"Marvellous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (l. ii. p. 86, 87) relates a marvellous discovery (A.D. 1046) of Pallas the son of Evander, who had been slain by Turnus; the perpetual light in his sepulchre, a Latin epitaph, the corpse, yet entire, of a young giant, the enormous wound in his breast, (pectus perforat ingens,) &c. If this fable rests on the slightest foundation, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... marvellous preparations are being made. One would think it was a journey to the South Pole. Aunt Maria spends hours each day in writing and rewriting lists of things she must have with her, and then Uncle John protests that only the smallest amount of luggage can be taken. ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... morning because we were really under way and accomplishing work that showed. Even the natives in the tank, swiftly passing the cable from hand to hand, were singing in barbaric monotone to themselves, while we idle ones on the quarter-deck read a marvellous tale of love and bloodshed to the monotonous accompaniment of the cable shuffling through the wooden troughs ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... yesterday, and who still, in the midst of her new womanly grace, kept her caressing baby ways. Something unusual, not only in degree but in kind, belonged to her brilliant beauty, and set it off. The marvellous blackness of hair and eyes was so soft in its depth, the tint of her skin so transparent in its duskiness, her slight figure so flexible, so exquisite in its outlines, that it was impossible not to wonder what the type was which produced so perfect an example. Spanish it was said to be, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... made an inspection of her dress, and especially of her earrings, which had at once attracted my attention on account of their great size. They were gold hoops of from two to three inches in diameter, thick and heavy, and set with a mass of stones and pearls. It seemed marvellous how any human ears could support such pendants. In effect, I found that they did not do so. The earrings were only sham, for in reality they were fixed to her head-dress, and were only so arranged as to appear ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... punished in a marvellous manner," continued the Dean. "He lost the battle, and as he fled through the woods, his long hair caught in a tree, the horse ran away from under him, and he was left hanging there until he was run through by ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction—marvellous illumination. Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... light-hearted good nature that distinguished my Derby friends. He possessed a good figure, wore fierce moustaches, and affected a military air. One suit of well-made, well-cut clothes by some means or other he managed to keep in a state of freshness and smoothness nothing short of marvellous. Borrowing was his besetting sin, and he was always head over ears in debt. Duns pursued him to the office and he sometimes hid from them in a huge safe which the office contained. It was a wretched life, but he brazened it out with wonderful effrontery, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... To that dome on marvellous pilasters, To that tent roofed o'er with colored bars, That blue garden full of stars like lilies, And of lilies beautiful ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... writes, "a town noble for its antiquity, pleasing in its site, superb for its walls, smiling for the fertility of its soil, charming for the gentleness of its inhabitants, magnificent for its palace, beautiful in its broad streets, marvellous in the construction of its bridge, rich because of its commerce, and known to ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... his most happy and resplendent moods that the Archdeacon held jocular conversations with his daughter. These conversations had been, in the past, moments of agony and terror to her, but since that morning when she had suddenly woken to a realisation of the marvellous possibilities in life her terror had left her. There were other people in the word ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... With marvellous swiftness she plunged her hand into her dress pocket, and turned it wrong side out, scattering the contents—thimble, thread, two "scalybarks," and some "ground peas" over the floor. Then stooping, she slipped off one shoe, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... He could be almost said to perceive what was passing through one's mind, so quick was his discernment, so penetrating his thought. He might have been a Jesuit, nor fallen a whit behind the most polished and profound of that marvellous society of men. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... or six score, Some behind and some before; A marvellous great company Of which are lords and gentlemen, With many grooms and yeomen And also ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... suggests something marvellous in the fact," replied Ah Cum, ironically. "Why shouldn't a Chinaman be honest? Ah, yes; I know. Most of you Americans pattern all Chinese upon those who fill a little corner in New York. In fiction you make the Chinese secretive, criminal, and terrible—or comic. ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... Mr. Blithers is trying to arrange a sparring match between those two great prizefighters,—you know the ones, Mrs. King,—just to give us poor women a chance to see what a real man looks like in—I mean to say, what marvellous specimens they are, don't you know. Now please tell the Prince that he positively cannot afford to miss a real sparring match. Every one is terribly excited over it, and naturally we are keeping it very quiet. Won't it be a lark? My daughter thinks it's terrible, ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... pests. The Green Fly is the enemy of the softer kinds of vegetation, and the Blue and the Black Fly are common plagues of the Peach-house and the orchard. The tender body of the Aphis is instantly affected by conditions unfavourable to its life, and it is therefore easily killed; but its marvellous power of reproduction renders its extinction impossible, for in every instance a few escape, and very soon re-establish their race. Two methods for the destruction of Aphis are in vogue. One is fumigation by tobacco, either pure or in some of the numerous ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... English engineer, Smeaton, displayed a marvellous ability for mechanical pursuits even in his childhood. Before he had donned jacket and pants in the place of short dress, his father discovered him on the top of the barn, putting up a windmill ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... heart in meeting these conditions, however various they are and however variously they act, seems little short of marvellous, and it goes on throwing three and one-third ounces of blood seventy or eighty times a minute into a tube against nine feet of water pressure, working often perfectly under conditions which would be fatal to a machine. As long as this goes on the injury is said to be compensated for; ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... satisfactorily. So often he seemed merely to be running on alone; often they realised it had been a failure, not what they had wanted. He left her, knowing THAT evening had only made a little split between them. Their loving grew more mechanical, without the marvellous glamour. Gradually they began to introduce novelties, to get back some of the feeling of satisfaction. They would be very near, almost dangerously near to the river, so that the black water ran not far from his face, and it gave a little thrill; or they loved sometimes in a little hollow below ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... brightly. For some little time he had been directly under Bell's influence, and that had meant a marvellous change for the better, he had lost a deal of his hesitating manner, and was looking forward to the operation with the ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... climbed; and soon this marvellous brushwood was holding me at gaze for minutes at a time, my eyes feasting upon it as the sun began to open its flowers and subdue the scents of night with others yet more aromatic. In Spain we know montebaxos, or coppice shrubs (as you might call them), and we know tomillares, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... about that at ten years old she scarcely knew how to read and could handle the boasting-tool with marvellous skill. Ruys would have liked to keep always with him this child whom he never felt to be in the way, a member of the great brotherhood from her earliest years. But it was pitiful to see the little girl amid the free behaviour of the frequenters of the house, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... to a pretty large sheet of ice; and the fat boy and Mr. Weller, having shovelled and swept away the snow which had fallen on it during the night, Mr. Bob Sawyer adjusted his skates with a dexterity which to Mr. Winkle was perfectly marvellous, and described circles with his left leg, and cut figures of eight, and inscribed upon the ice, without once stopping for breath, a great many other pleasant and astonishing devices, to the excessive satisfaction of Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Tupman, and the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... And, when the second morning shone, We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own. Around the glistening wonder bent The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below,— A universe of sky and snow The old familiar sights of ours Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood, Or garden-wall, or belt of wood; A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed, A fenceless drift what once was road; The bridle-post an old man sat With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat; The well-curb had a Chinese roof; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... afterward. Some inkling of what had happened got to the servants and they quitted the Tichlorne service in a body. Gaffer Bedshaw never recovered from the second shock he received, and is confined in a madhouse, hopelessly incurable. The secrets of their marvellous discoveries died with Paul and Lloyd, both laboratories being destroyed by grief-stricken relatives. As for myself, I no longer care for chemical research, and science is a tabooed topic in my household. I have returned to my roses. Nature's ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... on its panels, and on its hammer-cloth, my arms are emblazoned—no one has ever been able to count the quarterings. You would be wearing the family-jewels, reluctantly surrendered to you by my aunt. They are many and marvellous, in their antique settings. I don't want to brag. It humiliates me to speak to you as I am speaking. But I am heart-set on you, and to win you there is not a precious stone I would leave unturned. Conceive a parure all of white stones—diamonds, white sapphires, white topazes, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... distance, and look towards one another, but 'tis with an oblique glance. I have read a DIALOGUE of PLATO of such a motley and fantastic composition. The beginning was about love, and all the rest ABOUT RHETORIC. They stick not (that is, the ancients) at these variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves to be carried away at the pleasure of the winds; or at least to seem as if they were. The titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter, they often denote it by some mark only, as those other titles Andria Eunuchus, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... wish of not attending. He may, however, possibly have lost the habit of watching your eye for approbation; then you may assault his ear: if all other resources fail, beat with your foot that dead march of the spirits, that incessant tattoo, which so well deserves its name. Marvellous must be the patience of the much-enduring man whom some or other of these devices do not provoke: slight causes often produce great effects; the simple scratching of a pick-axe, properly applied to certain veins in a mine, will cause the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... it gulped down the rest of him, and we heard his ribs crack in its belly. Presently it went its way, and we abode in sore amazement and grief for our comrade and mortal fear for ourselves, saying, "By Allah, this is a marvellous thing! Each kind of death that threatened us is more terrible than the last. We were rejoicing in our escape from the black ogre and our deliverance from the perils of the sea; but now we have fallen into that which is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... (except the masters) thought of ill-treating a sweep, because no one knew who he might be, or what nobleman's or gentleman's son he might turn out. Chimney-sweeping was, by many believers in the marvellous, considered as a sort of probationary term, at an earlier or later period of which, divers young noblemen were to come into possession of their rank and titles: and the profession was held by them in great ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... full of intelligence, detecting by the manner in which he was wielded the moving passion of the wielder, and adapting his whole nature with marvellous dexterity to gratify that passion according to the character of him whom it possessed; now by a rough and ready impetuosity, now by a deliberate and hidden advance; equally willing to strike with the sword or to poison by ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Do you recollect the third chapter of that work—the one which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century? It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... enormous a deed is beyond thy power. Thy qualities are marvellous. Every new act of thine outstrips the last, and belies the newest calculations. But this—this perfidy exceeds—this outrage upon promises, this violation of faith, this blindness to the future, is incredible." There he stopped; while his looks seemed to call upon Mervyn for a contradiction ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... knowledge was, in Jack's mind, absolutely corroborated by the display. His marvellous parrying of Acton's attentions; his short step inwards, which invariably followed a mis-hit by Acton; his baits to lure his opponent to deliver himself a gift into his hands; his incredible ducking and lightning returns, held Bourne fascinated. ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... convent of Les Dames de la Visitation. A chapel was added to the extensive structure left behind by her father's old comrade, and it was in that chapel that her funeral sermon was preached by Bossuet—one of the first of those marvellous pieces of funereal eloquence which more than aught else have contributed to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... her. She gave her advice, and though advice is a cheap present as far as the giver is concerned, there are occasions when it may be a very valuable one to the recipient. Lady Maria's was valuable to Emily Fox-Seton, who had but one difficulty, which was to adjust herself to the marvellous fortune which ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ten and six, The lowest price a miser could fix: I don't pretend with horns of mine, Like some in the advertising line, To 'MAGNIFY SOUNDS' on such marvellous scales, That the sounds of a cod seem as big as a whale's; But popular rumours, right or wrong, - Charity sermons, short or long, - Lecture, speech, concerto, or song, All noises and voices, feeble or strong, From the hum of a gnat to the clash of a gong, This tube will deliver distinct and ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... also, and said, in a tone half ironical and half supplicating: "Pardon me, Julio; I believe all you told me, and I never doubted your marvellous courage. If sometimes I laugh at serious things, do not be offended; this kind of joking is ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... feeling of reality. He actually thought himself the mariner,—so I am persuaded,—while he was reading. As the poem proceeded, and we plunged deeper and deeper into its mystic horrors, the actual world receded into a dim, indefinable distance. The magnetism of this marvellous interpreter had caught up himself, and me with him, into Dreamland, from which we gently descended at the end of Part VI., ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... as "the father of comparative philology," and in the preface to his edition of the last volume of Gerald's works in the Rolls Series, he calls him "one of the most learned men of a learned age," "the universal scholar." His range of subjects is indeed marvellous even for an age when to be a "universal scholar" was not so hopeless of attainment as it has since become. Professor Brewer, his earliest editor in the Rolls Series, is struck by the same characteristic. "Geography, history, ethics, divinity, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... dating far back to the days when she was a little girl with eyes like a brown owl. Someone had told her fairy-tales about princesses and knights, strange beings which she never quite understood, but of which she made marvellous pictures in her head She had learned to read in order to follow up the doings of those queer bright folk, but she had never tracked them down again. But one book she had got called The Pilgrim's Progress, printed by missionaries in a far-away city called Philadelphia, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... wished much to enquire when Count Morano was expected at the castle, but an unwillingness to ask unnecessary questions, and to mention family concerns to a servant, withheld her. Meanwhile, Annette's thoughts were engaged upon another subject: she dearly loved the marvellous, and had heard of a circumstance, connected with the castle, that highly gratified this taste. Having been enjoined not to mention it, her inclination to tell it was so strong, that she was every instant on the point of speaking ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... having in life. Everything about her had been a revelation to him. The women whom he had come across in his battle upwards, barmaids and their fellows, fifth-rate actresses, occasionally the suburban wife of a prosperous City man, had impressed him only with a sort of coarse contempt. It was marvellous how thoroughly and clearly he had recognised Ernestine at once as a type of that other world of womenkind, of which he admittedly knew nothing. Yet it was so short a time since she had wandered into his life, so short a time that he was even a little uneasy at the wonderful strength ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was well; for through the marvellous dealings of Providence, the outlawry of this "wolf" of Norway led to the establishment of our royal line, and to that infusion of new spirit into England to which her greatness appears to ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... down and read, and he repeated with me,—'For ourselves and our country, O gracious God, we thank Thee, that, notwithstanding our manifold transgressions of Thy holy laws, Thou hast continued to us Thy marvellous kindness,'—and so to the end of that thanksgiving. Then he turned to the end of the same book, and I read the words more familiar to me,—'Most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold and bless Thy servant, the President of the United States, and all others in authority,'—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... placed their beloved hero in the rank of those gods whose worship he had restored; while the invectives of the Christians pursued the soul of the Apostate to hell, and his body to the grave. One party lamented the approaching ruin of their altars; the other celebrated the marvellous deliverance of their church. The Christians applauded, in lofty and ambiguous strains, the stroke of divine vengeance, which had been so long suspended over the guilty head of Julian. They acknowledge, that the death of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... "As we have a marvellous and incredible agility to transport ourselves whither we please in the twinkling of an eye, we have no occasion for carriages or horses; not but the king has his stables and his stud of sea horses; but they are seldom used, except ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... That marvellous concrete fact, the Bible,—has next to be encountered. Unmethodical as it seems to be, the Bible arrests a man in his impatient course with many a significant History,—many an unmanageable precept. Much of its contents, it is true, are of such a nature that they ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Days in 1914 (CONSTABLE), Major-General Sir F. MAURICE does more than revive our fading recollections of the retreat from Mons and the marvellous recovery on the Marne. A careful study of the German documents relating to VON KLUCK'S dash for Paris has led the author to form a new theory to account for the German defeat. Hitherto we have been asked to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... beneath the flower she was painting, Fairy Violet saw her own reflection in the clear water. But she saw something more! A pair of wings of the most delicate gossamer, tipped with silver and sparkling with a marvellous radiance, had sprung from her shoulders and rose almost on a level with her tiny head! Fairy Violet had won her wings at last, and the golden gates of Fairy-land, where the woods and forests were always green, and the valleys ever ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... better than no meat, and the men of the Royal Picts throve well and kept their strength upon Hyde's soups and savoury stews. Thanks to the care bestowed upon them, the regiment kept up its numbers in a marvellous way—it even returned more men for duty than corps which had just arrived, and the difference between it and others in the camp-grounds close by was so marked that Lord Raglan came over and complimented Blythe upon ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... God Who inflaming blessed Jane Frances with love, didst endow her with a marvellous fortitude of spirit to pursue the way of perfection In all the paths of life, and wast pleased through her to enrich Thy Church with a new offspring, grant by her merits and intercession that we, who, knowing our own weakness, ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... same intention, but in part likewise to their natural dispositions and tastes. For the same climate and many of the same circumstances were acting on them, which had acted on the great classics, whom they were endeavouring to imitate. But the love of the marvellous, the deeper sensibility, the higher reverence for womanhood, the characteristic spirit of sentiment and courtesy,—these were the heir-looms of nature, which still regained the ascendant, whenever the use of the living mother-language enabled the inspired poet to appear ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... are down. As for fallen Germany, so for Russia in her humiliation Greece has no extra thought or care. Not a humanitarian and philanthropic nation! One wonders how a Greek mind would interpret the "big-brother-love" of the Americans, which prompts the marvellous rescue-work now being done by the United States in all the stricken countries of Europe. There, however, the indolence of the Greek mind and the half-closed eye intervene. There is no curiosity about philanthropy. But it is a Greek ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Whoever concurred, voted, and sided with them, in their extravagant conclusions, let the infamy of his former life, or present practice be what it would; his injustice and oppression never so scandalous, and notorious; he was received, countenanced, and protected with marvellous demonstrations of affection.—Swift. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... tea was brought in, and she insisted on at least tasting everything on the table. Clo was well acquainted with her dainty ways, and the varieties of preserves and jellies she had brought out from her stores was marvellous. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... whenever we row up a river, I constantly practise—either at floating objects in the water, or at birds or other marks in the trees. I have the best weapons that money can buy. It is my one extravagance, and the result is that, to my boatmen and the men about me, my shooting seems to be marvellous; they tell others of it, and the result is that I am regarded with great respect. I have no doubt, whatever, that it has saved me from much trouble; for the natives have almost got to believe that I only have to point ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... cruel treatment. "Don Quixote" was licensed at Valladolid in 1604, and printed at Madrid in 1605. Its success was so great that, during his lifetime, thirty thousand volumes were printed, which in that day was little short of marvellous. Four editions were published the first year, two at Madrid, one at Valencia, and one at Lisbon. Byron says: "Cervantes laugh'd Spain's chivalry away!" So popular was it, that a spurious second part, under the fictitious authorship of Avellanada was published. ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... but what was really extraordinary in Mademoiselle Claxon was her sense of grammatical structure; she wrote the language even more perfectly than she spoke it; but beautifully, but wonderfully; her exercises were something marvellous. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... there were more than twenty thousand persons assembled before the Grotto. Everybody, indeed, had come down from the mountains. And this immense throng found at the Grotto the divine food that it hungered for, a feast of the Marvellous, a sufficient meed of the Impossible to content its belief in a superior Power, which deigned to bestow some attention upon poor folks, and to intervene in the wretched affairs of this lower world, in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... cloudless sky. Lower it fell, and lower, until a fang of rock two miles high pierced its under-edge, and sent a flood of fire pouring in a thin, bright border along the crest of the Rockies. The travellers stopped their horses on a ridge to watch the marvellous transformation; light before them, light behind them, at their feet the shadows creeping up the mountain sides, and the valley beneath transformed as by some fairy wand ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... that though my countenance is exceptionally mobile, I possess marvellous powers for keeping it impassive when necessity arises. In this instance, at mention of Theodore's name, I showed neither surprise nor indignation. Yet you will readily understand that I felt both. Here was that man, once more revealed as a traitor. ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... admitted. "When I heard that you were in England, I made up my mind to come over. To-night seemed to me propitious. I wanted to understand this marvellous power of yours of which so many people have written. Nothing has been exaggerated. The message which I have struggled to deliver to the world through my poetry, my plays, such prose as I have ventured ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... arming the blacks, so far as I have made it, has been a complete and even marvellous success. They are sober, docile, attentive, and enthusiastic; displaying great natural capacities in acquiring the duties of the soldier. They are now eager beyond all things to take the field and be led into action; and it is the unanimous opinion of the officers who ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... entirely too low and too broad for what I had heard of its marvellous grace and lightness; nay, some mischievous elf even whispered the word "dumpy" hi my ear. But being informed, in time, that this was the spire, I resisted the temptation, and determined to make the best of it. I have since ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which is mother and nourisher of vices, and ought to put myself unto virtuous occupation and business, then I, having no great charge of occupation, following the said counsel took a French book, and read therein many strange and marvellous histories, wherein I had great pleasure and delight, as well for the novelty of the same as for the fair language of French, which was in prose so well and compendiously set and written, which methought I understood the sentence and substance ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... known. Of course they were talking about William, and Clara was at first in constant fear lest some word should be said on her lover's behalf some word which would drive her to declare that she would not admit him as a lover; but Mary abstained from the subject with marvellous care and tact. Though she was talking through the whole evening of her brother, she so spoke of him as almost to make Clara believe that she could not have heard of that episode in his life. Mrs Askerton would have dashed at the subject at once; but then, ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... her own narrow sphere of experience, till, as if the truth was not enough, he found himself running to the very edge of exaggeration, and a little over it, in the enjoyment of calling out her passion for the marvellous, especially when called out ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... friend," said Athelstane, "a truce to your upbraidings—bread and water and a dungeon are marvellous mortifiers of ambition, and I rise from the tomb a wiser man than I descended into it. One half of those vain follies were puffed into mine ear by that perfidious Abbot Wolfram, and you may now judge if he is a counsellor to be trusted. Since these ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Rip Van Winkle may seem incredible to many, but nevertheless I give it my full belief, for I know the vicinity of our old Dutch settlements to have been very subject to marvellous events and appearances. Indeed, I have heard many stranger stories than this, in the villages along the Hudson; all of which were too well authenticated to admit of a doubt. I have even talked with Rip Van Winkle myself, who, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... astrologers, whom he consulted on all important occasions —especially before undertaking any expedition,—and whose influence over him was unbounded. He hated the priests, despised them for their ignorance, spurned their doctrines, and laughed at the marvellous stories some of their books contain; but still he never marched without a tent church, a host of priests, defteras, and deacons, and never passed near a church without ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... and steadily as to almost entirely change, within a decade, the character of the South End, from a region of homes to one largely of business and boarding houses. Still later, about 1890, with the marvellous development of the electric motor and trolley cars, making horse traction by rail obsolete, the suburbs of Boston became one great garden and a semicircle of homes. Then Brookline, Newton, and Dorchester churches ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... ago, when I became a Brahmin," he continued, "voluntarily giving up the faith in which I was born, I little knew to what such a step would lead. I stole Siva from the house of my Indian friend and brought the idol home. From the first it began to exercise a marvellous power over me. I had made a large fortune in India; and when I came to England, bought this place, and finding this curious gallery already in existence, had it lined with marble, and set up Siva in its midst. ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... tardily—his quick and treble voice is loud amongst the loudest. He is as quick to apprehend, as eager now to learn, as ravenous for gain, as when he trusted first an untried world. If life be truly but a shadow, and mortals but the actors in the vision, is it not marvellous that age, and wisdom, and experience build and fasten there as on a rock? Such thoughts as these engaged my mind, as I pursued my way alone, unoccupied, amongst the labouring multitude, and cast a melancholy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... expands the molecules of the glass, and a current of electricity and magnetism passes through it into the room; this current, falling upon animal or vegetable life within, stimulates it to unusual vigor. Certainly the results achieved, and abundantly certified to, are marvellous, and sufficient to provoke further experiments and inquiry." Prior to these splendid original discoveries of our contemporary, we ignorantly believed that blue glass only partially sifted out the orange and yellow rays from the spectrum, and that with this exception, it acted merely as ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... finished the usual routine of camp duty for the night, 'spansered' our horses, eaten our suppers, laid in a supply of fuel for our fires, and were sitting around them smoking our pipes and listening to the marvellous tales of an old 'Leatherstocking' of the party, whose life had been passed between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi, when two of our Indian spies came in, passing in front of our tents and across the branch to the Indian camp. One of our party followed them to hear their report, and soon ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... follows Villon's masterpiece, the matchless Ballad of the Ladies of Old Time, so incomparably rendered in the marvellous version of D. G. Rossetti; followed in its turn by the succeeding poem, as inferior to its companion as is my attempt at translation of it to his triumph in that higher ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Washington appears not as a man aiming at prominence or power, but rather as one under obligation to serve a cause. Necessity was laid upon him, and he met it willingly. After Washington's marvellous escape from death in his first campaign for the defence of the colonies, the Rev. Samuel Davies, fourth president of Princeton College, spoke of him in a sermon as "that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, whom I can but hope Providence has hitherto ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... life, and therefore a happy one,' says my old aunt, writing to me this morning; it is marvellous and yet sustaining what one can pass through, and yet those about you—those who suppose that they have the key, if any, to your heart—be absolutely ignorant of it. 'He looks a little tired and worn: he has been sitting up late;' 'all young men are melancholy: leave him alone and he will ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... further, and ask ourselves where is the key to be found for the many marvellous effects of so-called spirit phenomena? Who can read F. W. Myer's Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, and not feel that we are standing on the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous light of to-day. In the period of infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith is after a law; and this native law remains ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... all thin little strokes of blue, and now one and now a multitude would heel and catch the sun and become short flashes of light. They came rising and falling and growing larger, like some huge flight of gulls or rooks, or such-like birds moving with a marvellous uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer they spread over a greater width of sky. The southward wing flung itself in an arrow-headed cloud athwart the sun. And then suddenly they swept round to the eastward and streamed eastward, growing smaller and ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... his "white boss", that his captors' opinion as to his supernatural powers was confirmed. In his zeal to save his master's life, the faithful boy had gone a little too far, for the warragul tribe decided that they must keep such a marvellous man with them at all costs, and that his presence would be sure to bring them plenty of the good things of life—water, tucker, and ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... listens to GEORGE FRANCIS, that he is himself a marvel of taciturnity—that in the noble art of sounding his own trumpet he is a mere child—that as a contributor to the public amusement he is in danger of falling into paltry insignificance. Alas! he is not the marvellous mountebank which he has heretofore considered himself to be; and the nonsense upon which he so prided himself, in comparison with the nonsense of GEORGE FRANCIS, sinks into the most melancholy and insufferable wisdom. He looks forward to the future ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... by those two cities; a new scene of things commences, in which which [12] a King, the Empire of the Greeks, doth according to his will, and, by setting his own laws above the laws of God, exalts and magnifies himself above every God, and speaks marvellous things against the God of Gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished.—Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the lawful desire of women in matrimony, nor any God, but shall magnify himself above all. And in his seat he shall honour Mahuzzims, that ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton
... was actually nourished amid that 'Gothic supineness,' as Mr. MacColl has finely said of him. Of all our poets and painters Blake surely deserves a monument in the grey church which became to him what St. Mary Redcliffe was to Chatterton. A window adapted from the book of Job (with the marvellous design of the Morning Stars) was, I am told, actually offered to, and rejected by, the late Dean. To Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the wonderful movement of which he was the dynamic force there should also be a worthy memorial; to Water Pater, the superb aside ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... they had lost their horns. And by activity and swiftness of foot, he drove the hinds and the goats together into the house which there was for the goats at the extremity of the forest. Then Peredur returned to his mother. "Ah, mother," said he, "a marvellous thing have I seen in the wood; two of thy goats have run wild, and lost their horns; through their having been so long missing in the wood. And no man had ever more trouble than I had to drive them in." Then they all arose and went to see. And when they beheld ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... administration in the management of the war; attributing every failure to their measures, and every successful operation to circumstances over which they had no control. It was argued, indeed, that ministers had only made such preparations as would ensure defeats; and that it was marvellous we were not involved in indiscriminate ruin and disgrace. The blunders of ministers were both numerous and palpable, but it cannot be denied that they were mightily magnified by the opposition, who looked at their every movement with a jealous and jaundiced eye. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of wonders—there is a general and insatiate appetite for the marvellous; but let us proceed: Now we'll take the reverse of the picture. The Duke thinks he does things in style, by paying his debts of honour contracted at the gaming-table, and but very few honourable debts—by being harsh and severe to a private supplicant, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... time, all the nations of Christendom had for ages upon ages been sunk in a lazy doze of ignorance and superstition. But, when tidings of the great discovery reached their drowsy ears, they were roused in a marvellous manner; and many of the richest and most powerful forthwith determined to secure, each to itself, a portion of the new-found region, by planting colonies; or, in other words, ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... that further military resistance was hopeless, resorted at once to their old game of intrigue and management, and proved that, fresh as they were from the experience of violent methods, they had not forgotten their old art of manipulating Presidents. They adapted themselves with marvellous flexibility to the changed condition of things, in order to become masters of the situation, and began to declaim in favor of the Union, even while their curses against it were yet echoing in the air. They wheedled the President into pardoning, in the place of hanging them; they made themselves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and eventful has been the brief history of this marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... in the pulpit I quoted the words of Colonel Ingersoll, 'God cannot afford to damn an honest man.' That phrase has always seemed to me a marvellous mixture of blasphemy, ignorance, and sound common sense. From my point of view it is blasphemous, because it is the utterance of the atom trying to understand the universe. It is ignorant, because it is impossible for that human atom who uttered it to form any adequate conception of the ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Christians drink joyfully. For all agree that he will break his fast who eats any portion of chocolate, which, dissolved and well mixed with warm water, is not prejudicial to keeping a fast. This is a sufficiently marvellous presupposition. He who eats 4 ozs. of exquisite sturgeon roasted has broken his fast; if he has it dissolved and prepared in an extract of thick ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... his exhibition of his marvellous power of endurance, for pricking his finger accidentally with a pin, he sang out lustily, much to the astonishment ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... the Commedia. "After this sonnet" (in which he describes how beyond the widest sphere of heaven his love had beheld a lady receiving honor and dazzling by her glory the unaccustomed spirit)—"After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision, in which I saw things which made me resolve not to speak more of this blessed one until such time as I should be able to indite more worthily of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knows. So that it shall be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... feet in surprise. She had supposed she was alone, and for a moment she was frightened, but a glance around reassured her, for strange to say, seated on the radiator warming his toes was her old friend the Hatter, the queer old chap she had met in her marvellous trip through Wonderland, and with him was the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, and the White ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... line around his waist and straggles up the beach. Even if he has but one fish hooked amidships he has all he can do to drag him out from the countless thousands and land him. It is not an eminently ideal or sportsmanlike sort of fishing, this "jagging," but it possesses a marvellous enjoyment and fascination for the youth of ten, and older people as well; for a full-grown salmon is a powerful fellow, and his big, fluke-like tail enables him to make a terrific rush when under the influence of terror or when ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... Society's Gallery. This clever artist sojourned in that country from March to September. He kept his eyes open and his hand ever busy, and has brought back more than a hundred pictures—fresh, brilliant, and original. Such marvellous aspects of scenery, such wealth of colour, such novelty do we behold, that we long to start off at once to Yokohama, to Nikko, to Hakone, to Tokiyo, or any one of these delightful places—singing. "Let's quit this cold climate so dull and ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... begins to raise an invisible barrier between the child and parent. It was felt by a little maiden of rare fancy, who said in a whisper at the conclusion of one of these marvellous tales, "But don't tell Mamma." The impassable wall between many a mother and daughter in later years, once consisted of but a scattered stone ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... she made the acquaintance of the 'higher ranks of society,' and danced with all the earth. The great surgeon of something opened the ball with the matron of Bartimaeus's, and she went round on his arm like a dolly in a dolly-tub; but he soon saw what a marvellous and miraculous being Glory was, and after I had waltzed so beautifully with the ancient personage I had the hearts of all the young men flying round at the hem of my white petticoat—it was a nice ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of intimate civilisation was too brief to allow him to protest with effectiveness. The truth was, he could not say these things naturally. He had to compose them, and then pronounce them, and the result failed in the necessary air of spontaneity. He could not help thinking what marvellous self-control women had. Now, when he had a headache—which happily was seldom—he could think of nothing else and talk of nothing else; the entire universe consisted solely of his headache. And here she was overcome with a headache, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... a precocious intellect, it preserves—and this is its charm—a spontaneity of childhood—for the little Slav was a bewitching little girl, with rosy cheeks and clear eyes. Has she not evoked all the marvellous imagination of the little ones in these words: "Because I put on an ermine cloak, I imagine that ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... pursued Plinny, "I saw by degrees, and that it was marvellous; but next came something more marvellous still, for I saw that if one had gone forth to choose six persons to carry out this business, he could not have chosen six ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... would like it all the better, and he won the men's hearts as they went along before the wind by his questions about navigation, about rocks and shoals and sandbanks, and the adventures which they were ready enough to tell over again. And their guest had stories of his own to tell, about marvellous adventures with mutinous slaves in the West Indies, and of how he had escaped from their hands to be taken by a French privateer, and was freed by a storm in which the ship went down. And in the interest of the tales and the weather and the fishing he almost forgot about the excitement ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... give you the gold veils of light, And the dark spangled curtains of the night . . . And I will give you as a flower unfurled, The proud and marvellous beauty of the world, And all the wild, white horses of the sea. What will you give to ...
— The Inn of Dreams • Olive Custance
... monastery, where you had been studying to acquire the art of reading and writing, thinking that such knowledge must be useful to you in his service. I told him that brother Roger had reported that you had shown marvellous sharpness there, and could already read from a missal, barring only some of the ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... Tacoma commands the best view of the Sound and of Mt. Tacoma, with its fifteen thousand perpendicular feet looming rose-pink in the heavens, and all its fifteen glaciers seeming to glow with an inner tropic warmth. There are eighteen hundred miles of shore-line embroidering this marvellous Sound. We are continually rounding abrupt points, as in a river,—points so much alike that an untutored eye can not tell one from another. Old Probabilities industriously taking his reckonings and growing more and more enthusiastic at every turn—especially so when ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... barnacles) are, in every sense of the word, very important structures, and they differ extremely little even in different genera; but in the several species of one genus, Pyrgoma, these valves present a marvellous amount of diversification: the homologous valves in the different species being sometimes wholly unlike in shape; and the amount of variation in the individuals of several of the species is so great, that it is no exaggeration to state that the varieties differ more from each other ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... hear their youthful voices, as they march through the streets of the City, singing, "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest STILL the enemy and the AVENGER."[10] "Blessed be the Lord; for He hath showed me His marvellous kindness ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... be possible," asked Septimius, "to have too profound a sense of the marvellous contrivance and adaptation of this material world to require or believe in anything spiritual? How wonderful it is to see it all alive on this spring day, all growing, budding! Do we exhaust it in our little life? Not so; not in a hundred or a thousand lives. ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hear Elsie that very night of Miss Pritchard's call, and told her without preface that the girl had a marvellous voice. ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... will prove to her adversary, and to ours, that such boasting shall not be for his honor, 'for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hands of a woman.' [Hear, hear! and loud cheers.] Now, I ask you this: Is there one of you who believes that the statements of that marvellous book to which we have alluded present an exaggerated picture?—[Tremendous cries of 'No, no.'] Do they not know, say what they will, that the truth is not fully stated? [Hear, hear!] The reality is worse than the fiction. [Hear, hear!] But, apart from this, there is our solemn ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... a chamber that was marvellously well furnished and richly, wherein was a bed arrayed with cloth of gold, the richest that might be thought, and thereby a table of clean gold, and upon the table a marvellous spear, strangely wrought. And when Balin saw that spear he took it in his hand, and turned to King Pellam and smote him passing hard with it so that he fell down in a swoon. Therewith the castle roof and walls brake and fell to the earth, and Balin also, so that he might not stir ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried—it was so beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London. How different are the mean, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... modern science. Quite apart from radium and electrons and other sensational discoveries of recent years, the study of ordinary matter is hardly inferior, either in interest or audacity, to the work of the astronomer. And there is the same foundation in both cases—marvellous apparatus, and trains of mathematical reasoning that would have astonished Euclid or Archimedes. Extraordinary, therefore, as are some of the facts and figures we are now going to give in connection with the minuteness of atoms and molecules, let us bear in mind that we owe them to the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... doubtful, and not to be trusted, coming after cookery. After an exciting subject which has made the general tongue to wag, and just enough heated the brain to cause it to cry out for spiced food—then start your story: taking care that it be mild; for one too marvellous stops the tide, the sense of climax being strongly implanted in all bosoms. So the Countess told an anecdote—one of Mel's. Mr. George Uplift was quite familiar with it, and knew of one passage that would have abashed him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rough painting of his character, not without a resemblance to the final summary, albeit wanting in the justly delicate historical touch to particular features. On the one side he is abused as 'the one-man power'; lauded on the other for his marvellous intuition of the popular will. One can believe that he scarcely wishes to march dictatorially, and full surely his Egyptian policy was from step to step a misreading of the will of the English people. He went forth on this campaign, with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... covered with the wonted dainties of the occasion, occupied the sunny side of the High Street; while the shady side was, in like manner, taken possession of by the packmen, who, in their booths, made a marvellous display of goods of an inferior quality, with laces and ribands of all colours, hanging down in front, and twirling like pinnets in the wind. There was likewise the allurement of some compendious show of wild beasts; in short, a swatch of every ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... bred a watchmaker," he continued, after a long pause, "in the Canton of Zurich. It is not a matter of vanity when I say that I achieved a marvellous degree of skill in the craft. I developed a faculty of invention that led me into a series of experiments regarding the capabilities of purely mechanical combinations. I studied and improved upon ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... neighbouring village, hearing of all these doings in Mexico, and with that love of the marvellous which characterizes persons uneducated, or unaccustomed to the world, determined to pay a visit to the capital, and to hear at the fountain head, all these wonderful stories, which had probably reached them under a hundred exaggerated forms. No sooner had they entered their lodgings, than they ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca |
