"Fantastical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (Don), a pompous, fantastical Spaniard, a military braggart in a state of peace, as Parolles (3 syl.) was in war. Boastful but poor; a coiner of words, but very ignorant; solemnly grave, but ridiculously awkward; majestical in gait, but of very low propensities.—Shakespeare, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Algernon Charles Swinburne. The former of these two books was calculated to induce and foster a more general knowledge and appreciation of Blake's poetry. We can hardly say as much for Mr. Swinburne's essay. The exaggerated and fantastical epithets of praise, the involved and overloaded method of criticism, would have the effect upon most readers of creating a distaste in advance for the writings so heralded. The "Prefatory Memoir" prefixed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti to the most recent edition of the poems is of a different character, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... his most famous work, 'The Shoemaker's Holiday, or the Gentle Craft', categorised by modern critics as citizen comedy, it reflects his concerns with the daily lives of ordinary Londoners. This play exemplifies his vivid use of language and the intermingling of everyday subjects with the fantastical, embodied in this case by the rise of a craftsman to Mayor and the involvement of an unnamed but idealised king ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... species in itself disproved by the best physiological reasonings, but the additional assumptions which are requisite to enable its advocates to apply it to the explanation of the geological and other phenomena of the earth, are altogether gratuitous and fantastical[27]. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... a Parisian, with all her intoxicating charms, that alluring, if vicious attraction that flows from the eyes of even modest girls. Some words spoken by Monsieur de Rosas reaching Vaudrey's ears—a description of the somewhat fantastical preparation of poison by the Indians, explained by the duke by way of parenthesis—suggested to Sulpice that the most subtle, the gentlest and most certainly deadly poison was, after all, the filtering of a woman's glance through the very flesh of a man, and he thirsted for that longed-for ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... where much is left to her discretion or indiscretion, without being confined by the accompaniment, but in which she can indulge in ad libitum passages with a luxuriance and redundance no other singer ever possessed, or if possessing ever practiced, and which she carries to a fantastical excess." ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... temporary Elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sat brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into a thousand fantastical apparitions? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Terence spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomy words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the hardness of life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... an Art movement has sprung up called AEstheticism, which has been defined as the "Science of the Beautiful and the Philosophy of the Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... upon the roof, the sickly flame of a candle partially fell upon the human figures before alluded to, throwing them into darkest relief, and casting their opaque and fantastical shadows along the ground. An old coffin upon a bier, we have said, served the mysterious twain for a seat. Between them stood a bottle and a glass, evidences that whatever might be the ulterior object of their stealthy communion, the immediate comfort ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... yards the shadow of the gigantic Scuir lay dark beneath us along the descending slope. All the rest of the island, spread out at our feet as in a map, was basking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantastical dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around each,—specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Kings and Princes of Christendom, (although all that while he was alone in his own chamber by himself,) where he entered upon, debated, and resolved all the states' affairs of Christendom; and he verily believed that he was the wisest man of them all; and so he well might be, of the company." The fantastical imagination of this Triumpho furnishes a good illustration of the reality of companionship which one who possesses Plutarch may have in his own chamber with the greatest and most interesting men of ancient times. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... made on earth, and cracked hearts can be mended like any other cracked ware. 'A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste,' with a woman's name—and it has power to turn the sunshine black! Let him play the man and put her out ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... the compluvium was edged with a row of highly ornamented tiles, called antefixes, on which a mask or some other figure was moulded. At the corners there were usually spouts, in the form of lions' or dogs' heads, or any fantastical device which the architect might fancy, which carried the rain-water clear out into the impluvium, whence it passed into cisterns; from which again it was drawn for household purposes. For drinking, river-water, and still ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... introduces one in the Tempest's most fanciful scene.[3] Granger, who had not much time to study the manners of the age whose personages he was so well acquainted with, in a note on Milton's Masque, said that "these compositions were trifling and perplexed allegories, the persons of which are fantastical to the last degree. Ben Jonson, in his 'Masque of Christmas,' has introduced 'Minced Pie,' and 'Baby Cake,' who act their parts in the drama.[4] But the most wretched performances of this kind could please by the help of music, machinery, and dancing." Granger blunders, describing by two ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... windmills all over the country make it look as if flocks of huge sea birds were just settling upon it. Everywhere one sees the funniest trees, bobbed into fantastical shapes, with their trunks painted a dazzling white, yellow, or red. Horses are often yoked three abreast. Men, women, and children go clattering about in wooden shoes with loose heels; peasant girls who cannot get beaux for love, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... should have entrusted my estate to an ignorant bailiff, and sought to maintain an absentee guardianship over the affairs of serfs whom I have never met, and of whose capabilities and characters I am yet ignorant! To think that I should have deemed true estate-management inferior to a documentary, fantastical management of provinces which lie a thousand versts away, and which my foot has never trod, and where I could never have effected ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and smiled. "Young enthusiasts like yourself are great at forming theories which well-seasoned men like myself must regard as fantastical. However," he went on, "there is no doubt that Miss Page was a witness to, even if she has not profited by, the murder we have been considering. But, with this palpable proof of the Zabels' direct connection with the affair, I would not recommend ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... I am faine to dine and sup with water and bran: I dare not for my head fill my belly. One fruitful Meale would set mee too't: but they say the Duke will be heere to Morrow. By my troth Isabell I lou'd thy brother, if the olde fantastical Duke of darke corners had bene at ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the world is full of fantastical fools," answered Constance, lightly. "We be all nigh fools, sweeting—big fools and little ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... the difficult journey of 108,000 li to the Western Heaven. This promise, on the whole, he fulfilled in the service of Hsuean Chuang during the fourteen years of the long journey. Now faithful, now restive and undisciplined, he was always the one to triumph in the end over the eighty-one fantastical tribulations which beset them ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... a fantastical half-year, Surajah Dowlah revelled in the crazy dream of his own omnipotence. Then came retribution, swift, successive, comprehensive. Clive was upon him—Clive the unconquerable, sacking his towns, putting his garrisons to the sword, recapturing those places from which Surajah ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... objects of ambition continue to operate with full force on the mind, and are pursued with the greatest ardor, to take a resolution so singular and unexpected. But, while many authors have imputed it to motives so frivolous and fantastical as can hardly be supposed to influence any reasonable mind; while others have imagined it to be the result of some profound scheme of policy, historians more intelligent and better informed neither ascribe it to caprice, nor search for mysterious secrets of state, where ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... on. A light wind had risen and the fog was now breaking rapidly. As it gave way, the moonlight poured into the breaches that the wind made; the vast black-and-silver spectacle, the Falls, the gorge, the town opposite, the bridge, the clouds, began to appear in fragments, grandiose and fantastical. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of these sainted personages. They had gained, by visiting the capitals of all Europe, only a due acquaintance with the follies of each; and the only difference that could be observed in their conduct on their return was, that their affectation was rather more fantastical, and therefore ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... will not sourly your brows bend At such a fantastical conceit as this, But can be content to hear and see the end, I woll go show the Players what your pleasure is; Which to wait upon you I know be ready ere this. I woll go send them hither into your presence, Desiring that they may have ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... seen those who reproached them do the very same thing the instant their own vanity or prejudices are concerned. The most mechanical people, once thrown off their balance, are the most extravagant and fantastical. What passion is there so unmeaning and irrational as avarice itself? The Dutch went mad for tulips, and —— —— for love! To return to what was said a little way back, a question might be started, whether as thought relates to the whole ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... in a jumbled picture the devotion, the fury, the zeal, the terror of Antonio-Pericles—a mixture of demoniacal energy and ludicrous trepidation. She imagined his long figure, fantastical as a shadow, off at huge strides, and back, with eyes sliding swiftly to the temples, and his odd serpent's head raised to peer across the plains and occasionally to exclaim to the reasonable heavens in anger at men and loathing of her. She laughed ungovernably. Luigi exclaimed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... saw clearly, that of all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed through the mind of man, none had ever been more extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law, which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity, reverence and right, reverend eminence, and holiness around the idea of a priest, as no mortal could deserve and as always ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... have invented judges and courts of law to secure their goods, and the guillotine—that candle in which so many lie in silk, under silken coverlets, there is remorse, and grinding of teeth beneath a smile, and those fantastical lions' jaws are gaping to set their fangs ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterflies—in short, send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... my ears with a distinctness and purity of sound which made them seem like a melody "sweetly played in tune." The words he read related to life and death, and such solemn matters; but to my mind his theology seemed somewhat fantastical, although it is right to confess that I am no judge of such matters. There was also a great deal about the house, which did not enlighten me much, being too rhapsodical, and when he spoke about our conduct and aims in life, and things of that kind, I understood him little better. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... home, for her ladyship was in one of her jocose humours when I went to speak to her on the subject; and it was so far from my power to make a proper impression on her of the enormity that had been committed, that she made me laugh, in spite of my reason, at the fantastical drollery of her malicious prank ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... with her! ha! ha! no, not as you understand it! who take it to be that fantastical passion that may be inspired by the first sight of a pretty face. No! I am not in love with her, unless I could be in love with myself. For Lina was my other self. Oh, you who can talk so glibly of being 'in love,' little know that strength of attachment ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... myself on this unaccountable humour in womankind, of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial; and on the numberless evils that befall the sex from this light fantastical disposition. I myself remember a young lady that was very warmly solicited by a couple of importunate rivals, who, for several months together, did all they could to recommend themselves, by complacency of behaviour and agreeableness of conversation. At length, ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... chose from God one virgin gift above All gifts, and fleeth from the lips of love? Ah, deck not out thine own heart's evil springs By making spirits of heaven as brutish things And cruel. The wise may hear thee, and guess all! And Cypris must take ship-fantastical! Sail with my son and enter at the gate To seek thee! Had she willed it, she had sate At peace in heaven, and wafted thee, and all Amyclae with thee, under Ilion's wall. My son was passing beautiful, beyond ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... than lie idle, does after that manner forge, and create one frivolous and false; as we see that the soul in the exercise of its passions inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical subject, even contrary to its own relief, than not to have something to work upon. And after this manner brute beasts direct their fury to fall upon the stone or weapon that has hurt them, and with their teeth even execute their revenge upon themselves, for the injury they ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... narrowed and embanked, and two tiny rustic bridges, of fantastical wood-work, spanned its dark water. The dreary pollard- willows had vanished, and evergreens occupied their places. The black rushes had been exchanged for flowers. A trim little garden appeared where all had once ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... semi-circle of its dark, green grove. The luminous grasses, and the merry sun In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide, Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide, Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon. All these fair sounds and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... cried excitedly, "that stout young gentleman with the black face and eyebrows, and the blacker heart, I may say,—the one dressed in the fantastical costume called by a French name,—is Mr. Charles Fox. He has been sent by the devil himself, I believe, to ruin this country. 'Ods, sir, that devil Lord Holland begot him. He is but one and twenty, but his detestable arts have saved North's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... they have something to commend them to the fancy. They are among the last traces, in these matter-of-fact days, of the motley population of former times; and are whimsically associated in my mind with fairies and witches, Robin Goodfellow, Robin Hood, and the other fantastical personages of poetry. ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... not to be disregarded. It is regarded of especial moment that the mirror, taken as a whole, be symmetrical, and especially that the mammary mirror be so; yet it often occurs that it is far otherwise, its outline being often very fantastical—exhibiting deep bays, so to speak, and islands of downward growing hair. There are also certain "ovals," never very large, yet distinct, which do not detract from the estimated value of an escutcheon; notably those occurring ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... seeing he has only drawn the human mind from the contemplation of visible nature, to plunge it into the unfathomable depths of invisibility—of intangibility—of suppositious speculation, where it can find little other food except chimeras or conjecture. Such a philosophy is rather fantastical, yet it would seem we are required to subscribe to its positions without being allowed to compare them with reason, to examine them through the medium of experience, to try the gold by the action of fire: thus we have in abundance the terms spirits, incorporeal substances, invisible ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... delight and admiration in her up-turned eyes. No contrast could be imagined greater than that between the stately gentleman clothed in black, with his broad intellectual brow, spectacled eyes, and grave, solemn manner; and light, fantastical, frivolous Miss Folly, clad in the most absurd of styles, but looking as though she thought herself ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... to incur such risk; they were hidden where he knew no one could possibly steal them away from him. Then the little phial which he carried in the receptacle with his Bible was uncorked and the crimson paint applied with his forefinger to his face. The ornamentation was as fantastical as the imagination of the native American could ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... Webster condemns that evil custom of aping life and movement on the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure repose had been exhausted. "Why," asks the Duchess of Malfi, "do we grow fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" "Most ambitiously," answers Bosola; "princes' images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache): ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... watering-places; and, perhaps, if Andrew can manage it with my father, we may even take a trip to Paris. The Doctor himself is not averse to it, but my mother is afraid that a new war may break out, and that we may be detained prisoners. This fantastical fear we shall, however, try to overcome. But I am interrupted. Sir Marmaduke is in the drawing-room, and I ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... Truly a most fantastical history, and one which leaves us in some doubt whether it be a genuine legend of Heidelberg, or one of M. Dumas's dreams in the diligence after dining upon pig and cherry sauce. At any rate, if not true it is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... allusions relating to historical or mythological persons of the ancient world; some being drawn from Plutarch, Pliny, Ovid, Virgil, and other sources, but many springing simply from Lyly's exuberant fancy. In the second place Euphues is a collection of similes borrowed from "a fantastical natural history, a sort of mythology of plants and stones, to which the most extraordinary virtues are attributed[22]." "I have heard," says Camilla, bashfully excusing herself for taking up the cudgels of argument with the learned Surius, "that the Tortoise in ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... entered the lists and vanquished gallant troubadours with the concord of their sweet measures. Slowly, yet with resistless strength, a new social world was rising upon the splendid ruins of the old. Its principles were just, if their garb was fantastical. It began with that almost superstitious reverence for woman, which had borrowed its religion from the Teuton, its romance from the Minnesinger and the Trouveur: it will end in the honesty and freedom of a world mature for ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, Sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged behind. I was not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... him, Lest I fall unawares before the people, Waking laughter in indolent reviewers. Should I flounder awhile without a tumble Thro' this metrification of Catullus, They should speak to me not without a welcome, All that chorus of indolent reviewers. Hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble, So fantastical is the dainty metre. Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers. O blatant Magazines, regard me rather— Since I blush to belaud myself a moment— As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost Horticultural art, or half coquette-like Maiden, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... our miserable sleeping-place before sunrise. The road passed through a narrow sandy plain, lying between the sea and the interior salt lagoons. The number of beautiful fishing birds, such as egrets and cranes, and the succulent plants assuming most fantastical forms, gave to the scene an interest which it would not otherwise have possessed. The few stunted trees were loaded with parasitical plants, among which the beauty and delicious fragrance of some of the orchideae were most to be admired. As the sun rose, the day became extremely ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... great deal more to one who has been nourishing a youth sublime with the curious facts of Science and the thousand-and-one items of general information necessary to any person who, like the fantastical duke of dark corners, above all other strifes contends especially to know himself; and that physically, as well as morally. To him it is a nasty scrunch of the two hundred and twenty-six bones forming his own admirably designed ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... to have been John Eaton, who was a minister and preacher at Wickham Market, in which situation and capacity Smith succeeded him. This Smith published many other tracts and sermons, chiefly fanatical and with fantastical titles. One is described by Wood, and is called 'Directions for Seekers and Expectants, or a Guide for Weak Christians in these discontented times.' 'I shall not give an extract from these sermons,' writes Beloe, who is clearly, like ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... coming toward them with a callow youth near her own age. Her dress was some soft, pale blue material that was neither gaudy nor fantastical. But it was far from modest. Lane had to echo Blair's eulogy of this young specimen of the new America. She simply verified and stabilized the assertion that physically the newer generations of girls were markedly more beautiful than those of ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... these pictures, they could only come to the conclusion that they were strange fantastical conceits, not worthy to be ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... literature we meet with men who seem endowed with an obliquity of understanding, yet active and busy spirits; but, as activity is only valuable in proportion to the capacity that puts all in motion, so, when ill directed, the intellect, warped by nature, only becomes more crooked and fantastical. A kind of frantic enthusiasm breaks forth in their actions and their language, and often they seem ferocious when they are only foolish. We may thus account for the manners and style of Dennis, pushed ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... experience was bounded by the suburbs of Barlingford, be otherwise than delighted by the glare and glitter of foreign cities? Georgy was childishly enraptured with everything she saw, from the sham diamonds and rubies of the Palais Royal, to the fantastical bonbons of Berlin. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... correct. But with all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are incomparably below those of any one of the great Russian masters Tolstoi, Turgenev, or Goncharov. Pages of consummate realism are interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy only of the most incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling interest are interrupted in order to introduce a score of pages of the most unnatural theoretical discussions. Besides, the author is in such ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... was to receive the Toison d'Or. The Duc de Liria was to be his, godfather, and it was he who conducted us to the place of ceremony. His carriage was drawn by four perfectly beautiful Neapolitan horses; but these animals, which are often extremely fantastical, would not stir. The whip was vigorously applied; results—rearing, snorting, fury, the carriage in danger of being upset. Time was flying; I begged the Duc de Liria, therefore, to get into my carriage, so that we might not keep the King ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... had the same thoughts yesterday that I have today, and I act today contrary to what I resolved yesterday; I must convey myself out of the sight of the Duke de Nemours; I must go into the country, however fantastical my journey may appear; and if Monseur de Cleves is obstinately bent to hinder me, or to know my reasons for it, perhaps I shall do him and myself the injury to acquaint him with them." She continued in this resolution, and spent the whole evening at home, without ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... imperious, but in that she was her father's daughter, not saved by her wonderful intelligence from being fantastical. There must inevitably have been an element of broad farce in the veriest tragedy into which she might have been brought at that time, an element which was rendered all the more conspicuous by her own inability ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... last twenty-nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and Avisa's obduracy. To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose (canto xliv.) It is there stated that Willobie, 'being suddenly affected with the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while in secret grief. At length, not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W. S., who not long before ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... through the horizontal lines; yet the general impression at a distance and at first sight, is essentially different from that of any of the towns of the middle ages. The outlines are far from being so sharp, so angular, so irregular, so fantastical; a certain softness, a peculiar repose, reigns in those broader, terrace-like rising masses. Only in the creations of Claude Lorraine or Poussin could we expect to find a spot to compare with the prevailing character of this picture, especially when lit up by a favourable light. The principal ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... being captivated by a kind of savage philosophy, women by a thoughtless gallantry. Where these precautions are not observed, the man often degenerates into a Cynick, the woman into a coquette; the man grows sullen and morose, the woman impertinent and fantastical. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... in the schools) even on that side, on which it did not settle. This image, or faint motion, we persuade ourselves, could, at that time, have been compleated into the thing itself; because, should that be denied, we find, upon a second trial, that, at present, it can. We consider not, that the fantastical desire of shewing liberty, is here the motive of our actions. And it seems certain, that, however we may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves, a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even where ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... entered the cave, he found himself vis-a-vis with fifty masks, of all shapes, forms and appearances; some horrible, some odd, some commonplace, and some fantastical, and altogether, a medley of strange, undecipherable, yet impressive combination of devices, well calculated to excite a feeling of awe, and, with the timid, of terror, in the mind of the beholder. Into this singular assemblage Hurd was ushered, a wilderness of confused images ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery or the black race, and this is the whole of it: anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastical arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution in the States ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... brick and tile is very pleasant to the wayfarer, whilst throughout the other seasons the rich little gardens are all gay with old-fashioned flowers. The church is admirably situated, and has a tall and graceful spire with grotesque ornaments at the base, which from a distance bear a fantastical resemblance to roosting birds. In 1679 the folk of Edwinstowe humbly petitioned for permission to take two hundred oaks for the repair of the building, and one reads that, seven years before, the steeple had been beaten down by thunder, and the old body shaken, and in a very ruinous condition; ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... enterprise. With this it affiliates all the sundry activities of life, thus bringing both action and thought under the form of service of the ideal. At the same time it offers a supreme object for the passions, which are otherwise divided against {254} themselves, or vented upon unworthy and fantastical objects. Through being thus economized and guided, these moving energies may be brought to support moral endeavor and bear it with them ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... in a dense atmosphere, which became an obstacle to the disclosure of truth as the clouds are to the rays of the sun, his image only appeared in fantastical outlines borrowed from "Conrad the Corsair," or "Childe Harold," or "Lara," or "Manfred," or indeed "Don Juan." Analogies were sought which do not exist, and to the poet were attributed the sentiments, and even the acts, of these imaginary beings, albeit without any of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... of the manner in which their contents were crowded into Cotton Mather's brain. And in the middle of the room stood table, on which, besides printed volumes, were strewn manuscript sermons, historical tracts, and political pamphlets, all written in such a queer, blind, crabbed, fantastical hand, that a writing-master would have gone raving mad at the sight of them. By this table stood Grandfather's chair, which seemed to have contracted an air of deep erudition, as if its cushion were stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and other ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pompous show, The peaceful seasons glide serenely by, Fulfill their missions, and as calmly die, As waves on quiet shores when winds are low. Fields, lonely paths, the one small glimmering rill That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye, Under moist bay leaves, clouds fantastical That float and change at the light breeze's will,— To me, thus lapped in sylvan luxury, Are more than death of kings, or ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... to the little Trianon is both pleasing and moral; no doubt the reader has seen the pretty, fantastical gardens which environ it; the groves and temples; the streams and caverns (whither, as the guide tells you, during the heat of summer, it was the custom of Marie Antoinette to retire with her favorite, Madame ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... trained with so great subteltie, that she was not able to escape without daunger of her life and honour, whereof she declared herselfe to be so carefull. Alas, what blindnes is that, which captiuateth the wittes and spirite of him, that feedeth himselfe of nothing els, but vpon the rage of fantastical despite and vpon the furie of dispaire. Do wee not see, that after Reason giueth place to desired reuenge of wrong thought to be receiued, man dispoyleth himselfe of that, which appertayneth to the kinde of man, to put on the fierce nature of the moste brute ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... The whole region was bristling with spikes and circles. Toward the 60@ Philolaus stood predominant at a height of 5,550 feet with its elliptical crater, and seen from this distance, the disc showed a very fantastical appearance. Landscapes were presented to the eye under very different conditions from those on the earth, and also ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... The great Eolis papillosa, of a delicate French grey; Eolis pellucida (?) (Plate X. fig. 4), in which each papilla on the back is beautifully coloured with a streak of pink, and tipped with iron blue; and a most fantastical yellow little creature, so covered with plumes and tentacles that the body is invisible, which I believe to be the Idalia aspersa of Alder ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... they lied," that he was not hard as nails, but from that day onwards was a very poor creature indeed. The brass and steel wires in his system had degenerated into just those poor little soft grey threads which others have and are subject to many fantastical ailments. He fell into a nervous condition and started and blanched and was confused when suddenly hailed or spoken to even by some harmless old woman. He trembled at a shadow, and the very sight and sound of a wasp in the breakfast room ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... suggested is, that the highest, holiest life needs specific acts and times of prayer. A certain fantastical and overstrained spirituality is not rare, which professes to have got beyond the need of such beggarly elements. Some tinge of this colours the habits of many people who are scarcely conscious of its presence, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the portrait might stand for the speaker himself, and thus establishes a dual-identity. Thus, Armado, describing Holofernes, says, "That's all one, my fair, sweet, honey monarch; for I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical,—too, too vain,—too, too vain; but we will put it, as they say, to fortuna della guerra";—whilst Holofernes, not behind his counterpart in self-esteem, sees in the other the defects which he cannot detect in himself. "Novi hominem tanquam te" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... considerations are worldly. There is, there must be, something better in this world than power and wealth and rank; and surely there must be felicity more rapturous even than securing the happiness of a parent. Ah! dreams in which I have so oft and so fondly indulged, are ye, indeed, after all, but fantastical and airy visions? Is love indeed a delusion, or am I marked out from men alone to be exempted from its delicious bondage? It must be a delusion. All laugh at it, all jest about it, all agree in stigmatising it the vanity ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... quantity in all the problems that absorbed him. His idealism was not a thing of the air, but a flowering from old and vigorous roots. His politics was a kind of religion, and it did not prove upon analysis to be either so fantastical or so fanatical as she had believed at first. As the days shortened, he would prolong their walk until the shops and factories discharged their employees upon the streets. The fine thing about the people was, he said, the fact that they were content to go ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the pearly nacre of the mackerel, the ruddy gold of the mullets, the plated skins of the herrings, and massive silver of the salmon. It was as though the jewel-cases of some sea-nymph had been emptied there—a mass of fantastical, undreamt-of ornaments, a streaming and heaping of necklaces, monstrous bracelets, gigantic brooches, barbaric gems and jewels, the use of which could not be divined. On the backs of the skate and the dog-fish you saw, as it were, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... beauty of the night she found distraction, for it had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard, while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... nature is truly fine in the lands of the South, it is really sublime. I do not know whether you have ever observed the extreme fairness of Italians when they are fair. It is exquisite, especially under an artificial light. When I read the fantastical portrait of Colonel Oudet sketched by Charles Nodier, I found my own sensations in every one of his elegant phrases. Italian, then, as were most of the officers of his regiment, which had, in fact, been borrowed by the Emperor from Eugene's army, my colonel was a tall man, at least ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... academies prevailed, and pastoral poetry, in which the god of Love was represented wearing an immense allonge peruke, and the coquettish immorality of the courts was glowingly described in Arcadian scenes of delight, was cultivated. The fantastical romances of Spain were also imitated, and the invention of novel terms was deemed the highest triumph of the poet. Every third word was either Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, or English. Francisci of Luebeck, who described all the discoveries of the New World in a colloquial ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... every anxious look and word of their parents, by every family-arrangement, by the impressment of every chance guest into the service, that their parents consider their education as the one important matter in creation, are apt to grow up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious. The stars cannot stop in their courses, even for our personal improvement, and the sooner children learn this, the better. The great art is to organize a home which shall move on with a strong, wide, generous movement, where the little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... into three classes. These vestals were, so to speak, piled one on the other in three different halls, where the bridegrooms chose their brides as a butcher chooses his sheep out of the midst of the flock. There was wherewith to content the most fantastical in these three harems; for here were to be seen the tall and the short, the blond and the brown, the plump and the lean; everybody, in short, found a shoe to fit him. At the end of a fortnight not one was left. I am told that the plumpest were taken first, because it was ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... and it came upon Belding with dull insistency that whatever attraction he had hoped to have for the girl had been merged in the fact that, for the present at any rate, he was nothing more than a means of satisfying her sudden and, to him, fantastical interest in the man under whose dominant bidding the color of so many lives was being modified ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... of the Poles seems to have given occasion to the renewal, by the parliament of 1562, of a law against "fond and fantastical prophecies," promulgated with design to disturb the queen's government; by which act also it was especially forbidden to make prognostications on or by occasion of any coats of arms, crests, or badges; a clause added, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... began to seize on those young ill-treated Indians; and from thence also it came to pass, that many of them, not able to endure so violent a government, leapt over the walls by night, and fled from out the college. Gomez, who could not bear the least contradiction, upon this became more assuming and fantastical; so that one day he turned out all the remaining scholars of the seminary, as if they had been incapable of discipline, and, receiving into their places seven and-twenty Portuguese, who desired to be of the Society, without having any tincture of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... They were painted green and red, and fastened with clamps and bolts of hammered copper that looked enormously old. Against them were nailed two pictures of winged horses with human heads, and two more pictures representing a fantastical town of Eastern houses and minarets in gold on a red background. Balls of purple and yellow glass, and crystal chandeliers, hung from the high ceiling above these doors, with many ancient lamps; and two tattered and dusty banners of pale pink and white silk, fringed ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... poet, born in London; bred for the English Church; went to Paris, where he became a Roman Catholic; fell into pecuniary difficulties, but was befriended by Cowley and recommended to a post; was an imitator of George Herbert, and his poems were of the same class, but more fantastical; his principal poems were "Steps to the Temple" and the "Delights of the Muses"; both Milton and Pope are ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this enchanter, and the book of his spells is the penal code? Break the wand of this political Prospero, and take from him the volume of his magic, and he will evoke the spirits which are now under his control no longer. But why should I have recourse to illustration, which may be accounted fantastical, in order to elucidate what is in itself so plain and obvious? Protestant gentlemen, who do me the honour to listen to me, look, I pray you, a little dispassionately at the real causes of the events which have taken place ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... stared her in the face. The dress was so airy, so fantastical, and so extensive, that to get out in her new clothes by the rift which had admitted her in her old ones was an impossibility. She heard the Baron's steps crackling over ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... the Persians (1) to speak the truth; (2) to learn to ride and to use the bow and arrow. There is implied in the first command a recognition of actuality, the negation of all dreamy absorption, of all fantastical indetermination; and in this light the Persian, in distinction from the Hindoo, appears to be considerate and reasonable. In the second command is implied warlike practice, but not that of the nomadic tribes. The Persian fights on horseback, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it—the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail. Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... extraordinary as they may be, must have had some origin; since even the most abstract and fantastical ideas have some physical model, it may be useful to recur to this origin, and discover this model—in a word, to find out from what source the human understanding has drawn these ideas, at present so obscure, of God, of the soul, of all immaterial beings, which make the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Flora Macdonald. He must have had an extraordinary notion of her energy when he first proposed to her, whilst they met in Clanranald's house, to take the Prince with her to Skye, dressed up in woman's clothes. This proposition appeared to Flora so "fantastical and dangerous," that she positively declined it. "A Macdonald, a Macleod, a Campbell militia were," she observed, "in South Uist in quest of the Prince: a guard was posted at every ferry; every boat was seized; ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... upon this romance is not easy. We read a dozen or two of pages, and say, 'This is very fantastical humours.' We read further, and are tempted to follow Sir Hugh to the extent of declaring, 'This is lunatics.' One may venture the not profound remark that it takes all sorts of books to make a literature. Euphues is one of the books that would prompt to that very remark. For ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... religious-philosophical fraternity, which is exactly analogous to the Indic orders of the time; and finally the mystic speculation, which is peculiar to the Pythagorean school, and bears a striking resemblance to the fantastical notions affected by the authors of the Br[a]hmana.[30] Greek legend is full of the Samian's travels to Egypt, Chaldaea, Phoenicia, and India. The fire beneath this smoke is hidden. One knows not how much to believe of such tales. But they only strengthen the ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... indeed be ingenious who can make out the words her hrilir from any characters in the inscription in question, which, whatever else it may be, is certainly not mortuary. And even should the reverend gentleman succeed in persuading some fantastical wits of the soundness of his views, I do not see what useful end he will have gained. For if the English Courts of Law hold the testimony of grave-stones from the burial-grounds of Protestant dissenters to be questionable, even where it is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... or uncleanly; in the latter case his anger was unbounded, and his uneasiness pre-eminent; he was, however, sometimes vehemently delighted by exquisite and delicate sallies, particularly with a fanciful, and perhaps somewhat fantastical facetiousness—possibly the more because he was ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... retracted them, and that they were only extracted from such persons by the tortures employed by the Spanish officials; that the supposed introduction of arms into the Colony through an estate owned by Pedro P. Rojas is purely fantastical, and that the only arms possessed by the rebels were those taken by them in combat from the Spanish soldiers." [174] But his second cousin, Francisco L. Rojas, a shipowner, contrabandist, and merchant, was not so fortunate. He was also one ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... traveler, seem to have helped themselves more than once from the treasure of observations collected by the Oriental priests. Without a doubt they drew from these incongruous compilations, in which truth was mingled with the absurd and reality with the fantastical, the knowledge of some properties of plants and minerals, or of some experiments of physics. However, the limpid Hellenic genius always turned away from the misty speculations of magic, giving them but slight consideration. But towards the end of the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... "these vain and superficial distinctions? Do you not dance in public? What renders you more conspicuous? Do you not dress to be admired, and walk to be observed? Why then this fantastical scruple, unjustified by reason, unsupported by analogy? Is folly only to be published? Is vanity alone to be exhibited? Oh slaves of senseless contradiction! Oh feeble followers of yet feebler prejudice! daring to be wicked, yet fearing to be wise; ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... to give a list of the works so seized. Be this as it may he certainly never derived any advantage from them. He had collected a great variety of old armor, sabres, flags, and fantastical vestments, ironically terming them his antiques, and frequently introducing ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... have made a very decent, grave speaker." And here she began to imitate Esmond's way of carrying himself and speaking to his face, and so ludicrously that his mistress burst out a-laughing, and even he himself could see there was some likeness in the fantastical ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... to give the young man such splendid news. Eligi Brancaleone was but moderately flattered, as you will easily believe, by the fisherman's magnanimous intentions towards him; but like the finished seducer that he was, he appeared enchanted at them. Recollecting his character as a fantastical student and an out-at-elbows poet, he fell upon his knees and shouted a thanksgiving to the planet Venus; then, addressing the young girl, he added, in a calmer voice, that he was going to write immediately ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... nothing to solicit pardon for! We have each a right, around this hospitable table, to indulge our book whims: and mine may be as fantastical ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... this family belonged to that class of primitive physicians with which the Middle Ages was filled, and who learned their art of healing not from academies, but from wild nature, studied more with fantastical inquiring, than with learned thought. One of Isaak Todros' ancestors was, however, a very learned physician in Spain at the time when there was a short interval in prosperity in the bad fortunes of the Hebrew nation, and they were ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... of Louise widened at this fantastical reason. She was often puzzled to determine whether the Marquise was entirely serious, or only amusing herself with wild fancies when she touched on pondrous ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... sedition, and so also savors of the crimes of lese majeste. 2. In the second place, I revoke what I have pertinaciously, but without solid reasons, alleged against the magistracy, in letters secretly sent to several, that is to say, that the course of procedure against witches is erroneous and fantastical: asserting, moreover, that those witches were compelled by the severity of torture to confess acts that they had never done; that innocent blood was shed by a cruel judicature; and that by a new alchemy ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... most fantastical lady upon earth, suspecting that I held a secret correspondence with the Queen, could not forbear murmuring and threatening what she would do. She said I had declared to her a thousand times that I could not imagine ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... there, within a closet, on the flags Were two grim shapes which, vaguely seen at first In the half light, grew presently distinct— Two gnomes or vampires seemed they, or dire imps Straight from the Pit, in guise fantastical Of hose and doublet: one stretched out full length Supine, and one in terror-stricken sort Half toppled forward on the bended knee, Grasping with vise-like grip the other's wrist, As who should say, Arouse thee, sleep no more! But said it not. If they were quick or dead, No sign they gave ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Fantastical and strange, Their purple sails go floating o'er the deep, Like shadows through the summer land of sleep, In ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... had some acqaintance with the Eskimo during his years with the Hudson Bay Company, this book runs a little into the fantastical. The head of the family who are the heroes of the book has the belief that there is a sea of ever-warm water surrounding the North Pole, and that there are islands there abounding in animal life, and colonised by the Eskimos. The plan ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... a perfect natural goodness, which neither the uncertainties of his condition, nor the largeness of his wit could pervert. He had a firmness and strength of mind, that was of proof against the Art of Poetry it self. Nothing vain or fantastical, nothing flattering or insolent appeared in his humour. He had a great integrity, and plainness of Manners; which he preserv'd to the last, though much of his time was spent in a Nation, and way of life, that is not very famous for sincerity. But the truth of his heart was ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... I be Spitchcockt, if she han't an Inclination for the Collonel, to coquet, and flirt and fleer, and plague half Mankind, only because they like her, may be what you call a fine Lady, but in my mind she has more fantastical ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... of the wisdom of Paragot before bed?" I said, and, going to our small, carefully selected knapsack library, I found the gay-hearted fantastical book we had promised to read together on our wayfaring; and so the day drew to a ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... given in Mr. Lang's Red Fairy Book). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his Irish Sketch-Book, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost" (why "almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of the giant's breath occurs ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... different authors, and broken traditions of uncertain originals, of various people, and of centuries remote from one another as well as from ours. In short, that they might leave no liberty untaken, even a wild fantastical similitude of sounds has served to prop up a system. As the materials they have are few, so are the very best and such as pass for authentic extremely precarious, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... fantastical experiment was cut short by the interference of the law. A public prosecution was instituted against the St Simonians; and Pere Enfantin, and other chiefs of the sect, were brought before the tribunal at Paris. It ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... show, The peaceful seasons glide serenely by, Fulfil their missions and as calmly die As waves on quiet shores when winds are low. Fields, lonely paths, the one small glimmering rill That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye, Under moist bay-leaves, clouds fantastical That float and change at the light breeze's will,— To me, thus lapped in sylvan luxury, Are more than death ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that Shakspeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call "a humor" till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... cupboards, there were a thousand knick-knacks; small vases, statuettes, groups in Dresden china, and grotesque Chinese figures, old ivory, and Venetian glass, which filled the large room with their precious and fantastical array. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... splendid, but fantastical, Masks of all times, and nations, Turks and Jews, And harlequins and clowns, with feats gymnastical, Greeks, Romans, Yankee-doodles, and Hindoos All kinds of dress, except the ecclesiastical, All people, as their fancies hit, may choose, But no one ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... particular sense, and it is in this romanticism that its political significance to which I have referred lies. It is romantic in subject and the source of its inspiration. This source is the same to which the creators of the romantic school of literature went for its subjects—the fantastical stories of chivalry and knighthood, of which the principal elements were the marvellous and supernatural. The literary romanticists did a great deal to encourage patriotism among the Germans in the beginning of the nineteenth century by disclosing ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the hidden west. And on the very hill-top a few scattered olives, peaches, and wild cherries scrawled upon the blue, their bare, leaning stems, their pearly whites, their golden pinks and feathery grays all in a glory of sunset that made of them things enchanted, aerial, fantastical, like a dance of Botticelli angels ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stage. The nose, still with an upward tilt in it, had lost its masculinity; the hard bones of the uncle and the grandfather had disappeared. Lady Hester's was a nose of wild ambitions, of pride grown fantastical, a nose that scorned the earth, shooting off, one fancies, towards some eternally eccentric heaven. It was a nose, in fact, altogether ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... weary and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on the threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face deepened. He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire, would have graced a beau of an earlier decade. "Will you be pleased to enter?" he suggested punctiliously. "My house, such as it is, is quite at your disposal. And," he added, with a glance over his shoulder, "I fancy that a word or two may presently ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... in my aunt Claire's room, near the china bon-bon bear, I underwent with as much resignation as possible, the torture that the preparing of my tasks imposed. On the wainscoting of the wall, in a hidden recess of the room, there is still visible, among the other fantastical sketches, a pen-portrait of the "Big Ape"; the ink has faded to a light yellow, but the drawing has endured, and when I look at it I again feel a sort of deadly weariness, and a sensation of suffocation chills me through and through—in short I ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... in his customs, and, for aught we know, the soldier in his muster-rolls, think never the worse of themselves for being guilty of their respective frauds towards the public. This evil is come to such a fantastical height, that he is a man of a public spirit, and heroically affected to his country, who can go so far as even to turn usurer with all he has in her funds. There is not a citizen in whose imagination ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... notice of a Difference betwixt these Apparent colours, and those that are wont to be esteem'd Genuine, as to the Duration, which has induc'd some Learned Men to call the former rather Evanid than Fantastical. But as the Ingenious Gassendus does somewhere Judiciously observe, if this way of Arguing were Good, the Greeness of a Leaf ought to pass for Apparent, because, soon Fading into a Yellow, it Scarce lasts at all, in comparison ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... is obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it. It is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies, has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers. It only ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... short-enduring Joy, And Sorceries, to raise the infernal powers, And Sigils framed in planetary hours; Expense, and After-thought, and idle Care, And Doubts of motley hue, and dark Despair; Suspicions and fantastical Surmise, And Jealousy suffused, with jaundice in her eyes, Discolouring all she viewed, in tawny dressed, Down-looked, and with a cuckow on her fist. Opposed to her, on the other side advance The costly feast, the carol, and the dance, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... to cheat the ignorant you say The thing that's not, elated still to sway The crass credulity of gaping fools And women by fantastical display,— ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... be," I assented, though I did not believe it, and I found something almost too fantastical in my friend's scheme. "But when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to become of our tender and sacred associations ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "There speaks the woman!" cried he, "the very woman! A change! a change! Always fantastical and whimsical! Well, it's ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Very obscure in origin, no doubt proceeding from the opprobrious jests exchanged by the lower classes in mirthful hours, it was at first freely fantastical, composed in dialogue, oratorical, lyrical, satirical, even epical at times. Like tragedy, it possessed a chorus for which the lyrical part was specially reserved. It was personal—that is, it directly attacked known contemporaries, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... know where the ideas come from, or how they pour into me like this, but—anyhow it's a new experience, and I want to make the most of it. I've never done imaginative work before, and—though it is a bit fantastical, mean to keep in touch with reality and show great truths that emerge from the commonest facts of life. The critics, of course, will blame me for not giving 'em the banal thing they expect from me, but what of that?' ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... bring the natural man to concern himself with the things of his immortality. This is suggested in the words of the Upanishad already quoted: "There, where the dividing of the hair turns, extending upward to the crown of the head"; all of which may sound very fantastical, until one comes ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... were a kind of devil's bridge flung over the deep glen and its foaming water, and a strange-looking hill beyond it, below which, with a wood on either side, stood a white farm-house—sending from a tall chimney a thin misty reek up to the sky. I crossed the bridge, which, however diabolically fantastical it looked at a distance, seemed when one was upon it, capable of bearing any weight, and soon found myself by the farm-house past which the way led. An aged woman sat on ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... sense. So it was with Johnson himself. Behind all his learning lay something which no learned language could conceal. "On s'attend a voir un auteur et on trouve un homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical, namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities, indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody could feel that ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... stay with Cynthia.... Nat. Now rule, Pandora, in fayre Cynthias steede, And make the moone inconstant like thy selfe; Raigne thou at womens nuptials, and their birth; Let them be mutable in all their loves, Fantastical, childish, and foolish, in their desires, Demaunding toyes: And stark madde when they cannot have their will. Now follow me ye wandring lightes of heaven, And grieve not, that she is not plast with you; Ail you shall glaunce at her in your aspects, And in conjunction dwell with her ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... on her way; hearing all the time Harald's footsteps a little behind her, and yet not venturing to turn round to look at him. As by chance she cast her eyes to heaven, she perceived a little white cloud, which took the fantastical shape of a dragon, and which, with the speed of an arrow, came hastening over the valley. Immediately afterwards was heard a loud noise, which turned Susanna's glance to the heights, where she saw, as it were, a pillar of smoke whirlingly ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer |
