"Grandiose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one other thing that might be carped at—the partisan speech he made in the Lords—had exquisitely justified itself by its result. For it was as a Knight of the Garter that he had set the perfect seal on his dandyism. Yes, he reflected, it was on the day when first he donned the most grandiose of all costumes, and wore it grandlier than ever yet in history had it been worn, than ever would it be worn hereafter, flaunting the robes with a grace unparalleled and inimitable, and lending, as it were, to the very insignia a glory beyond their own, that he once and for all fulfilled ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... still sound judgment to the value of a sestertium, and sense to the value of an as, let myself be borne away by these fantasies, and I do this for the reason that, if they are not possible, they are at least grandiose and uncommon? Such a fabulous empire would be a thing which, some time or other, after long ages, would seem a dream to mankind. Except when Venus takes the form of Lygia, or even of a slave Eunice, or when ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... other sayings—I am quoting from memory—I remember this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic; and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved it ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... for the poet, in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, and upheld the nobility of the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there have been rhymsters ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... answer to my questions, he came round to his grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than half believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to understand ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... assembly as a leaping flame. She turned about, fronting the perplexed and agitated congregation, her head carried high, her face austere for all its youthful softness, an heroic quality, something, indeed, superlative and grandiose in her bearing and expression, causing a shrinking in those who saw her and a certain sense ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... scene is laid in old Padua and is, therefore, full of the mysterious spirit of mediaeval Italian, and especially Venetian life. Miss Cushman has played in an English version of this drama, called the "Actress of Padua". But it is hardly grandiose enough in its proportions to be very well adapted to the talent of Miss Cushman. It was remarkable how perfectly the genius which had, the evening before, adequately represented Phedre, could impersonate the ablest finesse of Italian subtilty. The old Italian romances were made real in ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... and palace-like hotels which have been built for the purpose they now serve, but the fact that they were so built has very effectually prevented even the most splendid among them from rivaling, or indeed approaching, the grandiose magnificence of this superb hostelrie, which has chosen its name in no idle spirit of vaunting. For building is costly, space is precious, and the necessity of finding a due return for the capital employed is the paramount rule which the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... those in search of sheer romantic adventure can purchase plenty of it at any book-stall. But the majority want something different from either of these. They want, first of all, to know what the country is like-not in vague and grandiose "word paintings," nor in strange and foreign sounding words and phrases, but in comparison with something they know. What is it nearest like-Arizona? Surrey? Upper New York? Canada? Mexico? Or is it totally different from anything, as is the Grand Canyon? When you look ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... Russia. That exuberant personality of hers is so eloquent, so omnipresent in the sphere of politics, that one is often the most luminous illustration of the other. There is a note you will find common to her grandiose schemes of territorial expansion, of intellectual enlightenment and domestic reform. It is the note of theatricality, of extravagance, of excess. The strangest chimeric phantasy sometimes here possesses her, hitherto prosaic enough in so many ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Titian. His thronging visions, his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures. His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale. He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the Crucifixion ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... States, the West Indies, and everywhere else in the world. This was to control its people "just as the Pope and the Catholic Church control its millions in every land." The related ideas and activities were sometimes termed grandiose and they awakened much opposition on the part of the old leaders, the clergy, while conservative business stood aloof. At the same time the conception is one that deserves to be considered ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... 1640. He wrote several theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Richard Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcomings of British husbandry. He also proposed a grandiose scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach youths "the theorick and practick parts of this most ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mystery." The work published under his name entitled "The Legacy," besides notices of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... practical man of the present age, especially when he happens to dwell on the other side of the Atlantic. There he uses the wonders of Nature as advertising boards for puffing quack medicines or patent stoves, and the picturesque and the grandiose are only appreciated by him in ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... battlefields of Europe and had so worn out France that clouds and darkness were about the last days of the Grand Monarch now nearing his end. In America his agents were still drawing up papers outlining grandiose designs for mastering the continent and for proving that England's empire was near its fall, but Europe knew that France in the long war had been beaten. The right way to smite France in America was to rely upon England's naval power, to master the great highway of the St. ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... horse ambles need not be considered an error. But the relative proportions of the horse and rider are not quite accurately preserved, Gattamelata being, if anything, rather below the right scale. The monument is, however, so massive and grandiose that criticism seems out of place; indeed, in the presence of the statue one feels that everything is subordinated to the power and mastery of Gattamelata himself. The general is bareheaded, and the strong courageous face is modelled ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... from that which had preceded it, the operas which had seemed the most secure of popularity were soon consigned to oblivion. It is a significant fact that Donizetti's lighter works have stood the test of time more successfully than his more serious efforts. Though the grandiose airs and sham tragedy of 'Lucia' have long since ceased to impress us, we can still take pleasure in the unaffected gaiety of 'La Fille du Regiment' and 'Don Pasquale.' These and many similar works were ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... legislator therefore would have his preferences, even in this matter of the trees under which the citizens of the Perfect City might sit down to rest. What trees? you wonder. The olive? the laurel, as if wrought in grandiose metal? the cypress? that came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete: the oak? we think it very expressive of strenuous national character. Well! certainly the plane-tree for one, characteristic tree of Lacedaemon then and now; a very tranquil ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... and shadows of human life are duly blended in his romances, Scott had a preference for the delineation of the gentle, the grand (or grandiose), the noble and the beautiful: loving the medieval, desiring to reproduce the age of chivalry, he was naturally aristocratic in taste, as in intellect, though democratic by the dictates of a thoroughly ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the Kremlin as one spoke of Versailles in the magnificent days of Louis XIV.... Only the most eminent commissaries of the people and a few other Soviet stars of the first magnitude are domiciled there in the grandiose palaces that once housed the most ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... satisfied with seeing in it a document of some poetic value, and of very high historic and linguistic value; he sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monument of epic genius. In its general design he finds the grandiose conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish it from the artificial epic of literary ages. One thinks of Homer; ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... felt hat and a plain stick with a curved handle. When the young men emerged from the gloomy hallway to the street, which in that part was beginning to be shabby, the street lights were already heralding the dusk. The two hastened from the region of deteriorating respectability to the grandiose quarter westward, and thence to Broadway and the clang of car gongs. The human ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... one has to admit that there were two sides to our hero's character. On the one hand was the spirit of Don Quixote, devoted to chivalry, to heroic ideals, to grandiose romantic folly, but lacking the body of the celebrated hidalgo, that thin, bony apology of a body, careless of material wants, capable of going for twenty nights without unbuckling its breastplate and surviving for twenty-four hours on ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... saloon in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers, the property of Count O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish livery enters before the curtain, on its ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... part of the territory through which the line was projected, and the promoters gave up. Then in 1845 the railway mania in England brought a revival of all colonial schemes. Sir Richard Broun took up the plan for a line from Halifax to Quebec, along with other grandiose projects connected with his endeavour to revive the lost glories of the baronetage of Nova Scotia, but did not get past the stage of forming a provisional committee. This discussion revived the flagging hopes of St Andrews, and, as will be ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... favourite corner of the domain—a kind of projecting spur or platform shaded by a few grandiose umbrella pines. Near at hand, on a slightly lower level, rose a group of flame—like cypresses whose shapely outlines stood out against the sea, shining far below like a lake of pearl. The milky sheen of morning, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... that letter, and while I waited two more critiques appeared in two of the most assertively pompous and dictatorial journals of the day, echoing the eulogies of the Parthenon, declaring 'this dead poet' worthy 'to rank with the highest of the Immortals,' and a number of other similar grandiose declarations. One reviewer took an infinite deal of pains to prove 'that if the genius of Theos Alwyn had only been spared to England, he must have infallibly been elected Poet Laureate as soon as the post became vacant, and that too, without a single dissentient voice, save such as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... in other parts of the world; two or three catch it and die and that is the end of the epidemic. There are no hospitals or doctors. The doctoring is done by feldshers. Bleeding and cupping are done on a grandiose, brutal scale. I examined a Jew with cancer in the liver. The Jew was exhausted, hardly breathing, but that did not prevent the feldsher from cupping him twelve times. Apropos of the Jews. Here they till the land, work as drivers and ferry-men, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... a new kind of Indian naturalism. Such a school, the creation of an alien Muslim dynasty, would at first sight seem unlikely to produce illustrations of Hindu religion. Its main function was to illustrate works of literature, science and contemporary history—a function which resulted in such grandiose productions as the Akbarnama or Annals of Akbar, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum.[74] None the less there are two ways in which Mughal painting, as developed under Akbar, contributed to ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... had gained the first prize for painting. He had now just come back from Rome. His soul, full-fed with poetry; his eyes, satiated with Raphael and Michael Angelo, thirsted for real nature after long dwelling in the pompous land where art has everywhere left something grandiose. Right or wrong, this was his personal feeling. His heart, which had long been a prey to the fire of Italian passion, craved one of those modest and meditative maidens whom in Rome he had unfortunately seen only in painting. From the enthusiasm produced in his excited fancy by the ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... construction, particularly as compared with that immediately following ("With the Faithful deign to place us"), a tenor solo of a quaint and pastoral character. The next number for chorus ("While the wicked are confounded") affords still another striking contrast, being in the grandiose style and very dramatic, closing with phrases for the solo voices expressive of submission and contrition. Up to this point the "Dies Irae" has been monotonous in its sameness of general style; but the next verse ("Day of Weeping, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... state-bed, was draped with ample portieres and window curtains lined with white silk. Pictures, evidently from old panels, plant-stands, various pretty articles of modern upholstery, handsome lamps, and a rare old cut-glass chandelier, gave a grandiose appearance to the room. The carpet was a Persian rug. The boudoir, wholly modern, and furnished entirely after Madame Moreau's own taste, was arranged in imitation of a tent, with ropes of blue ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting men give the grandiose name of "German Ocean." And through the wide windows we had a view of the Thames; an enfilading view down the Lower Hope Reach. But the dinner was execrable, and all the ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... air of this once proud city. Everywhere are evidences of ancient grandeur, mingling with memories of enormous wealth and violent scenes of strife. The narrow, winding streets, characteristic of oriental cities; the Moorish architecture displayed in the grandiose palaces and churches; the grated, unglazed windows, through which still peep timid senoritas, as in the romantic days of yore; the gaily painted balconies, over which bepowdered doncellas lean to pass the day's gossip in the liquid tongue of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... son of the preceding; born in 1793; subordinate in the mayor's office at Alencon in charge of registry. A sort of poet, liberal in politics and filled with ambition; weary of poverty and overflowing with grandiose sentiments. In 1816 he loved, with a passion that his commonsense combated, Mme. du Bousquier, then Mlle. Cormon, his senior by more than seventeen years. In 1816 the marriage dreaded by him took place. He could not brook the blow and drowned himself ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... binding, for three and six, and I am exceedingly indebted to Messrs. Newnes for creating that volume. It was sheer genius on their part to do so. I get charming sensations from it, but sensations not so charming as I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many-volumed and grandiose edition, even aside from Mrs. Toynbee's erudite notes and the extra letters which she has been able to print. The same letter in Mrs. Toynbee's edition would have a higher aesthetic and moral value ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house, as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, "the old Vertrees country mansion." It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans' by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... as true when their intellectual attitude is realistic as when it is idealistic. In the Germany of the past, the Germany of small States, to which all non-Germans look back with such sympathy and such regret, their thinkers and poets were inspired by grandiose intellectual abstractions. They saw ideas, like gods, moving the world, and actual men and women, actual events and things, were but the passing symbols of these supernatural powers; 1866 and 1870 ended all that. The unification of Germany, in the way ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... alternate squalor and luxury in one story of what had once been a glorious roseate home of Venetian counts, and was now crumbling to pieces and let in flats to the poor. Hilary and his wife were most suitably domiciled therein, environed by a splendid dinginess and squalor, pretentious, tawdry, grandiose, and superbly evading the common. Peggy wrote to Peter in her large sprawling hand, "You dear little brother, I wish you'd come and live with us. We have such fun...." That was the best of Peggy. Always and everywhere she had such fun. She added, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... know that Flaubert made L16 in four years out of "Madame Bovary," which went into three editions within considerably less than a year of publication. And yet the house of Levy is one of the most respectable and grandiose in France. Moral: English authors ought to go down on their knees and thank God that English publishers are not as other publishers. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... joy? The enslaved people are delivered, and yet a passion in peril is fain to moan. Pharaoh's son loves a Hebrew woman, and she must leave him. What gives its ravishing charm to this quintette is the return to the homelier feelings of life after the grandiose picture of two stupendous and national emotions:—general misery, general joy, expressed with the magic force stamped on them by divine vengeance and with the miraculous atmosphere of the Bible narrative. Now, was not I right?" added Massimilla, as the noble sretto ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... the top of the main platform or more commonly on a minor platform of its own in the middle of the steps. In most cases the chamber stands back behind a row, in some instances two rows, of columns, which support the characteristic entablature seen in the illustrations. In the case of the more grandiose temples a series of columns may run all round the building, carrying an extension of the roof, under which is thus formed a covered colonnade. More commonly the sides and back of the chamber have only what are known as "engaged" columns, as it were half-embedded in the wall. The ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... themselves and the masses in possessions and privileges, but also in dress and air, founded upon strict distinctions in law. The landed aristocrat with his laces and ruffles, his silks and his gold and silver ornaments and his expensive tableware, his consciously superior air and tone of grandiose authority, was far removed in established position from the mechanic or the laborer with his coarse clothes and mean habitation. Laws were long in force in various provinces which prohibited the common people from wearing gold and silver lace, silks and ornaments. Bellomont noted ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... suckling her baby from a very ample white breast. I think that this movement towards the Church tradition may be unconscious and instinctive, and would perhaps be deplored by many Communists, for whom grandiose bad Rodin statuary and the crudity of cubism better express what they mean by revolution. But this revolution is Russian and not French, and its art, if all goes well, should inevitably bear the popular Russian stamp. It is would-be primitive and popular ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... open space that must once have been a park in the center of the city. There were structures which could not possibly be other than government buildings. But the population of this world was small. They were not grandiose. There were walkways and some temporary buildings obviously thrown hastily together to house a ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... mean," confessed blue-eyed Flora with a sigh. Dreda looked at her quickly, and as quickly averted her eyes. Put in bald language was not that her own ambition also? In thinking over the essay, she had mentally rehearsed many grandiose phrases; but now, with a sudden chilling of the blood, she realised the emptiness of the high-sounding words. What had she ever wished from life but pleasure, approbation, and easy success? How much thought had she given to possible trials and difficulties? ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of the most characteristic branches of Renaissance painting, for it appealed to the newly aroused individualism, the grandiose egotism of the so optimistic and so self-confident age. After Leonardo no one sought to make the portrait primarily a character study. Titian and Raphael and Holbein and most of their contemporaries sought rather to please and flatter than to analyse. [Sidenote: Titian, c. 1490-1576] But withal ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... better will he be able to realise the depth of the solitude in which we now found ourselves. While the boys slung the beds, and Tom busied himself with dinner, we sat and smoked, and savoured together our satisfaction in our complete and grandiose isolation. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... Bologna to go to Florence you enter the gorges of the Appennines, and after journeying seven miles, begin to ascend the ridge. The ascent begins at Pianoro. Among these mountains the scenery is wild and romantic, and tho' not so grandiose and sublime as that of the Alps, is nevertheless extremely picturesque. One meets occasionally with the ruins of old castles on some of the heights, and I was strongly reminded, at the sight of these antique ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... imagination is too often tainted with insincerity; in his dramas of the elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramas of the emotions. Again, he is sometimes grand and often grandiose; but he has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constant and intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitles him to rank with the great artists in words of all time. His sense of verbal colour and verbal ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Harper sitting at the head of his own dinner-table was a real pleasure. He never looked so well at any other time. His grandiose air was then so mixed with genuine kindliness that it only enriched his courtesies, like the "body" in mellow old wine. He leaned graciously back in the arm-chair peculiarly his own, surveying the long table shone ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... concretely with the passions, it found itself impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"—so strangely overpraised by Thackeray—with their metallic clank and grandiose verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is always "heard," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... non-Jewish governments, to substitute therefor a Jewish world government, to obliterate all national boundaries, and to destroy all religions other than Judaism. This, it is alleged, is the concrete form in which the Jews visualize their destiny as the Chosen People. In order to attain this grandiose ideal, every means to weaken the non-Jewish elements and institutions in civilization is encouraged by the invisible Jewish government, the leaders ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if it was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japan to compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is no stone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare with the living-rooms of Japan. Suites ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 500 pounds a year. Mr. Alker is an Irishman, and is about 42 years of age. He is rather tall; is genteelly fashioned, has good features, wears an elegantly-trimmed pair of whiskers, has pompous, odorous, Pall Mall appearance, is grandiose and special, looks like a nineteenth century Numa Pompilius, would have made a spicey Pontifex Maximus, ought to have lived in Persia, where he might have worn velvet slippers and been fanned with peacock ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... and her leisure hours of weaving, with Helen and her heroic canvas, and the army of grandiose Biblical folk, and let us come westward into Europe in short review of the textiles called tapestry which were produced from the early Christian centuries to the time of the Crusades, and thus will we ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... meanest and most unworthy persons whom I have met have been the wild and lofty-minded poets who perpetually express contempt of Philistines and cast the shaft of their scorn at what they call "dross." So far as money goes, I fancy that the oratorical, and grandiose poet is often the most greedy of individuals; and, when, in his infinite conceit, he sets himself up above common decency and morality, I find it difficult to confine myself to moderate language. A ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... which remain are the fine proportions of the apartments— the marble pillars and niches of one; the remains of a richly-carved chimneypiece in another; the highly-wrought ceilings, to which ancient history and allegory have supplied grandiose figures—their deep colours unfaded, the ruddy burnish of their gilding as splendid as ever. Here and there great black-and-gold court-stools, raised at the sides, and finished off with bullet heads of dogs, arouse a recollection of Versailles or Fontainebleau, and look as if they had offered ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... different causes of domestic ennui, the Duchess di Bracciano varied her sojourn in Italy by long and frequent visits to France, going thither to present, by clever and well-timed calculation, the spectacle of a Roman princess whom no one even within the grandiose precincts of Versailles surpassed either in true French esprit or steady devotion to the Sovereign. The Duchess formed a close intimacy with the Marechale de Noailles, to whom she was related; she made the acquaintance of the minister Torcy, who was capable of appreciating all the varied ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... more than enough to make them thoroughly dissatisfied with the Wittelsbach regime, as carried out by Ludwig. The Cabinet had become very nearly inarticulate; public funds had been squandered on all sorts of grandiose and unnecessary schemes; and the clerical element had long been allowed to ride roughshod over the constitution. Altogether, the "Ministry of Dawn," brought into existence with such a flourish of trumpets after the dismissal of von Abel and his colleagues, had not ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of cardboard which had come in Cynthia's letter. He dared not look at Jethro, and his eye was fixed instead upon the somewhat grandiose signature of Isaac D. Worthington, which they bore. Jethro took them and tore them up, and slowly tossed the pieces into a cuspidor conveniently situated near the foot of the bed. He rose and thrust his hands ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... along the main street, Mr. Bernard had noticed a large house of some pretensions to architectural display, namely, unnecessarily projecting eaves, giving it a mushroomy aspect, wooden mouldings at various available points, and a grandiose arched portico. It looked a little swaggering by the side of one or two of the mansion-houses that were not far from it, was painted too bright for Mr. Bernard's taste, had rather too fanciful a fence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... explanation that can be given for his unfortunate coquetting a year ago with the leaders of the now fallen Anfu Club. He allowed himself to be deceived into thinking that they were ready to turn against the Japanese if he would give them his support; and his nationalist imagination was inflamed by the grandiose schemes of little Hsu for ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... opulent, splendid city. A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of permanence for much that is respectable. A great money-centre. San Francisco with the mines above-ground,—and some of 'em under the sidewalks. I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York, in all our cities. It makes 'em all look paltry and petty. Has many elements of civilization. May stop where Venice did, though, for aught we know.—The order of its development is just this:—Wealth; architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a mechanical art,—just ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... on a foreign shore, "deafening the sound of the westerly wave, and riding against the blast as thunder goes," to borrow O'Connell's graphic and grandiose phrases, had reached the country in advance of Mr. Garrison. The national sensitiveness was naturally enough stung to the quick. Here is a pestilent fellow who is not content with disturbing the peace of the Union with his new fanaticism, but must needs presume to make the dear Union ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... Dickens spend in the French capital, the incomparable city, and then was back in London, at the old life of hard work; but with even a stronger infusion than before of private theatricals—private theatricals on a grandiose scale, that were applauded by the Queen herself, and took him and his troupe starring about during the next three or four years, hither and thither, and here and there, in London and the provinces. ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... His voice rose as he approached. "You let the m'sieu' row you ashore! You——" A square, heavy boot shot out from beneath his cassock into the boy's stomach. "Cochon!" said the priest, turning to Simpson. His manner became suddenly suave, grandiose. "These swine!" he said. "One keeps them in their place. I am ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... insists on the unexpressed but inexorable scale by which Andrew and his following measured Lincoln. They had grown up in the faith that you could tell a statesman by certain external signs, chiefly by a grandiose and commanding aspect such as made overpowering the presence of Webster. And this idea was not confined to any one locality. Everywhere, more or less, the conservative portion in every party held this ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... a bit better.—A sociological discovery which startled him! He wanted to destroy Redcliffe Gardens, and to design it afresh and rebuild it under the inspiration of St. Mark's and of the principles of hygiene as taught for the Final Examination. He had grandiose ideas for a new design. As for Redcliffe Square, he could do marvels with ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... of frivolity in Francesca's conduct. It was noble, large, and without any second thought. This magnanimity struck Rodolphe greatly, for in it he recognized the difference between the Italian and the Frenchwoman. The waters, the land, the sky, the woman, all were grandiose and suave, even their love in the midst of this picture, so vast in its expanse, so rich in detail, where the sternness of the snowy peaks and their hard folds standing clearly out against the blue sky, reminded Rodolphe of the circumstances which limited ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... the Church has said: "I feel there are two men in me." He would have spoken truly in saying this about Tartarin, who carried in his frame the soul of Don Quixote, the same chivalric impulses, heroic ideal, and crankiness for the grandiose and romantic; but, worse is the luck! he had not the body of the celebrated hidalgo, that thin and meagre apology for a body, on which material life failed to take a hold; one that could get through twenty nights without its breast-plate being unbuckled, and forty-eight hours on a handful ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... in results that he was grandiose. Hear him on the theme of a completed line, a newly-opened tunnel, or a finished viaduct—it was a Poem! Such a picture of gushing beatitude as he could paint! It was the golden age—prosperity, happiness, and peace on every side; the song of the husbandman at his plough mingling with ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... with a fine and subtle body of paragraphs, and the smallest legs, in the way of advertisements, that any poor newspaper ever stood upon! And yet this attenuated journal had a plump and plethoric title,—a title that smacked of turtle and venison; an aldermanic, portly, grandiose, Falstaflian title: it was called The Capitalist. And all those fine, subtle paragraphs were larded out with recipes how to make money. There was an El Dorado in every sentence. To believe that paper, you would think no man had ever yet found a proper return for his ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you unawares. It is immense, insistent, arresting, almost thrusting itself on your imagination. It is a city for giants to dwell in, everything is on such an enormous scale, dealt out in such careless profusion. The river, first of all, is immense; the palaces grandiose, the very blocks of which they are fashioned seem to have been hewn by Titans. The names are full of romance and mystery. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, for instance, how it brings back a certain red and gold book of one's youth, full of innocent prisoners in clanking ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... affairs when complications threatened. He was an art student in those days of the 'seventies, possessed of about four hundred a year, beginning to go through the aesthetic phase, and not decided whether he would emerge a painter of pictures or an architect of grandiose or fantastic buildings. To his studio Miss Kitty Vavasour or Miss Kate Warren would often come and pose for the head and shoulders, or for some draped caryatid wanted for an ambitious porch in an imaginary millionaire's house in Kensington Palace Gardens. When in 1897, Vivie had learnt about ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the royal tomb favored nobles received permission to build their own tombs, similarly equipped but on a smaller, less grandiose scale than that of the pharaoh. By this means the courtiers who had attended the pharaoh in his life-time would be at hand to perform similar services in the after ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... the bottom of which lay one thing, and one thing only—the Roman Catholic Church. What was surprising was the length of time which he was taking to reach the inevitable destination. Years passed before he came to realise that his grandiose edifice of a Church Universal would crumble to pieces if one of its foundation stones was to be an amatory intrigue of Henry VIII. But, at last he began to see that terrible monarch glowering at him wherever he turned his eyes. First he tried to exorcise the spectre ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... circumstances to us arguing predestination to an illustrious heirship and career. Dr Middleton's musings were coloured by the friendly vision of glasses of the great wine; his mind was festive; it pleased him, and he chose to indulge in his whimsical, robustious, grandiose-airy style of thinking: from which the festive mind will sometimes take a certain print that we cannot obliterate immediately. Expectation is grateful, you know; in the mood of gratitude we are waxen. And he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... system. But the idea expressed by Burke—the spirit of his whole argument—went far beyond this particular absentee tax or any similar tax proposed, as happened in one instance, by a Colony. It was the superbly grandiose expression, and all the more insidiously seductive in that it was so grandiose, of a principle which all thinking men now know, or ought to know, is the negation of Empire, which lost us America, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... right. There was something about her husband that was grandiose and princely, whenever he escaped from his accursed Machiavel, and gave fair play ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... writer of English fiction was a new and interesting figure in English literature. Disraeli, indeed, had flashed into the literary world with 'Coningsby,' that eloquent vindication of the Jewish race. His grandiose 'Tancred' had revealed to an astonished public the strange life of the Desert, of the mysterious vastness whence swept forth the tribes who became the Moors of Spain and the Jews of Palestine. Disraeli, however, stood in no category, and established no precedent. But when Miss Aguilar's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a Court naturally suited him, and he had a quaint trick of transferring the grandiose nomenclature of palaces to his own very modest domain of Hughenden. He called his simple drawing-room the Saloon; he styled his pond the Lake; he expatiated on the beauties of the terrace walks, and the "Golden Gate," and the "German Forest." His ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... components of the "struggle for existence," such as Fabre has described it, but with no other motive than to describe what he has observed and seen. Such are the ordinary themes of the grandiose battles which he has scattered through his narratives, and never did circus or arena offer more thrilling spectacles; no jungle ever hid more moving combats ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... having the courage to take upon themselves the responsibility of the decisive "Yes." Finally the Count seized the bull by the horns. Adopting his most grandiose air, he turned with a bow to the embarrassed young woman and said, "We accept your offer with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... enterprise would bring the inhabitants. Through the spring and summer of 1836 the talk of internal improvements grew more general and more clamorous. The candidates for office spoke about little else, and the only point of emulation among the parties was which should be the more reckless and grandiose in its promises. When the time arrived for the assembling of the Legislature, the members were not left to their own zeal and the recollection of their campaign pledges, but meetings and conventions were everywhere ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... decide and to overcome even more difficult problems than the foregoing, and by what colossal forces the levers of his far-flung tale are moved, and how eventually the horizon will become extended until everything assumes a grandiose and a lyrical tendency. Yes, many a verst of road remains to be travelled by a party made up of an elderly gentleman, a britchka of the kind affected by bachelors, a valet named Petrushka, a coachman named Selifan, and three horses which, from the Assessor to the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the shadows. That is what it costs to be a mighty nation. It is sorrowful to think of the sacrificed men—sacrificed to fulfil England's imposing destiny; it is sorrowful to think of the mourners who cannot even see their darling's grave; yet there is something grandiose and almost morbidly impressive in the attitude of Britain. She waves her imperial hand and says, "See what my place in the world is! My bravest, my most skilful, may die in a fight that is no more than a scuffling ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... technical matters as to which his own knowledge was comparatively defective. He reserved to himself what may be called the "literary" aspect of his theme, recording the place of each animal in history, and relating its habits with such gusto as his ornate and grandiose ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... quietly up. One by one the casualties are lifted in or climb in stiffly. The doctor who has come up with them chats with the M.O., and the local gossip is exchanged for the wider knowledge (or more grandiose rumours) of the field ambulance. Our Jock, who has a bullet in his chest, is lifted in. Straps are fastened securely and tarpaulins tied. 'All aboard, sir!' 'Right! Well, so long, Hadley!' 'Cheero, Scott!' The ambulances ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... wild-cat schemes and fraudulent speculations, but they were voted cranks by the majority, and the Consolidated Provident Savings Company grew and flourished. It paid large dividends, and its stockholders were duly impressed with the magnificence of its buildings and the grandiose tone of its officials. ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... to realize vividly the nobility and grace of the landscape. And yet there was a difference in the appreciation of the two. More widely read and traveled, Evelyn's imagination took a wider range of comparison and of admiration, she was appealed to by the large features and the grandiose effects; while Alice noted more the tenderer aspects, the wayside flowers and bushes, the exotic-looking plants, which she longed to domesticate in what might be called the Sunday garden on the terraces ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... tall gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one of the most patrician rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall were those chambers of ours overlooking the garden of which I have already spoken, and another kitchen, less noble than the first, but still sufficiently grandiose to make most New World kitchens seem very meekly minute and unimpressive. Between the two kitchens was another court, with another cistern, from which the painter's family drew water with a bucket ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic—Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon—these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... of the society of a provincial town wearied her so excessively, her imagination was so filled with grandiose ideas that although she returned to the salons to eclipse other women once more by her beauty, and enjoy her new triumph as a musician, she again deserted them; and having proved her power to her cousins, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... was interviewing him. "I am fifty-eight," he added quickly; "but I do not look my years, though my hair, still thick and full of vigour, is prematurely white—so often the case with men whose brains are continually on the stretch. The little home, far from grandiose, which forms the background to this most interesting personality is embowered in trees. Cats have made their mark on its lawns, and its owner's love of animals was sharply illustrated by the sheep-dog which lay on his feet clad in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "de notre epoque est le plus triste, le plus incommode et le plus disgracieux, que la mode ait jamais invente, c'est surtout au milieu des champs que tous ses inconvenients et toutes ses laideurs revoltent.... Au milieu de ce cadre austere et grandiose, qui transporte l'imagination au temps de la poesie primitive, apparaisse cette mouche parasite, le monsieur aux habits noirs, au menton rase, aux mains gantees, aux jambes maladroites, et ce roi de la societe n'est plus qu'un accident ridicule, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... a motor-tour on the Continent in the Royce. Very likely they would go as far south as Capri, and Susan would stay with her new grand Italian connections. What she would be like when she got back Miss Mapp forbore to conjecture, since it was no use anticipating trouble; but Susan had been so grandiose about the Wyses, multiplying their incomes and their acreage by fifteen or twenty, so Miss Mapp conjectured, and talking so much about county families, that the liveliest imagination failed to picture what she would make of the Faragliones. She already alluded ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... beneath a triumphal arch; before him was a glittering square, grandiose, yet severe; a stretch of temples and basilicas, in which masterpieces felt at home—the Forum of Trajan, the compliment of a nation to a prince. Dominating it was a column, in whose thick spirals you read to-day the one reliable chronicle of the Dacian campaign. Was not Gautier well advised ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... another grandiose operatic oath, Siegfried attesting his innocence on Hagen's spear, and Brynhild rushing to the footlights and thrusting him aside to attest his guilt, whilst the clansmen call upon their gods to send down lightnings and silence the perjured. The gods do not respond; ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... that dirty and ruined place, that was once so splendid, with a regret that modern Italy, which is so eager to build grandiose banks and every sort of public building, is yet so regardless of old things that one might fancy her history only began in 1860. Mr. Le Mesurier, in the interesting book already referred to, has suggested that this old palace, so full of memories of Genoa's ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the composer of the grandiose, the magnificent. This appears in his earliest works. In 1837 he composed his Requiem, for the funeral obsequies of General Damremont. This work is of unprecedented proportions. It is scored for chorus, solos and orchestra, the latter occasionally of extraordinary appointment. In the "Tuba Mirum," ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... London and to Staines, and all we have just mentioned, as also of the great importance of cavalry in the Middle Ages, no better example can be quoted than the connected episode of April-June 1215, which may be called—to give it a grandiose name—the Campaign of Magna Charta. It further illustrates points which should never be forgotten in the reading of early English history, though they are too particular for the general purpose of this ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... quantity of fine, amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... objections to the bill supported by 'my old classical companion Wilkes, with whom I pray you to excuse my keeping company, he is so pleasant;' by Mr Burke, the Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and by 'that brave Irishman, Captain Macbride, the cousin of my wife.' In grandiose capitals he appeals to Fox and to Pitt. 'Great sir,' he cries, 'forgive my thus presumptuously, thus rashly, attempting for a moment to forge your thunder! But I conjure you—in the name of God and the King, I ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... Jag Ear and Wrath of God wait for me," Jack said, entering with real enjoyment into the grandiose style. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... He is hot at heart, and he does not look on at the movement of mankind as merely understanding it, and analysing it, and liking it,—and making allowances for it. He is tumultuous and urgent, daring and impetuous, eager to say a great word. His conceptions shake him. They are all grandiose and huge. The great passions are awake in them—avarice, lust, hate, love, god-like pity, supreme courage, base fear. The whole trend of his mind is towards the heroic. He struggles to be in touch with the actual, and he makes many incursions upon it, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... seconds he sat in state, wearing a grandiose yellow dressing-gown. The change was accomplished just in time. Mr.. Bryany entered, and not only Mr.. Bryany but Mr.. Seven Sachs, and not only these, but the lady who had worn a red hat ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he can witness in August for three shillings third-class return. The man who is imbued with the idea of development, of continuous cause and effect, perceives in the sea an element which in the day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour, which yesterday was boiling, ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... Parisienne, he declared that Cooper was the only writer of stories worthy to be placed by the side of Walter Scott, and that his hero Leather-stocking was sublime. "I don't know," said he, "if the fiction of Walter Scott furnishes a creation as grandiose as that of this hero of the savannas and forests. Cooper's descriptions are the school at which all literary landscapists should study: all the secrets of art are there. But Cooper is inferior to Walter Scott in his comic and minor ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... his mind, he joyously appropriated it as his own. A mere proposal of marriage and an acceptance were more or less hackneyed; the event contained no elements of the spectacular; but to follow it promptly with a midnight ceremony impressed him as a grandiose achievement and one calculated to shed luster upon his adventurous career. "That's my idea of romance—that's the way I like to do things," he declared. "We'll be married soon's I pay this check." Fumbling through his pockets, ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... great injustice to Patrick Henry by representing him virtually as a mere declaimer, as an ill-instructed though most impressive rhapsodist in debate, and as without any claim to the character of a serious statesman, or even of a man of affairs; while, by the somewhat grandiose and melodramatic tone of some portion of the narrative, it is singularly out of harmony with the real tone of that famous assemblage,—an assemblage of Anglo-Saxon lawyers, politicians, and men of business, who were probably ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... electrical interpretation to the phenomena of matter and motion, and thus merge mechanics itself in electricity. One thus sees dawning afresh the eternal hope of co-ordinating all natural phenomena in one grandiose and imposing synthesis. Whatever may be the fate reserved for such attempts, they deserve attention in the highest degree; and it is desirable to examine them carefully if we wish to have an exact idea of the tendencies of ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... be visited without the same haunting conviction, the same oppressive thought: how terribly difficult it is to understand the City of the Dead which holds in so small a space the whole secret of the antique world! There are far more grandiose and impressive ruins to be seen in Rome; the city of Timgad in Northern Africa is more complete as a specimen of a Roman settlement than the half-excavated town near Vesuvius; yet here, and here only, can the men of the past stretch hands, as it were, across the barrier of eighteen ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... adored and imitated, could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... a glance of apprehension along the path where Jane Allen should at least now be seen on her way. "Perhaps Jane feels we should forswear this moment of mirth; being juniors and stepping aside from all the others. They call it the Whisper you know; 'count of the whispering poplar above," with a grandiose wave at the innocent tree. "But I would much prefer a chuckle, wouldn't ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... Cisa. The sense of breadth in composition is continually satisfied through this ascent by the fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces of Italian landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but the geographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... base of the Coumelie, the mule-path to the Cirque de Troumouse leading through a field above us, as we reached the zigzag's top. Still gently ascending round the foot of the Coumelie, the pointed summit of the lofty Taillon (10,323 ft.) came into view ahead, with the grandiose Campbieil (10,418 ft.) up the Heas valley; and the Pic de Saugue immediately above on the right, from whose height the splendid Cascade d'Arroudet, dashing past the shepherds' cottages, launches its foaming showers into the river below. A ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Geoffrey of Monmouth, who first showed the romantic possibilities of the material, made of the obscure British chieftain Arthur a world conqueror. Arthur thus became already in Geoffrey's "Historia regum Britaniae" a conscious protagonist of Charlemagne and his rival in popularity. This grandiose conception of Arthur persisted in England, but this conception of the British chieftain did not interest the French. For Chretien Arthur had no political significance. He is simply the arbiter of his court in all affairs ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... subjugation without a plentiful spending fund. He had told her they would go North from Reno and travel eastward by the Canadian Pacific, stopping at points of interest along the road. He imagined his courtship progressing in grandiose suites of rooms wherein were served delicate meals, his generous largesse to obsequious hirelings adding to her dazzled approval. He had to have that money; he couldn't go without it; he had set it aside to deck with fitting ceremonial ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... to Utopian ideas by certain hereditary influences; his grandmother's nervous disorders became in him so much chronic enthusiasm, striving after everything that was grandiose and impossible. His lonely childhood, his imperfect education, had developed his natural tendencies in a singular manner. However, he had not yet reached the age when the fixed idea plants itself in a man's mind. In the morning, after he had dipped his head in a bucket of water, he ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... plains that seem to roll into the sun, and there are great herds of game, and warlike Indians, and beyond the range of any vision there are vast mountains white with snow. Gold, too, may be there. It is a country enormous, grandiose, rich, and silent,—a desert waiting dumbly for the strong man's tread." He turned a little and drew another line. "To this side, away, away to the east, here where you and I are sitting, watching, watching, here are the Old Thirteen,—the ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... eighty-five pounds profit. No, no. We ought to have invested the money quietly, but unfortunately Alexander Fed'otch, when he was selling the house, met another man who persuaded him to buy a plot of land higher up, and to build a grandiose villa upon it. They thought it a splendid idea, and Alexander Fed'otch paid the nine hundred roubles as part of the money down for the contractor. It was a great sorrow—for no profit ever came of it. It happened in the revolutionary time. We ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... of exhilaration and beauty, Alsace offers attractions innumerable, sites grandiose and idyllic, picturesque ruins, superb forests, old churches of rare interest and many a splendid ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... so we put a few stones in each of the barrows, and, well content, journeyed back to the scene of operations, and laid our stones round the base of the tub, more because we knew nowhere else to lay them than for any other reason, for the sergeant-major had apparently forgotten his grandiose designs in other schemes, and had disappeared. The fatigue party was thinning. The corporal said what may be freely translated as "disappear quietly," and we made off to our camp, where I found Henry, who had doctor's leave to be excused fatigues, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... to haunt him. For he began now to recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had known—beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most men overlook ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... now fairly evident that the present war is but a violent phase in the unfolding of a grandiose ground idea—the subjugation of Europe by the Teuton—which was being steadily realized ever since the close of the Franco-German campaign of 1870. It is likewise clear that, despite her "swelled head," Germany's estimate of her ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Confederate side this point was commanded by two batteries posted on a slightly lower elevation beyond a creek, and a half-mile away. All the guns but one were masked by the trees of an orchard; that one—it seemed a bit of impudence—was on an open lawn directly in front of a rather grandiose building, the planter's dwelling. The gun was safe enough in its exposure—but only because the Federal infantry had been forbidden to fire. Coulter's Notch—it came to be called so—was not, that pleasant summer afternoon, a place where ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Charles Boulle made many pieces to which the name of cabinet has been more or less loosely given. They were usually of massive proportions and of extreme elaboration of marquetry. The North Italian cabinets, and especially those which were made or influenced by the Florentine school, were grandiose and often gloomy. Conceived on a palatial scale, painted or carved, or incrusted with marble and pietra dura, they were intended for the adornment of galleries and lofty bare apartments where they were not felt to be overpowering. These North Italian cabinets were often covered with intarsia ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... behind it had been added by nature merely as the handle to so fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through the streets, and followed by an eager multitude, nine tenths of whom thought the man belonging to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him. But then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not a great man, sat beside him, and the display was saved from contempt by the massive shape of Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow against a thunder-cloud. Even Mr. Fillmore, to whom the Fugitive Slave Law denies the complete boon of an otherwise justly earned oblivion, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell |
