"Colossal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nebuchadnezzar. He, as he declares in various inscriptions, 'paved the causeway with limestone flags for the procession of the Great Lord Marduk.' He made the Istar Gate 'with glazed brick and placed on its threshold colossal bronze bulls and ferocious serpent dragons'. Along the street thus built the statue of Marduk was borne in solemn march on the Babylonian New Year's Day, when the king paid yearly worship to the ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... river is narrow and fordable the tower was built by the Gibbelins' gluttonous sires, for they liked to see burglars rowing easily to their steps. Some nourishment that common soil has not the huge trees drained there with their colossal roots from both banks ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... signal. I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... heavens the real motion of the earth. Published tables of planetary motions. Motion still supposed to be in epicycles. Worked out his ideas for 36 years, and finally dedicated his work to the Pope. Died just as his book was printed, aged 72, a century before the birth of Newton. A colossal statue by Thorwaldsen erected ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... might come like the wind in the grass. Bee reached the choked ravine, pulled up his great roan. He was a man tall and large, and as he rose in his stirrups and held his sword aloft, standing against the sky, upon the rim of the ravine, he looked colossal, a bronze designed to point the way. He cried aloud, "Look! Yonder is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!" As he spoke a shell struck him. He ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... doctrine to its full extent, and traced its operation through an infinity of historical events and political institutions. It is to the success with which he has done this, and the combined philosophical depth and grasp of details which his writings exhibit, that his colossal reputation has been owing. He had prodigious acquaintance with individual facts, united to the power of classifying them under their proper heads, and deducing from them their general and common principles. Like the steam-engine, he could, by turns, turn a thread round a spindle, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... be admitted, however, that with the colossal growth of the Social Democratic party in Germany in numbers and the introduction into it of elements from various quarters, a certain deterioration, one may hope and believe only temporary, has become apparent in its quality. ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... enormity of the proposed insult and injury to the dignity of that Government which, in their eyes, was only a shade less sacred than the Church, and their first emotion was one of overwhelming indignation against those whose colossal insolence and audacity rendered them capable of such an overwhelmingly humiliating proposal. But the offence to their national pride was quickly swamped by considerations of their own personal safety, and as one man they soon came to the ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... that quarter of the city long before. He went about in flowing Asiatic garb; his dark complexion indicated a Southern origin, but to what particular nation he belonged, India, Greece, or Persia, no one could say with certainty. Of tall, almost colossal stature, with dark, thin, ardent face, heavy overhanging brows, and an indescribably strange colour in his large eyes of unwonted fire, he differed sharply and strongly from all the ash-coloured ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... many important events occurred. The power of Napoleon was crumbling in that year and countless historians have written countless pages describing innumerable events, great and small, which accompanied that colossal downfall. But one event of that year, of which we do not read in our historical memoirs and school books was the discovery by Sir Humphry Davy, in the humble person of a bookbinder's apprentice, of the man who will probably stand out forever in the history of science as the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... been more in sympathy with the discoverers in Natural History than John Fiske. No man ever knew so much about his work as John Fiske. His knowledge was colossal, his memory prodigious. And in all of the realm of science and philosophy, from microscopy and the germ theory to advanced astronomy and the birth of worlds, his glowing imagination saw the work of a beneficent Creator who stood above and beyond and outside of Natural Law, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... began to flow over their crests like a flood. Down it crept, lower, and yet lower, till it reached a little plateau not three hundred yards above us. There, on the edge of the plateau, looking out solemnly across the waste, sat a great ruined idol, a colossal Buddha, while to the rear of the idol, built of yellow stone, appeared the low crescent-shaped mass ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... as an actress changes her dress? Where Napoleon, with all his genius, had made a complete failure, could a young, ignorant woman be reasonably expected to succeed in the face of all Europe? Were her hands strong enough to rebuild the colossal edifice that lay in ruins ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... suffering that darken the face of the world is due to women's false position, showed, at all events, that this young creature held a burning conviction that the subjection of her sex was the world's Root-Evil. With no apparent apprehension of the colossal audacity of her position, the girl moved gravely that 'this meeting demands of the Government the insertion of an enfranchisement clause in the Plural Voting Bill, and demands that it shall become law during the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... none the less necessary, for no person of mind or heart can thrust this knowledge aside. It is the first step towards a solution of the labor complications, some of which have assumed foul shapes and colossal proportions, through ignorance, weakness, and ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... way, what a colossal labour must have been the preparation of the above Dictionary. How it reminds us of the words of poor, patient Antony Wood: "What toyle hath been taken, as no man thinketh, so no man believeth, but he that hath made the trial." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... opportunity which Beard offered. At the most he had two years and six months to serve. By good behavior he could reduce the term to a trifle less than two years. When he got out, his future comfort was assured. Five thousand a year looked colossal to him—in the most hopeful period of his advancing manhood he had never been able to earn above two ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... nerve centre of world revolution.... And from its frowning gates they sally forth in their high power limousines on affairs of state even as the Czars in their day went forth to superintend the administration of their colossal heritage. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... scientist; "of the most colossal. For it is a discovery you have of him made he is new ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... an age! How was it that You let Colossal genius and colossal crime Walk for a hundred years across the earth, Like giant twins? How was it then that men, Conceiving such vast beauty for the world, And such large hopes of heaven, could entertain Such hellish projects for their fellow-men? How could the hand ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... her enthusiasm. In the wildest flights of her imagination, she had never pictured such a scene as the one now presented to her eyes. It was as if she had been suddenly transported to fairyland, and was treading among the colossal habitations of giants. On all sides were stupendous masses of rock, huge boulders of all colors—white, yellow and red—most fantastically shaped. There were lofty towers, strange, wind-wrought obelisks, pointed pinnacles, bizarre in shape as one sees in nightmares. It reminded her of the settings ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... a hundred and fifty of the giant liners had gone into making that colossal mass of junk in space. They must protect the remaining cruisers! And it was that flight of small ships that did protect them. Many of the Solarians went down to death under their rays. The death rays were exceedingly effective, but the heat rays were not able to ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... too populous to conquer, but with possibilities of further expansion that are gigantic. The Slav will be free to increase and multiply for another hundred years. Eastward and southward bristle the Slavs, and behind the Slavs are the colossal possibilities of Asia. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... were living, wonderful proof that spirit, mind, and heart were free—free to soar in scorn of the colossal barrenness and silence and space of that terrible hedging prison of lava. They were young; they loved; they were together; and the oasis was almost a paradise. Gale believe he helped himself by watching them. Imagination had never pictured real happiness to him. Thorne and Mercedes ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... Phoenician amongst Phoenician people little need be said here. It can be traced in the graffiti of the mercenaries of Psammetichus at Abu Simbel in Upper Egyrt, where Greeks, Carians and Phoenicians all cut their names upon the legs of the colossal statues. Still later it is found on the stele of Byblos, and on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar (about 300 B.C.). The most numerous inscriptions come from the excavations in Carthage, the ancient colony of Sidon. One general feature characterizes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... thoughts came to her mind as we sat looking out on the pictures o; the mirage which the sun was painting on the desert landscape. But, finally, as we gazed, there seemed, among these weird images, one colossal tragic shape which moved, advanced, changed definitely. Now It stood in giant stature, and now dwindled, but always it came nearer. At last it darkened and denned and so disappeared beyond a blue ridge not half a mile away from us. We realized at last that it ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... from hard rock, a massive, blunt face as rigid as his arm. The third man can scarcely be described. He was neither short nor tall. He was muscled as heavily as the second man. As he sat he looked like a colossal toad squatting with his arms about his knees, and upon these his chin rested. He had no shape nor swiftness, and his head was flattened down and was scarcely wider than his neck. He had a protruding dog-like mouth that twitched occasionally, and from ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... appetites, the passions, the emotions are all held in allegiance to their rightful sovereign, Reason. The true words and deeds of successive generations will build up this glorified humanity, fairer than any Parian marble, grander than any colossal sculpture of the East, more exalted than spire or dome, boundless in capacity, in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... barbarizing backwards. This fatal gravitation towards decay and decomposition in Mahometan institutions, which, at this day, exhibits to the gaze of mankind one uniform spectacle of Mahometan ruins, all the great Moslem nations being already in a Strulbrug state, and held erect only by the colossal support of Christian powers, could not, as a reversionary evil, have been healed by the Arabian prophet. His own religious principles would have prevented that, for they offer a permanent bounty on sensuality; so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... a memorial lamp in the dome of the Taj, especially as the lamp is exquisite in workmanship and adds rather than detracts from the stately beauty of the interior. But just the same the first verdict of the spectator is that Lord Curzon displayed a colossal egotism in ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... the father of the ice business, now so colossal in its proportions, started the trade here, living on what is now the poor farm. The Saugus Female Seminary once held quite a place in literary circles, Cornelius C. Felton, afterward president of Harvard College, being its "chore boy" (the ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... bit of pulsating, jelly-like life—it is all I am. About me are the great natural forces—colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... a place above the little inlet, directly across from the burning Peristyle. The fire had burned itself out now, and was dying with protests of reviving flame spurting here and there from the dark spots of the Court. The colossal figure rising from the lagoon in front of the Peristyle was still illuminated,—the light falling upon the gilded ball borne aloft,—solemnly presiding even in the ruins of the dream. And behind this colossal ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion, long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from all ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... all a question of what you may want, but of what is best for you. I have merely been trying to tell you in my awkward way that it is not good for one to live alone." She laughed hysterically. The colossal impudence of the man took her breath away. She gasped—attempted to speak, but words failing her, turned her back upon him and began tearing into shreds the end of the silken gauze Indian scarf which she wore ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... He found that colossal hostelry, and was just inquiring of the clerk whether a Mr. Longworth was staying there, when that gentleman appeared at the desk, took ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... though high-born and accomplished, is a hysterical wildcat. You did well, my child; you did extremely well. So long as I have found you, nothing matters; but, nothing at all. As my great, my gigantic friend, my colossal preserver, el Capitan Gimmo, says, 'Ourrah ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... being large birds are the larger hawks, owls, herons, eagles, geese, etc. The several varieties of the ostrich are known as colossal birds and are skinned and preserved much as the large quadrupeds by mounting the prepared skin on a manikin, built in the pose of the finished specimen and supported by ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... modified to suit their own needs. In illustration is the Chinese ideograph, for the learning of which even in the modern common-school reader, there is no arrangement of the characters in the order of their complexity. The possibility of simplifying the colossal task of memorizing these uncorrelated ideographs does not seem to have occurred to the Japanese; though it is now being attempted by the foreigner. Perhaps a partial explanation of this apparent exception to the usual flexibility of the people in meeting conditions may be ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... men who wait to welcome you to the blessings of our society. There they stand, like the majestic statues that line the entrance to an eternal pyramid. And when I look upon one statue, and another, and another, and contemplate the colossal greatness of their proportions, as Canova gazed with rapture upon the sun-god of the Vatican, I envy not the man whose heart expands not with the sense of a new nobility, and whose eye kindles not with the heart's enthusiasm, as he thinks ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... and kept open by numerous officers, who drove back all who crowded into or ran across the main avenue. This triumph lasted three days. On the first, which was scarcely long enough for the sight, were to be seen the statues, pictures, and colossal images, which were taken from the enemy, drawn upon two hundred and fifty chariots. On the second, was carried in a great many wagons the finest and richest armor of the Macedonians, both of brass and steel, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... very life-blood when necessary. Overwork is "the last infirmity of noble minds." Yet when not really necessary, it must be ranked as a sin, and not too generously condoned. The intense competition of modern industry, the complexity of our economic machinery, the colossal accumulation of facts which must be mastered for success, bring heavy pressure to bear upon those who have their way to make in the world. The pace is fast, and many there are that die or break from overstrain when at the height of their usefulness. Such, overpressure does not pay; it ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... shall be leaving either to-morrow or the next day—for a short time. Now, Don Sebastian Alvaros, disgrace to the uniform that you wear, unmitigated blackguard and scoundrel, mean, contemptible coward, and, as I believe, colossal liar, listen to me! As I told you a moment ago, I am leaving Cuba within the next day or two. But I shall return, Senor; and if it should ever prove that the infamous story which you have just told is even approximately true, I ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... Such in brief suggestion was Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple—"a huge mastodon, whose moral perceptions were all colossal and monstrous." ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the fruit before it was ripe, or, to use a more exact simile, before he was tall enough to reach it. In vain he represented to Abdul Hamid the immense advantages which would result to Turkey by the establishment of those Gott-like German settlers in Asia Minor. Out of his colossal egalo-megalomania, of which we know more now, he thought that any request which the All-Highest should deign to make must instantly be granted. But he met with a perfectly flat refusal, and the baffled All-Highest left Constantinople ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... of the Red Sea to the French Republic"; to improve the condition of the natives of Egypt, and to cultivate good relations with the Grand Signior. Another secret decree empowered Bonaparte to seize Malta. To these schemes he added another of truly colossal dimensions. After conquering the East, he would rouse the Greeks and other Christians of the East, overthrow the Turks, seize Constantinople, and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... seized Pig Head, and tipped him on end, even as he had tipped the eagles. Two knives went "snick" as they opened, then "wheep-wheep" as they cut. Several pieces of cord and bits of sacking flew into the air. There was one colossal upheaval of wings, a feathered whirlwind hurling everybody every way—and the Chieftain and his son, released and scandalized, offended and enraged beyond the rage of kings, rose swiftly into the air with mighty, threshing strokes ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... saw all were waiting for something further, "there can be no doubt that Tintoretto was a great painter and a notable man. To read the story of his life,—his struggles to learn the art,—his assurance of the worth of his own work, and his colossal ambitions, is as interesting as ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... genius; and here (in the Cathedral) you have what is esteemed his masterpiece—the "Descent from the Cross"—which surprises you with a boldness of drawing, vigour and richness of colouring, and an animation in the grouping, that can scarcely be excelled; and when you discern the colossal figures from a little distance amongst the pillars and arches of the nave, you feel inclined to bow in reverence to the divinity of the genius which has portrayed so wonderful a conception of the mind. It is needless to say that this was one of the works ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... grandfather, who died in the 'fifties, used to tell a story of a hermit who lived in Savernake Forest, an extraordinarily absent-minded man with a beard of such colossal dimensions that several of the feathered denizens of the forest took up their abode in its recesses. This curious phenomenon was, I believe, commemorated in verse by an early-Victorian poet, but I have not been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... and nights the great fleets shuttled backandforth over the jungled area, dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs. Following close behind, still more planes dropped cargoes of fuel to feed the colossal bonfire. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... C. or Lyons's; and perhaps go into Hyde Park. Gradually it came back to her that her father used to take them to Hyde Park on Sundays. But that was long ago, and on Sundays the traffic was less and the shops were all shuttered. She gave a sigh at the memory, awoke, and marched up to a colossal policeman who was wagging a pair of gloves in his right hand—as if to keep the flies away, but in reality to encourage the traffic. He inclined an ear, and an eye to her letter, and ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... The Pyramids are thine; Their giant summits guard thee night and day, On thee they look when stars in splendor shine, Or while around their crests the sunbeams play: Thine own coevals, who with thee remain Colossal Genii of the boundless plain! ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... individual soon wearied of expiring patriots, who all appeared to be quitting their earthly tabernacles in convulsions, ruffled shirts, and a whirl of torn banners, bomb shells, and buff and blue arms and legs. The statuary also was massive and concrete, but rather wearying to examine; for the colossal ladies and gentlemen, carried no cards of introduction in face or figure; so, whether the meditative party in a kilt, with well-developed legs, shoes like army slippers, and a ponderous nose, was Columbus, Cato, or Cockelorum Tibby, the tragedian, was more than I could tell. Several ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... hundred; tramways, telegraph-poles, enormous signs, holes in the pavement, oceans of mud, commis-voyageurs, young ladies looking for the husband. On the other hand, no beggars and no cocottes—none, at least, that you see. A colossal mediocrity, except (my brother-in-law tells me) in the machinery, which is magnificent. Naturally, no architecture (they make houses of wood and of iron), no art, no literature, no theatre. I have opened some of ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... the age in which he lived, the differences in moral standards between the past and the present, and the force of the temptations which come with strength of body, passion, imagination, great position, colossal enterprises; these do not conceal or excuse the faults of heroes but they explain ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... guinea there isn't one of them has more than 200L a year," put in Chanter, whose father could just write his name, and was making a colossal fortune by supplying bad iron rails to the new ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... of this number of people, the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of various material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal convictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and the elimination of the dead, colossal task though it would be, is still not so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with the work of the post-offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing of such libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Minar is a needle of red stone, that rises from a plain as flat as paper to a height of two hundred and fifty feet; and you might compare it, as you catch, approaching, glimpses of it at a distance, to a colossal chimney, a Pharos, or an Efreet of the Jinn. The last would be the best. For nothing on the surface of the earth can parallel the scene of desolation which unrols itself below, if you climb its 380 steps and look out from the dizzy verge: a thing that will test ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... almost hear in it the laughter of the eternally young.... Not only the glamor of the Orient but the breath of Undying Youth is in this work of Tagore, a genius so peculiar to India, so utterly inartificial, so completely of imagination all compact that his colossal power begotten of Fairyland and the World of Visions makes us poor Occidentals look very ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... the lip of a heather-edged bluff which fell sheer for perhaps two hundred feet into a pinewood. Beyond, by mammoth terraces, the glory of the forest sank step by colossal step into the purple distance, from which distant in turn a thread of silver argued the ocean. There never was such a staircase. The grandeur of its proportions diminished the rolling world. The splendour of its covering made ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... by the form of his government, not merely to succeed, but to dazzle, to astonish, to subjugate. His Empire required extraordinary magnificence, prodigious effects, Babylonian festivities, gigantic adventures, colossal victories. His Imperial escutcheon, to escape contempt, needed rich coats of gilding, and demanded glory to make up for the lack of antiquity. In order to make himself acceptable to the European, monarchs, his new brothers, and to remove the memory of the venerable titles of the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... been made into a guard-house, with battlements and frescos and heraldic devices in gold and colors, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size in his niche and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close at hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... dawn Martina led me back to the colossal statues, and we waited there, hoping that we should hear them sing, as tradition said they did when the sun rose. Yet the sun came up as it had done from the beginning of the world, and struck upon those giant effigies as it had done for some two thousand years, or so I was told, ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... superlatively honest one. He had the initiative, the knowledge, and above all the judgment that made some men call him the Napoleon of Threadneedle Street. At forty-five he launched the Union Bank of Brazil and Uruguay; and to that colossal undertaking he devoted the last twenty-five years of his ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... flame arose lighting up the great wall of rock from summit to base. An Indian who was leaning over the brazier rose upright, his two hands in the air, his elbows bent, and all at once we saw arising, all black on the immense white cliff, a colossal shadow, the shadow of Buddha in his hieratic posture. And the little pointed toque that the man wore on his head even looked like the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... been sent for into France, where grow The Lilies that illumine heaven and earth, And carry in mine equipage the model Of a most marvellous golden salt-cellar For the king's table; and here in my brain A statue of Mars Armipotent for the fountain Of Fontainebleau, colossal, wonderful. I go a goldsmith, to return a sculptor. And so farewell, great Master. Think of me As one who, in the midst of all his follies, Had also his ambition, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... city. And his fresh earth grip and virile conception of humanity gave him a finer sense of civilization and endeared civilization to him. Day by day the people of the city clung closer to him and the world loomed more colossal. And, day by day, Alaska grew more remote and less real. And then he met Kitty Sharon—a woman of his own flesh and blood and kind; a woman who put her hand into his hand and drew him to her, till he forgot the day and hour and the ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... square are forty obelisks of one piece of granite. A road is cut in the mountain of red marble, having on the left a parapet wall about five feet in height. At equal distances there are solid pedestals, upon the tops of which stood originally colossal statues of Sirius, Litrator Anubis, or Dog Star. There are 133 of these pedestals, but only two much mutilated figures of the Dog remain. There are also pedestals for figures of the Sphinx. Two magnificent flights of steps several hundred feet ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... buoyant, and the young multi-millionaire who faced him with uplifted hand even after the former returned to his chair, were exact opposites in everything save wealth alone. Roderick Duncan, son and heir of Stephen Langdon's former partner, was the possessor, by inheritance, of one of those colossal fortunes which are expressed in so many figures that the average man ceases to contemplate their meaning. Nevertheless, Duncan had kept himself clean and straight. In person, he was tall, handsome, distinguished in appearance, and genuinely a fine specimen of young American manhood. ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... of Yarmouth (1777-1842), succeeded his father as second Marquis of Hertford in 1822. The colossal libertinism and patrician splendour of his life inspired Disraeli to paint him as "Monmouth" in 'Coningsby', and Thackeray as "Steyne" in 'Vanity Fair'. He married, in 1798, Maria Fagniani, claimed as a daughter by George Selwyn and by "Old Q.," and enriched ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of which her form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and the climax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous, more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figure in the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritual character, that the difficulty in all its extent ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... from the far East, discernible at once by their costume, were many present, who seemed interested not less than others in the great questions to be agitated. Between the two central columns upon the western side, just beneath the pedestal of a colossal statue of Vespasian, the great military idol of Aurelian, upon a seat slightly raised above the floor, having on his right hand Livia and Julia, sat the Emperor. He was surrounded by his favorite generals and the chief members of the senate, seated, or else standing against the columns or statues ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... An almost Mephistophilean coolness, an unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the mean possibilities of the sublime,—these, with a native sense of incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration, make up his stock- in-trade. The colossal exaggeration is, of course, natural to a land of ocean-like rivers and almighty tall pumpkins. No one has made such charming use of the trick as Mark Twain. The dryness of the story of a greenhorn's sufferings who had purchased "a genuine ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... intelligent race of savages; and looking into futurity, he already saw a monstrous cross crowning the dome-like summit. Far different were the sensations of the muleteer, who saw in those awful solitudes only fiery dragons, colossal bears and break-neck trails. The converts, Concepcion and Incarnacion, trotting modestly beside the Padre, recognized, perhaps, some manifestation of their ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... sharp and shrewd trader, but his honesty was never questioned; indeed, the only trait in his character that ever came up for general discussion was his extraordinary, unbelievable, colossal meanness. This so eclipsed every other passion in the man, and loomed so bulkily and insistently in the foreground, that had he cherished a second vice no one would have observed it, and if he really did possess a casual virtue, it could scarcely ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rhetoricians. Now our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men. And just as this repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of small men in the arts. Our modern politicians claim the colossal license of Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are too practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral; but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our new artistic philosophers call for the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... arranged my own pictures and few belongings about the room and felt more at home. After I had dressed and stood ready to go down for my first dinner in my new home I felt happier. To be living, to be young and enthusiastic, to possess the colossal courage of youth, was enough to bring happiness into my heart again. I'm going to like this place. I'm going to work and play and live in ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... know no more than I do what becomes of the old moons. Their place is immediately supplied by new candidates. Paris is thus kept perennially sumptuous and splendid by the gold it engulfs. But then some men succeed,—succeed prodigiously, preternaturally; they make colossal fortunes, which are magnificently expended. They set an example of show and pomp, which is of course the more contagious because so many men say, 'The other day those millionnaires were as poor as we are; they never economized; why should we?' Paris is thus doubly enriched,—by ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sir James) Macdonell [d. 1857], "a man of colossal stature," who occupied and defended the Chateau of Hougoumont on the night before the battle of Waterloo. (See Gronow, Reminiscences, 1889, i. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... that Blake had ever heard before. Vibrant with colossal power, it suggested a sustained note struck from a giant organ, a note so low in pitch that it seemed a full octave below the lowest bass note ever struck. Whatever it was, the thundering vibration of infra-bass was coming nearer ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... another voice, and Hugh came forward laughing, and took his sister in his arms. "Well, little girl,—big, enormous, colossal little girl, how are you? Shut your eyes, Peg of Limavaddy, or they will drop out, and then what should ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven. One felt one might at last find something lighter than light. In the fullness of this silent effulgence all ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... is about fourteen hundred feet long by nine hundred broad, and its faces front the four quarters of the heavens. You rise from the plain by flights of marble steps, so broad and easy that a procession on horseback could ascend them. By these you reach a landing, where stand as sentinels two colossal figures sculptured from great blocks of marble. The one horn in the forehead seems to Heeren to indicate the Unicorn; the mighty limbs, whose muscles are carved with the precision of the Grecian ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... up amid this colossal prosperity. The one, tall, brown-haired, with blue eyes changing like the sea; the other, fragile, fair, with dark dreamy eyes. Jeanne, proud, capricious, and inconstant; Micheline, simple, sweet, and tenacious. The brunette ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... solutions to the question were left, creating two very distinct groups of supporters: on one side, those favoring a monster of colossal strength; on the other, those favoring an "underwater boat" ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... President Kruger has for many years carefully propagated the fear of such an attempt among the Dutch in South Africa, as a means of separating Boers and Englishmen into two camps, and as an incentive to their preparing the colossal armament that has now been brought into play, not to keep the English out of the Transvaal, but to realise what is called the Afrikander programme of a Dutch domination over the whole of South Africa. Thus, he a short time ago imported from Europe ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... remained lying back in the carriage, looking like an irritated queen. By that time they were driving up the Champs Elysees, towards the Arc de Triomphe. That immense monument, at the end of the long avenue, raised its colossal arch against the red sky, and the sun seemed to be descending onto it, showering fiery dust on ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... inevitable results that would flow from the general adoption of the principles which he professes, ought to decide whether or not he really desires to overthrow the polity under which he lives, ought to ask if he and his fellows are able to face with any serious hope of success the colossal task of constructing a new society on the ruins of the old. Now the historic rebels to whom I have referred above by way of example—the Greek Nationalists, the French Revolutionists, the English Puritans and Whigs—did not hesitate ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... must be confessed that her supreme calmness and incredible audacity saved her more than once. The Conde de Onis, the colossal man with a long beard, was a mere puppet in the hands of the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... provided for his Passover was to be so rudely dispelled at the eleventh hour. Poor Moses! He had been so proud of having earned enough money to make a good Yontov, and was more convinced than ever that given a little capital to start with he could build up a colossal business! And now she would have to go home and spoil everybody's Yontov, and see the sour faces of her little ones round a barren Seder table. Oh, it was terrible! and the child wept piteously, unheeded in the block, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to the throne—2, upon his amiable rival for having supplanted him—and 3, upon all those of the nobility who had manifested their sense of his weakness by their neglect, or their sense of his perfidious character by their suspicions. Here was a colossal outline of wickedness; and by one in his situation, feeble (as it might seem) for the accomplishment of its humblest parts, how was the total edifice to be reared in its comprehensive grandeur? He, a worm as he was, could he venture to assail the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... time those plastic "nature-motives" which in the Nibelungen-trilogy with constantly increasing individuality are made the exponents of the passions and the characters which give expression to them. He immediately returned to his dreary, involuntary home to proceed with the completion of his colossal work, which was to engage his attention for many years. A visit from Liszt, in October, led to a profounder understanding of Beethoven's last sonatas, so that their language was fully identified with his own. "Rheingold" and the "Walkuere" ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... a nobleman of colossal stature stepped forward and said I could claim his protection, as my whole family, myself included, had served the prince his master. He spoke the truth, for he was the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... stood above the immense red-baked wall at its eastern end, where it was in huge blocks stratified in thicknesses varying from 15 to 20 ft. each. In that eastern section the strata were perfectly horizontal. On the western side of the crater was a colossal quadrangular mountain of red-baked rock—a solid mass of granite with a narrow band, slightly discoloured, all along its summit. There—above—we also perceived a slight grassy slope, and above it again a great natural wall in layers 6 ft. thick. From the bottom of the mountain ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... notions in his egomania I believe is recorded in authentic history. But the way Eitel I had adapted that faith to the rather depressing facts of the failure of world conquest would have been extremely comical to me, had I not seen ample evidence of the colossal effect of such a faith working in the credulous child-mind of a people so utterly devoid of any ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... was pointed out that at the time at which the Great Pyramid was built, probably about 4000 years ago, mining, architecture, astronomy, etc., were so advanced in various parts of the East as to present no obstacle in the way of the erection of such magnificent mausoleums, as the colossal Great Pyramid and its other ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... homewards. Men were standing on the wall along the Arno, in various picturesque attitudes, fishing, after the Italian fashion, with singular nets suspended to long poles; and as I saw their dark figures between me and the moonlight, and elevated above my eye, they looked like colossal statues. I then strayed into the Piazza del Gran Duca. Here the rich moonlight, streaming through the arcade of the gallery, fell directly upon the fine Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini; and illuminating the green bronze, touched it with a spectral and supernatural beauty. Thence I walked round ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... country swarmed with game, large and small, from the colossal elephant to the tiny dinkerbuck. To Laurence, passionately fond of sport, this alone was sufficient to reconcile him to his strange captivity—for a time. He would be the life and soul of the Ba-gcatya hunting parties, and skill and success, together with his untiring energy and philosophical ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... fascination—one of those reputations which can only emanate from the man himself—M. de Chauxville neither fascinated nor intimidated Miss Delafield. He therefore disliked her intensely. His vanity was colossal, and when a Frenchman is ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... society woman, accustomed to be addressed and joked with and caressed by scores of persons every day—her own people, friends, visitors, strangers! Such a child I met last summer at a west-end shop or emporium where women congregate in a colossal tea-room under a glass dome, with glass doors opening upon an acre of ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... the same sort of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done something. One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the utmost. Spy you insecurity?—a possibility of invasion? Then indeed the colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is no attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable. Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger across the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not what is known as a "war story." It is not even a story of the War, but a relation of incidents occurring amidst and resulting from the strenuousness of a period to which "the War" was a background so colossal that it dwarfed all events, except in the minds of those for whom such events personally shook and darkened or brightened the world. Nothing can dwarf personal anguish at its moment of highest power; to the last agony and despairing terror of the heart-wrung ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gate is a fine bronze colossal bust of Alexander Von Humboldt, the work of Professor Blaiser of Berlin, which was presented to the park by the German citizens of New York, and inaugurated on the 14th of September, 1869, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of the colossal egotism of Youth. It is not egotism; it is unfathomable ignorance. The youth knows neither himself, the world nor his adversaries. He is unafraid because he does not know the strength of the forces he would conquer. But society learns from the threshings about of its individuals. And it is ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... before God! Would the Christ not say now as He said so many centuries ago—'My House is called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves!' Is it not truly a den of thieves? What has the Man of Sorrows to do with all the evil splendour of St. Peter's?—its bronzes, its marbles, its colossal statues of dead gods, its glittering altars, its miserable dreary immensity, its flaring gilding and insolent vulgarity of cost! Oh, what a loneliness is that of Christ in this world! What ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... ambition's reach. He saw a crown high above all human grandeur. He sought, he gained, and wore that crown. But he had indeed one frailty—the weakness of great minds. He was fond of fame, and had reared a colossal reputation. It stood on the rock of his virtue. This was dear to his heart. There was but one thing dearer. He loved glory, but still more he loved his country. That was the master passion, and with resistless might it ruled his every thought and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... pure in its quality, and has in it quite as much of tenderness and grief as of wrath and indignation; and it rages with all the fierceness of his half-savage nature. The passion in him becomes heroic, colossal; but it is perfect in its nature and in its proportions, and from the point to which he has been brought by Iago, perfectly justifiable. Hence it is that it is so respected by women. Nothing was more remarkable at Salvini's admirable performance of Othello than the acquiescence of all ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... of The Lane none more deserved distinction than Mary Magovern. The grandmother of a numerous family, she united all the masculine and feminine virtues. About the stiff, spotless and colossal frill of her cap curled wreaths of smoke from her stout dhudeen as she sat before the door blacking the small boots of her grandchildren, stopping from time to time to remove the pipe from her mouth, that she might deliver in her full bass voice a peremptory order to the large yellow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... the excitement was very great in the faubourgs, the sections, the usual support of the assembly, defiled through it. There was, also, opposite the Invalides, an elevated mound, a Mountain, surmounted by a colossal group, representing Hercules crushing a hydra. The section of the Halle-au-ble demanded that this should be removed. The left of the assembly murmured. "The giant," said a member, "is an emblem of the people." "All I see in it is a mountain," replied another, "and what is a Mountain but an eternal ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... name of Amunoph III. is engraved on the oval face of the ring, exactly as it appears on the tablet of Abydus in the British Museum. Amunoph (who reigned, according to Wilkinson, B.C. 1403-1367) is the same monarch known to the Greeks as Memnon; and the colossal "head of Memnon," placed in the British Museum through the agency of Mr. Salt, has a similar group of hieroglyphics sculptured on its shoulder. There was another kind of official ring, which we can recognise from the description of Pliny, and of which we give an engraving (Fig. 81) from the ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... roofs went magic veilings of flimsy smoke. Down the avenues clanged cars black with mechanics, clerks, and shop-girls on the way to work; people streamed hurrying to their day's toil. The city was awake, shaking in every part of her with glad breakfast and the rush to activity. What colossal forces swinging in, swinging out of the metropolis in long pulsations of freight and ship and electricity! Wall Street would roar, the skyscrapers swarm, the schools drone and murmur and sing, the mills grind and rattle, and the six continents and ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... to the frontier without awaiting the solution to the question. Such was his method now. He had so much to do that he could but skim the surface of his task. For the human mind, though it be colossal, can only work within certain limits. The greatest orator in the world can only move his immediate hearers. Those beyond the inner circle catch a word here and there, and imagination supplies the rest or improves upon it. But those in the farthest gallery ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... life. She became the centre of thought and speculation, prayers and supplications were addressed to her, and more than once did she appear in beatific vision to some illumined worshipper. It was in the midst of this glow of feeling that Cimabue painted his colossal and wondrous Madonna and Child with the Angels, the largest altar piece which had been produced up to that time. Cimabue was then living in the Borgo Allegri, one of the suburbs of Florence, and there in his studio this great painting slowly ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger |
