"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... 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
... fantastic that this noble gentleman, this very type of the perfect soldier, with the brown face of a picaroon and an athletic valour of body, should become a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... the girl's fantastic vagaries; her sound common sense rallied to her aid. "They are the people who remember; sane folk forget. Work is the only cure ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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 |
