and incorrigible spendthrift. Aunt Judy seems to him an incarnate joke. The likelihood that the joke will pall after a month or so, and is probably not apparent at any time to born Rossculleners, or that he himself unconsciously entertains Aunt Judy by his fantastic English personality and English mispronunciations, does not occur to him for a moment. In the end he is so charmed, and so loth to go to bed and perhaps dream of prosaic England, that he insists on going out to smoke a cigar and look ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... the way Peter began,—as all great men begin, at the foot of the ladder; for great as it was to be born a prince, it was greater to learn how to be a general. In this fantastic conduct we see three things: a remarkable sagacity in detecting the genius of Lefort, a masterly power over his own will, and a willingness to learn anything from anybody able and willing to teach him,—even as a rich ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... in religion alone that diversity grew. Simcoe had set up a generous land policy which brought in many "late Loyalists," American settlers whose devotion to monarchical principles would not always bear close inquiry. The fantastic experiment of planting in the heart of the woods of Upper Canada a group of French nobles driven out by the Revolution left no trace; but Mennonites, Quakers, and Scottish Highlanders contributed diverse and permanent ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... occurred to me as a fantastic possibility that I could conceal the body in the mummy-case. But as I turned over the idea, I began to see that it was really practicable; and not only practicable but easy; and not only easy but eminently safe. If once the mummy-case was in the Museum, I was ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... size and marking gives rise to the popular belief that they are seeds, and, fantastic though this conception is, it finds support in ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... dwelling-place more than twelve times. Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, Tanyrallt, Killarney, London (Half Moon Street and Pimlico), Bracknell, Edinburgh again, and Windsor, successively received this fantastic household. Each fresh house was the one where they were to abide for ever, and each formed the base of operations for some new scheme of comprehensive beneficence. Thus at Tremadoc, on the Welsh coast, Shelley ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Cowper alludes to the story of Aristaeus, when speaking of the ice-palace built by the Empress Anne of Russia. He has been describing the fantastic forms which ice assumes ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... night, making the moonlight still more mysterious and remote by contrast. The quartette of strings played for the ears of those who cared to listen and for the legs of those who chose to take chances on tripping their light fantastic toes over tree ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... on which little what's-her-name, the spoilt child, Peerybingle's wife, pays her regular visit to you—makes her fantastic Picnic here, an't it?" said Tackleton with a strong expression of distaste for the ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Colloquies. Especially in the Convivium religiosum Erasmus has elaborately pictured his dream, and it would be worth while to compare it, on the one hand with Theleme, and on the other with the fantastic design of a pleasure garden which Bernard Palissy describes. The little Dutch eighteenth-century country-seats and garden-houses in which the national spirit took great delight are the fulfilment of a purely Erasmian ideal. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... produced from Fantastic Universe January 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... tale concerning American losses in the Philippines was too fantastic to be told by the leaders and believed by the soldiery and the populace. The American soldiers were even said to be refusing to fight, and great prisons were being constructed in order properly to ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... excel, He'd wish his rivals all in hell. Her end when Emulation misses, She turns to Envy, stings and hisses: The strongest friendship yields to pride, Unless the odds be on our side. Vain human kind! fantastic race! Thy various follies who can trace? Self-love, ambition, envy, pride, Their empire in our hearts divide. Give others riches, power, and station, 'Tis all on me an usurpation. I have no title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Blue Beard, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, or any of the others in the same category that follow here. But I am none the less convinced that these old-time favourites, not yet unknown, though familiar to city children in the present generation mainly in their variegated and fantastic Christmas pantomime form, were in Scotland and England alike in the last century more essentially the books of childhood than any others known and read beyond the walls of the school-room. The travelling ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... there those seeming capable of carriage. Other men, prone on their faces, hold canteens of tepid, muddy water—but ah! a draught to the feverish lips which seems godlike nectar. Against the stout bodies of the trees, armless men, legless trunks, the maimed in every condition of death's fantastic sport, hold themselves limply erect, to gain succor or save some of the vital stream ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... exaggerate, as we were soon to know, for the scene was truly wonderful, and rightly named. All kinds of sea life began to pass before our eyes, like the fast changing figures of a kaleidoscope. Here the delicate sea moss lay like a green carpet, dotted here and there with a touch of purple, making fantastic figures; a place where the sea fairies might dance and hold their revels, as the peasant girls of Normandy dance ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... had been to look to the right and left for the means of avoiding this encounter, but there was no escape; and he was moreover in most fantastic motley, arrayed in one of the many suits provided for the occasion. It was in imitation of a parrot, brilliant grass-green velvet, touched here and there with scarlet, yellow, or blue. He had been only half disguised on the occasion of Fulford's visit to his wife, and he ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... had actually spotted the wretched creature, passionately and categorically denounces him as 'some grammatical pretender.' 'But,' replies Mr. White, 'that it is the work of any grammarian is more than doubtful. Grammarians, with all their faults, do not deform language with fantastic solecisms, or even seek to enrich it with new and startling verbal combinations. They rather resist novelty, and devote themselves to formulating that which use has already established.' In the ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... principal gods, and more than two hundred of less importance, each of whom, however, had his day of festival, which was duly observed. At the head of all stood the war-god, the terrible Huitzilopochtli, whose fantastic image was loaded with costly ornaments, and whose temples, in every city of the empire, were the most splendid and stately. The Aztecs also had a legend that there had once dwelt upon the earth the great Quetzalcoatl, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... need go borrow that fantastic glass Invented by Galileo the Florentine To view another spacious world i' th' moon, And look to find a constant ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... present conditions, the future long-lasting woe and misery, the barbarous neutrality violations has so made me blush for my mother's country as the "scrap of paper" incident; and it has been most bitter to listen to the extravagant, fantastic eulogies on England, with which we've been so favored without feeling honestly able to make any ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... catch me using my spy-ray—it's on an awfully narrow beam, you know, and uses almost no power at all—so I've been able to dope out quite a lot of stuff. I can open most of their locks, and I know how to run their small boats. This battle, fantastic as it is, is deadly stuff, and it isn't one-sided, by any means, either, so that every one of them, from Nerado down, seems to be on emergency duty. There are no guards watching us, or stationed where we want to go—our way out is open. And once out, this battle is giving us our ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... a spectacle of fantastic beauty. It was as if a huge, rounded piece of amber, mellow, golden, lay in the murk of the sea-floor. Not steel, hard and grim, but of transparent, shimmering stuff she was built, all coated a soft yellow by her lights, clearly visible ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... heavens seemed to draw down upon her and fantastic ghost creatures of her disordered fancy crept hungrily in. The warm air hung heavy and still between the flanking forest walls and she might have been lost in some unreal world but for the rough insistence of the roadbed through the ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Stern despot of a fleeting hour! Nor "make the angels weep" to know The fond "fantastic tricks" ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... lacy spires soared heavenward; inter-connected by long, slim cantilever bridges whose prodigious spans seemed out of all proportion to the gossamer delicacy of their construction. Buildings, spires, and bridges formed fantastic geometrical designs, at which Nadia ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... years belongs to the one or the other group; and yet both are fundamentally wrong. And while, of course, this mistake is one of theoretical interpretation, it evidently has its practical consequences. The fantastic position allowed to a subconscious mind easily gives to the doctrine a religious or even a mystical turn and the artificial separation between the energies of the mind and those of the body leads easily to a moral sermon. Whether ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... of many unhappy men, equally wilful though less gifted. There is a perennial charm about theatrical stories, and the history of these theatres must be illustrated by many a sketch of the loves and rivalries of actors, their fantastic tricks, their practical jokes, their gay progress to success or ruin. Changes of popular taste are marked by the change of character in the pieces that have been performed in various ages; and the history of the two theatres will include various illustrative sketches of dramatic ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... knowledge of New York was of streets crossing each other at right angles, numbered, prosaic, leaving no more play to the fancy than a sum in arithmetic. Here the ways were narrow, the buildings tall, the night effects fantastic. In the lamp light she could read signs bearing names as unpronounceable as the gibbering monkey-speech in Lafayette Street. Warehouses, offices, big wholesale premises, lairs of highly specialized businesses which only the few knew anything about, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... when a Grand Christmas was kept. At this particular Christmas, 1561, in the fourth year of Elizabeth, it was Lord Robert Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester, who was Constable Marshal, and with chivalrous gallantry, taking in fantastic style the name of Palaphilos, Knight of the Honourable Order of Pegasus, Pegasus being the armorial device of the Inner Temple, he contributed to the splendour of this part of the entertainment. After the seating ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... after pacifying the two irrational principles, he rouses up the third, which is reason, before he takes his rest, then, as you know, he attains truth most nearly, and is least likely to be the sport of fantastic and ...
— The Republic • Plato
... eating-room is particularly well fancied, being covered within, and so painted as to produce a good idea of a close arbor; the several windows, which are pierced through the sides, have such forms, as the fantastic turn of the bodies of the painted trees admit of; and the building is in a manner surrounded with natural trees; the room, when illuminated for the Prince's supper, has not only a very pleasing effect, but is a well executed deception, for the real trees falling ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... who could speak of his own knowledge concerning Nyssia, having never spoken of her, the Sardians were left to their own conjectures in her regard; and their conjectures, it must be confessed, were fantastic and altogether fabulous. The beauty of Nyssia, thanks to the veils which shrouded her, became a sort of myth, a canvas, a poem to which each one added ornamentation as ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... accustomed to it. It was adopted, doubtless, by the Egyptians for the purpose of coolness and cleanliness; but Amuba thought that he would rather spend any amount of pains in keeping his hair free from dust than go about in the fantastic and complicated wigs that the ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... resemble, in their general aspect, the well-known Giant's Causeway on the northern coast of Ireland, and the Isle of Staffa off the western coast of Scotland. The latter, which, around its whole sea-girt outline, presents ranges of basaltic columns, some of them disposed in curious fantastic groups, most nearly resembles the Sicilian pair. These differ from it chiefly in their having the columns piled in terraces, one above another. Staffa, however, can boast of a far more striking feature —the celebrated Cave of Fingal—its stately basaltic columns inspiring every ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... fire lighted up with its red gleam the stone on which they were sitting, making it look like an immense pedestal, surmounted by two bronze statues. Any traveller suddenly entering the valley would have recoiled in terror before this fantastic apparition; and if any wild beast had been prowling near us, our gigantic shadows would certainly have made it keep ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... Evil One; and the occupant was a dirty, grasping little man, cruel enough to have been made out of its scraps. It was a hard, remorseless little door, that took in a visitor at a gulp and closed after him with a bite. If the luckless caller happened to be a debtor, the fantastic barbarity of his reception was positively infernal. The jerk of grotesque ferocity that greeted him was like the "hoop la!" of a demonized gymnast. The straight-backed chair looked like a part of the stiff, angular man. The yellow-wash on the wall seemed to have ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... now again from seeing Charlie halt there for a certain time, and whistle on his fingers, and hurry on, fearing consequence. The tune that he whistled was strange to me, and lingered in my ears, as having something very new and striking, and fantastic in it. And I repeated it softly to myself, while I marked the position of the houses and the beauty of the village. For the stream, in lieu of any street, passing between the houses, and affording perpetual change, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... views of this sort, extending over a hundred or a thousand other points, were so universally accepted in his time that to dispute them was to be ranked with the unlettered or the fantastic. I asked him if it were so in economics. He said: Yes, in England, where there was a similar dogma of Free Trade: ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... own atoms, so that each beholder feels as if he, personally, had been the man. But this bird that hovers and alights beside me, peers up at me, takes its food, then looks again, attitudinizing, jerking, flirting its tail, with a thousand inquisitive and fantastic motions,—although I have power to grasp it in my hand and crush its life out, yet I cannot gain its secret thus, and the centre of its consciousness is really farther from mine than the remotest planetary orbit. "We do not steadily bear in mind," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... smiled in good earnest at his fantastic fashion of self-introduction, observing which the blue gentleman swayed me backwards and forwards several times with his right hand, and I felt that if I had been an oak of the forest he would have swayed ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... had replied: "Chances are I should have been if one had ever asked me." And warmed by appreciation, my aunt's amiability took root and flourished, though assuming, as all growth developed late is apt to, fantastic shape. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... observe numberless moves by a peripatetic Queen, reckless incursions by a Knight into the enemy's camp, and when the other pieces join in the fray, combination follows combination in bewildering sequence and fantastic chaos. Captures of pieces are planned, mating nets are woven, perhaps with two pieces, against a King's position, where five pieces are available for defence. This unsteadiness in the first childish stages of development makes it very ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... and stronger than any of my comrades; besides, I exercised over them, sternly enough, the authority I drew from my noble birth. In fact, the mixture of familiarity and etiquette in our intercourse was rather fantastic. Sometimes, when the excitement of sport or the fatigue of the day had greater powers over them than I, they used to have their own way; and I already knew how to yield at the right moment, as tyrants do, so as always to avoid the appearance ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... any idea of the kind was purely and simply balderdash. Exactly what bee Sydney had got in his bonnet, I could not guess. But I did know Paul. Only let me find myself face to face with the fantastic author of Mr Holt's weird tribulations, and I, a woman, single-handed, would do my best to show him that whoever played pranks with Paul ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Religion itself as ever. The attitude of his mind was still distinctly skeptical—the immutable pride of what he considered his own firmly rooted convictions was only very slightly shaken—and he now even viewed the prospect of his journey to the "field of Ardath" as a mere fantastic whim—a caprice of his own fancy which he chose to gratify just for the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... sheltered from changes in the weather and prevented from over-tiring themselves. Many of them come from poor cramped homes, and to spend the whole summer in the forest more at play than at work makes them most happy. I met Germans who did not approve of the Waldschule who considered it a fantastic extravagant experiment, too heavy for the rate-payers to bear. This is a side of the question that the rate-payers must settle for themselves; but there is no doubt about the results of the venture on the children sent to school in the forest. They ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... the burning pile as to set his clothes on fire. In very cold weather he would freeze one side while the other burned, unless he frequently performed that military feat, changing "his base of operations." If the wind blew, making his fantastic gyrations among the tents, so that you never knew whence he would come nor whither he would go, you were sure to ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... questions in which her happiness and destiny are involved. A senseless, though a false fondness, denies her a participation in all questions of the actual world around her. The novel writers therefore create a fictitious world, filled with fantastic and hollow characters, for her to range in. Awhile she believes she is an angel, till some unfortunate husband finds her to be a moth on his fortune, and a baleful shadow stretching across his pathway, without curiosity or interests in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the workmen have come upon some singular hollows or openings in the rock, caused by convulsions of the earth or earthquakes, or caverns through which torrents have flowed in former ages, and have left them for nature to ornament in the most beautiful and fantastic manner. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a manly air, Fatigues and dangers with their husbands share; They in fantastic sports have no delight, Partners with them in ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the celebrated Danish sculptor, was appointed carver of the royal statues of the piazza, but Gibbons executed the statue of Charles II. for the quadrangle. Bushnell, the mad sculptor of the fantastic statues on Temple Bar, carved statues for the Cornhill front, as we have before mentioned. The statue of Gresham in the arcade was by Cibber; George III., in the piazza, was sculptured by Wilton; George I. and II. were ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the children?' he repeated. 'What a fantastic idea! Do you think I should take all this trouble to come and request your assistance and spend hours of valuable time looking for a book that's ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... or small degree of freedom in comparison with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness attainable ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... beautiful new forms of cloth binding should have a word of praise, but the many more which we see of gaudy, fantastic, and meretricious bindings, and frightful combinations of colors must be ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... remember, however, that while erotic symbolism becomes fantastic and abnormal in its extreme manifestations, it is in its essence absolutely normal. It is only in the very grossest forms of sexual desire that it is altogether absent. Stendhal described the mental side ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... The foam of the cascade was white, reflecting the colors of the rainbow on its facets of liquid diamonds. The sky was a rose tint, with distant music and mild perfumes. Something trembled mysteriously, invisible, and at the same time smiling, in this fantastic atmosphere; a supernatural force which seemed to beautify it with its contact. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... written a good deal of discussion about it found its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr. Yeats, who wanted ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... down from the verandah]. Ah, ladies, every mortal has a small Private celestial empire in his heart. There bud such shoots in thousands, kept apart By Shyness's soon shatter'd Chinese Wall. But in her dim fantastic temple bower The little Chinese puppet sits and sighs, A dream of far-off wonders in her eyes— And in her hand a golden tulip flower. For her the tender firstling tendrils grew;— Rich crop or meagre, what is that to you? Instead of it we get an after crop They kick the tree for, dust and stalk ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... MIMOSA, the white stems of the EUCALYPTUS, and the deep grey shadows of early morning, still slumbering about the woods, are blended and contrasted in the most pleasing harmony. The forms in the soft landscape are equally fine, from the wild fantastic tufting of the Eucalyptus, and its delicate willow- like ever-drooping leaf, to the prostrate trunks of ancient trees, the mighty ruins of the vegetable world. Instead of autumnal tints, there is a perpetual blending of the richest hues of autumn with the most ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... with gaseous odours, which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... am amused when I read in the newspapers the silly and fantastic rumours which obtain credence, or at any rate currency, from day to day. One day we are told that it is the intention of the Government to seek a dissolution of Parliament before the Budget reaches the House of Lords—in ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... over three years have passed since that night in Florence, I suppose, I may confess to you that I loved you deeply. You yourself, however, stifled my love by your fantastic devotion and your insane passion. From the moment that you became my slave, I knew it would be impossible for you ever to become my husband. However, I found it interesting to have you realize your ideal in my own person, and, while ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... vision hangs the mind's house with a mysterious tapestry of figurative thoughts, a rich and fantastic imagery, a world where the elements are personified, where every tree has its dryad, and where the wings of the winds actually brush ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... the shadow of tears. Mary Ann, in her neat white cap—yes—and in her tan kid gloves. He rubbed his eyes. Was he really awake? Or—a thought still more dizzying—had he been dreaming? Had he fallen asleep and reinless fancy had played him the fantastic trick, from which, cramped and dazed, he had just awakened ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... often unintelligible to her, until Miss Merriman, silent-footed and efficient, translated them into action, as, before the wide eyes of the mountain child, there began to unfold the swift drama of modern surgical science at its pinnacle, amid that fantastic setting. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... was more deeply exhausted than he knew, or because he had fairly dropped asleep with his eyes open and his fantastic imaginings had slipped into a veritable dream, he felt himself suddenly become identified with one of the logs. It was one which was just drawing around to the fateful cleft. Would it win past once more? No; it was too far out! It felt the grasp of the outward ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and, as he was now in Protestant England, the empire of fashion was the only one in which the young Catholic could distinguish himself. Let us then charitably set down to the score of his political disabilities the fantastic dissipation and the frantic prodigality in which the liveliness of his imagination and the energy of his soul exhausted themselves. After three startling years he married the Lady Barbara Ratcliffe, whose previous divorce from ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... would not seek to cast ridicule—did not they all begin by taking for granted something no longer possible or receivable, build on this basis as if it were indubitably solid, and fail to see that their basis not being solid, all they built upon it was fantastic? ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... the great eater of Kent whom FULLER places among his worthies, and tells us that he did eat with ease thirty dozens of pigeons at one meal; at another, fourscore rabbits and eighteen yards of black pudding, London measure!—or a fastidious appetite, only to be excited by fantastic dainties, as the brains of peacocks or parrots, the tongues of thrushes or nightingales, or the ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... excelled his expectation. He had four rooms and a private garden enclosed by a thicket of bamboo. His bathroom walls were slabs of glossy actinolite, inlaid with cinnabar, jade, galena, pyrite and blue malachite, in representations of fantastic birds. His bedroom was a tent thirty feet high. Two walls were dark green fabric; a third was golden rust; the fourth opened upon ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... crimson flamed in our backs and turned the clear pools to fire. Far off down the vale the plains and the sea gleamed half in shadow. Somehow in the fragrance and colour and the delectable crooning of the stream, the fantastic and the dim seemed tangible and present, and high sentiment revelled for once in ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... and SULLIVAN model, dealing with our present-day economic crises. The thing became an idee fixe, as the French say, or, as we lamely put it in English, a fixed idea. There can be no doubt that he was engaged in the terrible task of fitting the current coal dispute to fantastic verse when a brain-cell unhappily buckled, and he was found destroying the works of his grand ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... continuing and delusively ending them by the broken, dented line of its batteries, its shattered roofs, its half-crumbled towers. Now the rocks and the castle are covered with a smoky shroud of twilight. They seem airy, devoid of any weight, and almost as fantastic as those monstrous heaps of structures which are piled up and which are falling so noiselessly in the sky. But while the others are falling this one stands, and a live light reddens against the deep blue—and it is just ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... of mist, which after some time resolved itself into the well-known form of the Rock of Lisbon. The wind being light and variable, we drew very gradually inshore, till the mist suddenly lifting, as if at the command of a magician, disclosed to us the splendid and fantastic scenery of those rocky heights, as they rose proudly from the glittering ocean, which was dotted with numerous sails of fishing-boats and coasters, and here and there the canvas of some loftier merchantmen, making for the mouth of the Tagus. On the lower land, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... then roll away, as Mr Kohl says, "like a huge giant in his seven-league boots." Thousands of them are annually blown into the Black Sea, and here, once in contact with water, in an instant lose the fantastic grace belonging to their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... impossible. Nor will the historian of this epoch shrink from his task, even though the transactions he has to record seem to savor of legend rather than of simple fact. No fiction contains matter more fantastic, no myth or allegory is more adapted to express a truth in figures of the fancy, than the authentic well-attested annals of this period of seventy years, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... not been agitated, and there was nothing to give uneasiness to masters or false hopes to the slaves. These latter, shared largely in the festivities of the white people, and were free for many years to come to conduct their religious services in any way that seemed best to their wild and fantastic notions. ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... by the wind in wild confusion about the maimed and storm-beaten tree-trunks seemed to assume fantastic shapes and expressions as we approached from different directions, or viewed them under light and shadow of changing weather. Gnarled and twisted, they became elves and goblins, and the huge piles of storm wreckage were transformed ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile—or, what is worse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterwards—when the external forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial, fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn't a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... however, by this time arrived at a strong attraction toward the organs of generation and all aspects of puberty, and my imagination spent Itself in a fantastic worship of every sign of masculinity. My enjoyment now was to imagine myself forced to undergo physical humiliation and submission to the caprice of my male captors, and the central fact became the discharge of urine from my lover ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... before indistinct now clearly opened to the view. With a feeling of awe at being thus unexpectedly admitted, as it were, into the secrets of that desert place, Frances gazed intently, until, among the scattered trees and fantastic rocks, something like a rude structure was seen. It was low, and so obscured by the color of its materials, that but for its roof, and the glittering of a window, it must have escaped her notice. While yet lost in the astonishment created by discovering a habitation in such a spot, on ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... I said at last night's 'light fantastic,' she has sent you to me!" he cried excitedly, as he opened the door on ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... that they transformed themselves into masters, the Buddhist religious constructed a complicated theology, full of fantastic figures. They say there is an infinite number of worlds. If one surrounded with a wall a space capable of holding 100,000 times ten millions of those worlds, if this wall were raised to heaven, and if the whole space were filled ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... on Transylvania, says that even the aged find it impossible to resist the dance when a gypsy band invites them to it. Their prelude is slow and sonorous, the music quickens, there is a rush of tones, the fantastic melody hastens on at a head-long pace—every one, old and young, is under ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
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