"Fantastically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to Osmonde the day he had watched her on the moor; and the gipsy women stood by showing their white teeth in their pleasure, and the gipsy men hung about with black shining eyes fixed on her in stealthy admiration. She stood by the fire in the light of the flame, having fantastically wound a scarlet scarf about her head, and 'twas as though she might have been ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... experience of the true horrors of sleep-fighting. It was bitterly cold—cold as the Free State night on the veld knows how to be. And we could not smoke, could not talk above a faint murmur, and nodded in our saddles. The clear stars danced fantastically in the sky ahead of us, and the ground seemed to be falling away from us into vast hollows, then rising to our horses' noses ready to smash into us like an impalpable wall. After midnight, outspanning ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... depths of the eyes sparkling with intensity of observation, as if they were everywhere at once and gazed through and through. He wore his national dress, with the short cloak over one shoulder; but the little boy, who stood at the table, had been fantastically arrayed in a sort of semi-Albanian garb, a red cap with a long tassel, a dark, gold-embroidered velvet jacket sitting close to his body, and a white kilt over his legs, bare except for buskins stiff with gold. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... we lie in the little room, Just touching hands, with eyes and ears that strain Keenly, yet dream-bewildered, through tense gloom, Listening in helpless stupor of insane Drugged nightmare panic fantastically wild, To the quiet breathing of ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... close on either hand, and ran back so sharply from the narrow waterway that they seemed to shut in the boat from the world beyond. The moonlight showed a little mud fort or a thatched cottage on the bank fantastically, as through a mist, and from time to time as they sped forward they saw the camp-fire of a sentry, and his shadow as he passed between it and them, or stopped to cover it with wood. The night was so still that they could ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... shocks of the day before; I know I was prepared for nothing at all—to find the grass as I'd left it or even reverted to its original decay. Indeed, I was not too sure that my memory was completely accurate; that the thing had happened so fantastically. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the butt of it. The latter had few personal attractions. According to Falstaff's portrait of him, he looked like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When he was naked he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife: he was so forlorn that his dimensions to any thick sight were invincible: he was the very genius of famine; and a certain section of his friends called him mandrake: he came ever in the rearward ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... temple scene in The Magic Flute was then exposed to view: the gloomy, massive architecture of the interior, the glowing sky above it in the background, and, silhouetted against the latter, the gigantic seated statue of the Pharaoh. A fantastically carved wooden couch lay before the pedestal of the statue. Near the curtain, obliquely placed to the auditorium, was a plain oak armchair, for ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... I accepted, for it was too fantastically strange to refuse; do you think so? What an adventure! What luck! A number of letters between the Countess and Bakounine prepared the way; I was introduced to him at his house, and they discussed me there. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides, and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the kitchen, save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls and ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and pans. The rain pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney; the lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed. And Peter looked at the Duchessa—and blessed the elements. To see her seated there, in her ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... returned to his room for some books, and then began his own march across the snowy campus. The wind twisted his coat-tails fantastically, and he was obliged to keep one hand firmly on the top of his hat. When he arrived home he met his wife in the hall. " Look here, Mary," he cried. She followed him into the library. " Look here," he said. "What is this all about? Marjory ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... of these is By the Fireside. After One Word More, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning's most perfect rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rapturous love. The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. A landscape so instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness is hardly to be found elsewhere ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... neighbours. Fate brought him face to face with two enemies at once. Maso was battling his way up the street, white and strained as a grave-cloth; and Carlo Formaggia, the approved bravo—oiled and jaunty, with his brown felt fantastically rolled and stuck over one ear, with a long cigar which he alternately gnawed and sucked, Carlo the broad-chested, of the seared, evil face, came down with the stream on the arms of two other gilded youths. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... outline of sea; and distant though it seems, sends its reflection across the waves even up to the very ship itself. Ah! if one could but secure that orange tinge, one might gaze at it unwearied all day long. See, also, the dark, fantastically-shaped spots on the ocean as the sails of the distant vessels appear between us and the sun, like evil spirits gliding about the ocean to cause shipwrecks and disaster; while again, on the opposite quarter, the canvas appears of snowy whiteness, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... green quivering leaf above flickering between us and the bright blue cloudless sky, and the everlasting rocks, with those diamond—like tears trickling down their rugged cheeks, impending over us,—and those gigantic gnarled trees, with their tracery of black withes fantastically tangled, whose naked roots twist and twine amongst the fissures, like serpents trying to shelter themselves from the scorching rays of the vertical sun, and those feather—like bamboos high arching overhead, and screening us under their noble canopy,—and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of his escapades, and of all the knowledge, unutterable in Bursley, fantastically impossible in Bursley, which he had imparted to her son, he marvelled that the maternal instinct should be so deceived. Still, he felt that her praise ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... tried to arrange a suitable toilette in which to call on her cousin, Mme. d'Espard. The weather was rather chilly. Looking through the dowdy wardrobe from Angouleme, she found nothing better than a certain green velvet gown, trimmed fantastically enough. Lucien, for his part, felt that he must go at once for his celebrated blue best coat; he felt aghast at the thought of his tight jacket, and determined to be well dressed, lest he should meet the Marquise d'Espard or receive ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... of my heaviness of heart, I laughed and loved the man. There was something fantastically chivalrous in the action; something superb in the contempt of convention; something whimsical, adventurous, unexpected; and something divine in the wrathful pity; and something irresistible in his impudent apostrophe to myself. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... seen her! She was dressed in a white brocade trimmed with a piece of red silk around the bottom, a red, blousy waist covered with gold heads sewed fantastically over it, perhaps odds and ends of old ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... his shoulders drooped, and his head bowed. For once silence had fixed its seal upon his lips, no inspiring speech fell from them. He had been suddenly swept back into a past he had striven these twenty years and more to forget, and his memories shaped themselves fantastically. Surely if ever a man had quitted the world that knew him, he was that man! He had died and yet he lived—lived horribly, without soul or heart, the empty shell of ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... the instant the sound ceased, Tressilian, instead of interposing the space of time which his guide had required, started up with his sword in his hand, ran round the thicket, and confronted a man in a farrier's leathern apron, but otherwise fantastically attired in a bear-skin dressed with the fur on, and a cap of the same, which almost hid the sooty and begrimed features of the wearer. "Come back, come back!" cried the boy to Tressilian, "or you will be torn to pieces; no man lives that looks on ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... strolling in imagination through the moonlit garden, listening to the birds, the waters, and the rustling leaves, while the stately beat of the minuet comes throbbing through it all, calling up the vision of gayly dressed cavaliers and beautiful ladies fantastically moving to the tune. Such poetic sentiment as this of the purely picturesque sort was in large measure Thalberg's possession, but he could never understand that turbulent ground-swell of passion which music can also powerfully express, and by which ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... about to celebrate the Holy Communion, Ivan came into the Cathedral with a troop of his satellites, like him, fantastically dressed in black cassocks and high caps. He came towards the Metropolitan, but Feeleep kept his eyes fixed on the picture of our Lord, and never looked at him. Someone said, 'Holy Father, here is the prince; ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar silence, full ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... verdure-clad walls of the canyon had long been steadily marching closer. Above, between their rims the wide ribbon of sky was like a fantastically shored river, shimmering, dazzling; every cove and headland edged with an opalescent glimmering ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... eyes; not a quiver of a lip or an eyelash betrays to you the outrageous quality of your French. The behaviour of your sentences would cause a scandal in a private boarding school for young ladies, it is so fantastically incorrect. But Max and Jean receive each phrase with an imperturbable and charming gravity. By the subtlest suggestion of manner they assure you that you speak with fluency and distinction, that yours is a very perfect French. ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... disaster, they knew they were too late. Not a house, not a building of any kind, but was already wrapped in a roaring torrent of flame, and against the broad illumination could be seen the figures of the savages, fantastically dancing. The English captain formed his line with prudent deliberation, and then led the attack at ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... driven back by a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next morning I started for the GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk sharply against the sky, except where fleecy clouds lightly draped it and fantastically blew about it. As I ascended, and turned to look at it, its beautifully cut peak had caught the first ray of the sun, and burned with a rosy glow. Some great clouds drifted high in the air: the summits ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... morning. It was bordered by a low stone wall along which two peacocks strutted with almost ridiculous self-consciousness of their beauty. In the very centre was a flight of steps which descended to the bowling-green beneath, where the yew hedge which grew round it had been fantastically cut into the shape of an embattlemented parapet, framing the distant view into a series of charming little pictures: here a glimpse of the river, there a delightful vignette ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... aeroplane observation by the dense foliage, the reserve Companies of the Brigade, lived in canvas tents fantastically daubed or in log huts. Some of the more elaborate of these latter served the double purpose of mess and bedroom for the Company Officers, the sides being taken up by two tiers of bunks made of wire ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular Sovereignty"; but never a man among you in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, 195 Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar's plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set 200 With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; 205 For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o'er the unfathomable ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... was just dispelling the diaphanous mists of early morning, making them hang luminous a moment and then disperse, like tinted gauze that flutters slowly upward in a breeze and vanishes. Great white clouds, foam-like and crisp, piled themselves up fantastically and floated off also, leaving the deep blue vault to mirror itself in the answering azure of the sea; the eternal calm above, awful in its intensity of stillness; the ceaseless movement below, a type of life, throbbing, murmurous, changeful, more interesting than awe-inspiring, more ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... man to waste words over the social conventions. He was obviously well—as well as a hard, seafaring life will make a man who lives simply and works hard. He was a short man, with a red face washed very clean, and very well shaven, except for a little piece of beard left fantastically at the base of his chin. His eyes were blue and bright, like gimlets. He may have had a soft heart, but it was certainly hidden beneath a hard exterior. He wore a thick coat of blue pilot-cloth, not because the July day was cold, but because it ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... geraniums stood about. Within a few hundred yards of the house, the green and glowing cultivation stopped as abruptly as the edges of an oasis in the desert, and the Karoo began—that sweeping, high table-land, empty of all but brown stones, long white thorns, fantastically shaped clumps of prickly-pear, bare brown hills, and dried-up rivulets, and that yet is one of the healthiest and, from the farmer's point of view, wealthiest plateaux in ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... true that his style partakes of the defects of his age, that the brilliancy of his rhetoric does not always compensate for the defectiveness of his reasoning; that he resembles, not a mirror which clearly reflects the truth, but "a glass fantastically cut into a thousand spangles;" that side by side with great moral truths we sometimes find his worst errors, contradictions, and paradoxes; that his eloquent utterances about God often degenerate into a vague Pantheism; and that even on the doctrine of immortality ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... hand, with a bell fastened to the lower part of his back, and several smaller ones round his ankles. Thus equiped he starts from the Egbo-house, runs through the streets with his bells ringing, to the house of the offender, followed by half a dozen subordinate personages fantastically dressed, each carrying either a ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... entirely open square, of about 150 paces by 100,) you can scarcely look upon a more lively and stirring scene. The houses and their shops (they have all shops) are like nothing so much as so many scenes in a pantomime—so fancifully and variously are they filled, so brightly and fantastically painted, and so abruptly do they seem to have risen out of the ground! This last appearance is caused by the absence of a foot-path, and of areas, porticoes, railings, &c.—such as, in all cases, give a kind of finish to the look of our houses. The houses ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... with Indians when expecting a fight, they were nearly naked, fantastically painted with blue clay, and hideously arrayed in war bonnets. They seemed very belligerent, brandishing their muskets in the air, dancing on one foot, calling us ugly names, and making such other demonstrations of hostility, that it seemed at first that nothing short of the total destruction ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... fantastically feathered hat of conceit, her broad sleeves of self-righteousness, her ruby bracelets and necklace of vanity, her flowing garments of personal liberty, and her shoes ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... And if there is a more abjectly awful feeling than that the Other Girl pities you, nobody has discovered it yet.... Gail might even know how much of a pretender she was. If John—but no. John wasn't like that. He was—"fantastically honorable," she had heard Phyllis call it. John hadn't told—he wouldn't tell if his own happiness depended on it.... And Joy let her thoughts stray off into a maze of wondering as to whether she would rather have her self-respect ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... the hearer, then the Turkes Tribute. I doe remember him at Clements Inne, like a man made after Supper, of a Cheese-paring. When hee was naked, hee was, for all the world, like a forked Radish, with a Head fantastically caru'd vpon it with a Knife. Hee was so forlorne, that his Dimensions (to any thicke sight) were inuincible. Hee was the very Genius of Famine: hee came euer in the rere-ward of the Fashion: And now is this Vices Dagger become a Squire, and talkes as familiarly of ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... name, however, by the epithets "most fantastic, but most human." To me the essential humanity was always the thing most apparent. In a fire well nourished of seasoned ship-timber, the flames glance fantastically and of many colours, but the glow at heart is ever deep and strong; it was at such a glow that the friends of Stevenson were accustomed to warm their hands, while they admired and were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the siege of Troy, and followed, most of them, by subjects ten times more numerous, this Godfrey may be regarded as the Agamemnon. The princes and counts esteem him, because he is the foremost in the ranks of those whom they fantastically call Knights, and also on account of the good faith and generosity which he practises in all his transactions. The clergy give him credit for the highest zeal for the doctrines of religion, and a corresponding respect for the Church ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... of the dress, and at the wide open sleeves; it is also entwined in the hair, and with the girdle, at the back of which it is allowed to droop in full, graceful folds. The men do not affect such bright colours as the women and children, although their robes are often fantastically embroidered with various strange devices, such as shell-fish, frogs, flowers and landscapes, some ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... wide-open countries all my life," said the latter, "but this beats anything I ever saw. Why, the crooks outnumber the honest men and they're running things to suit themselves. One of 'em tried to lay me. ME!" He chuckled as if the mere idea was fantastically humorous. "Have you heard about this Soapy Smith? He's the boss, the bell-cow, and he's made himself mayor of Skagway. Can you beat it? I'll bet some of his men are on our Citizens' Committee at Sheep Camp. They need a lot of killing, they do, and they'll get it. What did you do ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... deeply-indented edges of the Wolds begin to appear, and the roads generally make great plunges into the valley of the Derwent. The weather, which has been fine all day, changes at sunset, and great indigo clouds, lined with gold, pile themselves up fantastically in front of the setting sun. Lashing rain, driven by the wind with sudden fury, pours down upon the hamlet lying just below, but leaves Wharram-le-Street without a drop of moisture. The widespread views all over the Howardian Hills ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... Dragon's blood, that blood now hidden under the sun-browned skin of a river coolie. Kan Wong stuffed fine-cut into his brass-bowled pipe and struck a spark from his tinder box. Through his wide nostrils twin streamers of smoke writhed out, twisting fantastically together and mixing slowly with the rising river mist. His pipe became a wand of dreams summoning the genii of glorious memory. The blood of the Dragon in his veins quickened from the lethargy to which drudgery had cooled it, and raced hotly as he thought ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... persuasive allocution, he took up his little groups successively from the table, held them aloft, turned them about, rapped them with his knuckles, and gazed at them lovingly, with his head on one side. They consisted each of a cat and a monkey, fantastically draped, in some preposterously sentimental conjunction. They exhibited a certain sameness of motive, and illustrated chiefly the different phases of what, in delicate terms, may be called gallantry and coquetry; but they were strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... "Why, suppose that I do! Look, Truelove, how brave and red are those holly berries, and how green and fantastically twisted the leaves! The sky is a bright blue, and the clouds are silver; and think what these woods will be when the winter is past! One might do worse, meseems, than to be of God's taste in ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... moon had ceased revolving, and hung inert, opening anon a heavy lid to doze and drowse again, and God would sigh 'Enough,' and nod, and Being would swoon to sleep: for that any old Chinaman should be alive in Pekin was a thing so fantastically maniac, as to draw from me at times sudden fits of wild red laughter that ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Fantastically tangled: the green hills Are clothed with early blossoms—through the grass The quick-eyed lizard rustles—and the bills Of summer-birds sing welcome as ye pass; Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class, Implore ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... For several seconds they remained motionless and silent, grimly surveying their awesome surroundings. The billions of stars above were terrifyingly vivid against the dark emptiness of space. The ship's hull was fantastically twisted and pitted, and the enemy ship—it hovered a few miles distant—had been transformed into a brilliantly burning ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... Bedarra, with its lovely little bays and coves and fantastically weathered rocks, its forest and jungle and scrub, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... which his brother's death-bed prayer had recommended her. At first, there was something to her young mind savoring of the romance to which she had rather given herself up, in the notion of a woodland cottage, and rural sports, and wild vines gadding fantastically around secluded bowers; but the reality—the sad reality of such a home and its associations—pressed too soon and heavily upon her to permit her much longer to entertain or encourage the dream of that glad fancy in which she originally ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... it did, for now he is holding what it contains—holding it lovingly, almost reverently, in the palm of his hand. It is a little case, green velvet worked with flowers, and in the center, spreading fantastically in spidery pattern in dark maroon, is a monogram—Lilith's. And in like manner is this same ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... fast approaching an exceedingly gloomy bit of the road where there were plantations on each side, and the trees united their fantastically forked branches overhead. I thought I had never seen so dismal-looking a spot, and a sudden lowering of the temperature made me draw my overcoat ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... when two or three hardy Europeans stand opposed to an apparently overwhelming majority of blacks, call for a large share of personal courage and decision; whilst the savage yells and diabolic whoops of the barbarians in their onsets, their fantastically painted forms, their quivering spears, their contortions, and shifting of their bodies, and their wild leaps, attach a species of romance to these encounters which affords plentiful matter for after-meditation. As the love of war, of gaming, or of any other species of violent excitement, grows ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... whose hand trembled not at murder, shuddered with fear, as he hastened through the forest, at the sound of a branch waving in the wind, or felt his hair stand erect with terror on beholding a distant bush fantastically enlightened by the moon! Conscience has made cowards of the most sanguinary freebooters and the most shameless oppressors. The dreadful "worm that dieth not," and banishes every cheerful thought from the guilty soul, is not inaptly compared ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... and presumption outdid even poor Piers Gaveston: he had one hundred and eighty knights in his own train alone, and their dress was so fantastically gay that the Scots jested on them, and made rhymes long current ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and I, at twilight, in the children's dining room. A little white room, unevenly panelled, the silver candlesticks and yellow flames fantastically reflected in the mirrors between the deep windows, and the moths and June-bugs tilting at the lights. We sat at a little mahogany table eating porridge and cream from round blue bowls, with Mammy to wait on us. Sometimes ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the side of Miss Van Tuyn, behind Lady Sellingworth and Ambrose Jennings, who were really a living caricature as they proceeded through the night towards Shaftesbury Avenue. The smallness of Jennings, accentuated by his bat-like cloth cloak, his ample sombrero and fantastically long stick, made Lady Sellingworth look like a moving tower as she walked at his side, like a leaning tower when she bent graciously to catch the murmur of his persistent conversation. And as over the theatres in letters of fire were written the names of the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... mingled procession of the church and the army—priests with relics, and soldiers with weapons, an obese and aged archbishop, habited in cambric and lace, looking strangely like a grey daw in bird-of- paradise plumage, and a band of young girls fantastically robed and garlanded—then I spoke ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Thebes, which was situated on the edge of the desert at the foot of the western hills. It was an extensive and roomy structure, lightly built and gaily decorated. The ceiling and pavements of its halls were fantastically painted with scenes of animal life: wild cattle ran through reedy swamps beneath one's feet, and many-coloured fish swam in the water; while overhead flights of pigeons, white against a blue sky, passed across the hall, and the wild duck hastened towards the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... of columns, flew off before the fire had time to reach them. Windows melted in their frames, pillars fell to the ground, ironwork bent as wax; nay, the very pavements around glowed so that neither man nor horse dared tread upon them. And the flames, gradually gaining ground, danced fantastically up and down the scaffolding, and covered the edifice as with one blaze; whilst inside transom beams were snapped asunder, rafters fell with destruction, and the fire roaring through chapels and aisles as in a great furnace, could be ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... say that Oannes set down his revelations in books which he consigned into the keeping of men, and that several more divine animals of the same kind continued to appear at long intervals. Who knows but the latter strange detail may have been meant to allude fantastically to the arrival of successive Cushite colonies? In the long run of time, of course all such meaning would be forgotten and the legend remain as a miraculous ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the cataract, here also the hills are simply jumbled heaps of granite boulders, fantastically piled one upon the other, barren and naked, and without any vegetable growth ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... writes, "to imagine the frantic gambols that are daily played off here; sometimes dressing in red coats, and otherwise very fantastically, and collecting a number of ignorant natives around them, telling them that they are the great eris of the Northwest, and making arrangements for sending three or four vessels yearly to them from the coast with spars, &c.; while those ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... must ride through thorns and bushes, were either drawn up so as to cover the thighs or turned over from the knee downward, like the leg-covering of Rupert's cavaliers. Many heads were bare, or merely shielded by wreaths of grasses and leaves, the greenery contrasting fantastically with the unkempt hair and fierce faces, but producing at a distance an effect which ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... a twin-motor Caudron going in the opposite direction. It was fantastically painted, the wings a bright yellow and the circular hoods, over the two motors, a fiery red. As it approached, it looked like some prehistoric bird with great ravenous eyes. The thing startled me, not so much because of its weird appearance ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... her and had almost exhausted his critical capabilities, but not once had she become annoyed with him. She seemed to devour every factual point of imperfection about herself that Pembroke brought to her attention. And, fantastically enough, she actually appeared to have overcome every little imperfection he had been able ...
— The Perfectionists • Arnold Castle
... furtive sensations, passing impressions, individual and subjective bliss and woe. Never daring to grapple with the sublime yet tender simplicity of nature, they sport with eccentricity, delight in fantastically related ideas, revel in surprises, in sudden and unforeseen developments. Their style is full of individualities and mannerisms, ornaments and intricacies; the coloring is always worth more than the form, the sensation than the idea. Their heroes and heroines are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... waveringly uncertain of outline, until with the clearing of his numbed brain they stood out once again in sane, well-ordered clarity. And as they gradually took shape again each detail grew only more fantastically unbelievable. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... emancipation of the personal element in art; it is by qualities which are non-dramatic that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When, in 1830, his Hernani was presented at the Theatre Francais, a strange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired brigade of young supporters engaged in a melee with those spectators who represented the tyranny of tradition. "Kill him! he is an Academician," was heard above the tumult. Gautier's truculent waistcoat flamed ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... is David. David is penguinacious by fits and starts, not wholly to be depended on, sometimes needing himself to be cheered with the Penguinity of others, but, when the mood is on him, softly, fantastically ridiculous, like the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll, a sort of Alice in Wonderland person. I should not hesitate to recommend him to Dr. Crothers as a neighbor; indeed I suspect the good doctor is almost such a man himself,—too ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... the store I noticed a small party of dark-skinned and rather fantastically dressed people, whom I ascertained were Indians, and as I had never before seen a real live Indian, I was much interested in them. I went over and endeavored to talk to them, but our ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... sheer precipice. On either side the cove or chine was closely shut in by treeless, iron-coloured masses of rock, behind one of which the few inhabited hovels were clustered, and the boat which had brought her was drawn up. In front was the sea, still lashed by a fierce wind, which was driving the fantastically shaped remains of the great storm cloud rapidly across an intensely blue sky. The waves, although it was the ebb, were still tremendous, and their roar re-echoed as they reared to fearful heights and broke ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Bald Mountain the fire raved exultingly, leaping and skipping fantastically as it ran. It was a prisoner released from the bondage of the elements that had held it. It was a spirit drunk with sudden-found freedom. It was a flood raging down a valley. It was a ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... needed privacy; by your orders no one is to enter here to-night. I needed a sword—you had it hanging here, ready for the first comer. Oh, beyond doubt, you are a fool, Vincent Floyer!" Standing in the arm-chair, Simon Orts bowed fantastically, and then leaped to the ground with the agility ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... eight o'clock on a December morning as dark as twelve o'clock on a December night. Under such conditions the soft, thick, yellow gloom has its picturesque and even humorous aspect. One feels enclosed by it at once fantastically and cosily, and is inclined to revel in imaginings of the picture outside, its Rembrandt lights and orange yellows, the halos about the street-lamps, the illumination of shop-windows, the flare of torches stuck up over coster barrows and coffee-stands, ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... closer about her face—pure and colorless as old ivory. Her robe, of green brocade, richly embroidered with gold, fell over full pantaloons of scarlet satin which were tightly bound about the slender ankles by jewelled bands, displaying to advantage the tiny feet, clad in boots of soft, yellow kid, fantastically wrought with gold threads; the robe parted over a bodice of yellow, open at the throat, around which chains of gold and jewels were ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... curbed. Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long—then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression. The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... doubt, be very much amused to learn how carefully Bobby trod the velvet carpets, how he stared with wonder at the drapery curtains, at the tall mirrors, the elegant chandeliers, and the fantastically shaped chairs and tables that adorned Mr. Bayard's parlor, the length of our story does not permit us to pause ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... lopped, the oaks and beeches retain their natural luxuriance, and form some of the most picturesque groups conceivable. In some places their straight boles rise sixty feet without a bough; in others, they are bent fantastically over the alleys, which turn and wind about just as a painter would desire. I followed them with eagerness and curiosity, sometimes deviating from my path amongst ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... of their heredity that they achieved this unholy concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus in them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold, cold-calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this I know: it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... holiday costume. As the evening approached the scene became still more brilliant, for the fireworks and illuminations then began to have their effect. The evening was soft and Italian, the air pure, and the sky without a cloud. From the water, the scene was fantastically beautiful; the huge altar erected on the shore, was now a blaze of light; the range of buildings, as they ascended from the shore, glittered like diamonds in the distance. Fireworks, in great abundance and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... was at college, but a captaincy was awaiting him when he could enter the army. So the war secretary for a pleasantry issued a mock commission to Tad, ranking him as a regular lieutenant. As long as he confined his supposed duties to arming the under servants and drilling the more or less fantastically, as well as he remembered, evolutions on the parade-grounds, where he accompanied his father, all was amusing. But he terminated his first steps in the school of "Hardee's Tactics," the standard text-book of the period, by bringing his awkward squad ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... those who give must take, did he render himself a fit object for those who indulge in that sort of pastime to level their wit upon. On this occasion, Blowers had not spent many hours in the city ere he had all its convenient corners very fantastically decorated with large blue placards, whereon was inscribed the loss of his valuable woman, and the offer of the increased sum of four hundred dollars for her apprehension. The placards were wonderful curiosities, and very characteristic ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... turns pitilessly from a beggar-woman and her child. Meanwhile Death, fantastically crowned, lays hands ...
— The Dance of Death • Hans Holbein
... English Law transplanted, in their most mischievous luxuriance, into the holy and peaceful shades of the Bramins,—such events as these, in which the poetry and the prose of life, its pompous illusions and mean realities, are mingled up so sadly and fantastically together, were of a nature, particularly when recent, to lay hold of the imagination as well as the feelings, and to furnish eloquence with those strong lights and shadows, of which her most ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... the corner. What a change! All is light and brilliancy. The hum of many voices issues from that splendid gin-shop which forms the commencement of the two streets opposite; and the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left. The interior is even gayer than ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... precision of meaning. What applies to Scott, will apply still more to Byron's poems; Byron is one of the greatest of modern poets, but that does not make him an epic poet. We must keep our minds on epic intention. Shelley's Revolt of Islam has something of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generality of human experience had little to do with this glittering poem. Keats's Hyperion is wonderful; but it does not go far enough to let us form any judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose.[13] ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... the bread-fruit are of great size, and their edges are cut and scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady's lace collar. As they annually tend towards decay, they almost rival in brilliant variety of their gradually changing hues the fleeting shades of the expiring dolphin. The autumnal tints of our American forests, glorious as they are, sink into nothing ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... he will understand it, and it will be as it was before." This idea, which was as fixed as an obsession of delirium, seemed to occupy some central space in her brain, leaving room for a crowd of lesser thoughts which came and went fantastically around it like the motley throng of a circus. She thought of Cyrus Treadwell's accident, of the stupid jokes the man from Dinwiddie had told her, of the noises of the train, which would not let one sleep, of the stations ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... parading a large open space behind, or selecting the toys and amulets made to please them by the dainty-tentacled jewellers who work in kennels below, the mothers of the moon world—the queen bees, as it were, of the hive. They are noble-looking beings, fantastically and sometimes quite beautifully adorned, with a proud carriage, and, save for their ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... earliest and greatest essayists, and likeness and unlikeness exist between the men. Bacon was constitutionally the graver nature. He writes like one on whom presses the weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on its serious side. He does not play with it fantastically. He lives amongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be too familiar. In the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial. When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace with spacious entrances, and courts, and banqueting-halls; when he writes on ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... they had grown up in Hawthorne's practice and had developed a power to penetrate more deeply into life. Obviously at the start there is the physical object in which his imagination habitually found its spring, the fantastically embroidered scarlet letter on a woman's bosom which he had seen in the Puritan group described in "Endicott and the Red Cross." It had been in his mind for years, and his thoughts had centred on it and wandered out from it, tracking its mystery. It has in itself that ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... concealed from view by dark, fantastically shaped clouds, that, crawling along with a slow, stealthy motion, periodically obscure the moon. The crest of a hill covered with short-clipped grass, much worn away in places, and in the centre a Druidical circle broken and incomplete; ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the three was fantastically arrayed as a cannibal chief, in brown fleshings, with cuffs upon his ankles, gaudy decorations about his neck, and huge rings ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... behind them, every tilted chair came down to the floor with a bang, and many voices exclaimed in concert, "Who the devil is she?" Curiosity was satisfied at eight o'clock in the evening, for at that hour Doctor Paracelsus Aesculapius, as he fantastically called himself, opened the doors of his traveling apothecary shop and exposed his "universal panacea" for sale, while at the same time, "Pepeeta, the Queen of Fortune Tellers," entered her booth and spread out upon a table the paraphernalia by which she ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... officers in his private uniform. It paid off, for with such a skeleton force of highly skilled professionals as a cadre, the marshal could enlist veterans for his rank and file and whip together a trained fighting force in a fantastically ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... farmer until he reached his fortieth year. Only then, belatedly, did the authorities find he was telepathic and agree to let him late in life enter upon the career of pinlighter. He did well at it, but he was fantastically old for this ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... of the hill. Since midnight the enemy "heavies" had been coughing gruffly under the mist-blanket that overlaid the plain, dappling it with alternately flashing and fading blotches of light till it glowed fantastically like a lamp-shade of Carrara marble; star-shells, fired with a low trajectory, popped up and dove out of sight again, throwing a fluttering green radiance over the white pall ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... library—not fantastically transformed, but just like what the room really was. So far, he might have been wide awake, looking at the familiar objects round him. But, after a while, an event happened which set the laws of reality at defiance. Simple Sally, miles away in the Home, made her appearance ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... its surface features are concerned, one may regard Australia as a continent not quite so large as the United States. The eastern part is diversified by low ranges of mountains fantastically scored and carved by rivers which are swift and impassable torrents during the season of rains, and trickling streams, or dry washes, the rest of the year. This is the region that has produced a wealth of gold and wool and a stock of hardy people that for intelligence and strength of character ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... to him through the extension. Mr. Browning professes to rest his narrative on a Rabbinical work, of which the title, given by him in Hebrew, means "Collection of many lies;" and he adds, by way of supplement, three sonnets, supposed to fantastically illustrate the old Hebrew proverb, "From Moses to Moses[116] never was one like Moses," and embodying as many fables of wildly increasing audacity. The main story is nevertheless justified by traditional Jewish belief; and Mr. Browning has made it the vehicle of some poetical imagery and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... church-tower in Florence, a great lean, pale brick minaret, designed, I suppose, to be laminated with marble, but cheerfully abandoned to bareness; he came out on to one of those high balustraded balconies, which in mediaeval pictures seem to have been always crowded with fantastically dressed persons, and are now only visited by tourists. The silvery city lay outspread beneath him, with the rapid mud-stained river passing to the plain, the hill-side crowded with villas embowered in green gardens, and the sad-coloured hills behind. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the possessors in the midst of the most admirable abodes in the world. People may walk in these immense gardens without suspecting that they have a master. The grass grows in the middle of the walks, and in these very walks are trees fantastically cut according to the ancient taste that prevailed in France.—What a singular whimsicality is this neglect of the necessary, and affectation of the useless!—But one is often surprised at Rome, and in the greater part of the other cities of Italy, at the taste of the Italians for extravagant ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... preferred to lie lazily on their cushions and saddles under the oak- tree, a little distance from the blaze. The clear, red firelight danced and flickered, and the sparks rose into the sombre darkness fantastically, while the ruddy glow made the great oak an enchanted palace, into whose hollow dome they never tired of gazing. When the light streamed highest, the bronze green of the foliage was turned into crimson, and, as it died now and then, the stars winked brightly ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... village and up Hatton Hill again. He thought the very trees bent their branches to greet him and that the linnets and thrushes sang together about his return. Then he smiled at his foolish thought, yet instantly wondered if it might not be true, and thus fantastically reasoning, he came to the big gates of the Hall, and saw his mother ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... have appeared before the Tribunal of God.' Near a great sundial are these solemn words: 'Sol et luna faciunt quae precepta sunt eis; nos autem pergrimamur a Domino.' The church itself is one of the most fantastically ugly structures imaginable. All possible tricks of style and taste appear to have been played upon it. It is a jumble of heavy Gothic and Italian, and the apse is twisted out of line with the nave, in which respect, however, it is like the cathedral of Quimper. As I left ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... little aircushion Moskvich. They crossed over the Vltava River by the Cechuv Bridge and turned right. On the hill above them loomed the fantastically large statue of Stalin which had been raised immediately following the Second War. She grimaced at it, muttered, "I wonder if he ...
— Freedom • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... street as a promise of some extravagance, real, untrammelled, and characteristic. I seized my hat and—OVERCOAT,—a dreadful incongruity to the spangles that had whisked by, and followed the vanishing figures round the corner. Here they were re-enforced by a dozen men and women, fantastically, but not expensively arrayed, looking not unlike the supernumeraries of some provincial opera troupe. Following the crowd, which already began to pour in from the side-streets, in a few moments I was in the broad, grove-like allee, and in ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... may it be alleged that, if this imagining of matters be so fit for the imagination, then must the historian needs surpass, who bringeth you images of true matters, such as indeed were done, and not such as fantastically or falsely may be suggested to have been done. Truly Aristotle himself in his discourse of poesy, plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry is philosophoteron and spoudaioteron, that is to say, it ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... open. And there burst upon my vision the wildest assemblage of faces I had ever seen. Some were blacked to resemble the negro. Some were painted to look like the Indian on the warpath. They were dressed fantastically, in a variety of colors, with feathers in their hair or hats or coon caps. They leered, grinned from ear to ear. They yelled, and again began to beat their pans and kettles and to fire their rifles. Sarah put her fingers to her lips in a gesture of terror, of violated privacy. But after ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters |
