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Monumental   /mˌɑnjəmˈɛntəl/  /mˌɑnjəmˈɛnəl/  /mˌɑnjumˈɛntəl/   Listen
Monumental

adjective
1.
Relating or belonging to or serving as a monument.  "Monumental sculptures"
2.
Of outstanding significance.
3.
Imposing in size or bulk or solidity.  Synonyms: massive, monolithic.  "Moore's massive sculptures" , "The monolithic proportions of Stalinist architecture" , "A monumental scale"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Monumental" Quotes from Famous Books



... peculiar to the refinement of our manners, or to modern Europe; it is not the charity of Christianity alone which has hallowed this sensibility, and confessed this equality of affection, which the domestic may participate: monumental inscriptions, raised by grateful masters to the merits of their slaves, have been preserved in the great ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... is now a monumental artist at Woking, after many vicissitudes. Dear chap, how he did stick out of his clothes to be sure! He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall beside my more youth full compactness, and, except that there was no black moustache under his nose blob, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... monumental inscription in Bunhill-fields is, Grace, daughter of T. Cloudesly, of Leeds. Feb. 1666.—Maitland's Hist. of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various

... enjoy them. But when you begin calling a room a library it should mean something more than a small mahogany bookcase with a hundred volumes hidden behind glass doors. I think there is nothing more amusing than the unused library of the nouveau riche, the pretentious room with its monumental bookcases and its slick area of glass doors and its thousands of unread volumes, caged eternally ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe

... nation, the common dead! And so, I suppose, we are to raise monuments beside the monuments to Reynolds and others, to be erected in the cemetery on the battle-field of Gettysburg. We must there build high the monumental marble for men like Barksdale, whom I have seen in this hall draw their bowie-knives on the Representatives of the people; men who died upon the battle-field of Gettysburg in arms against the Government, and where they now lie buried in ditches, 'unwept, unhonored, and unsung!' They ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... eleven o'clock there was an unusual gathering in the parish church. The stillness round the marble sleepers on the monumental tombs was broken, not by the sound of prayer and praise, but by the low hush of murmuring voices and the tramp of eager feet. Pelle came quietly in and took his usual seat. He bowed his head, just ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker

... strength to carry out the will so to serve your Majesty that I obtain the sovereign satisfaction, of which such a gracious testimony lies before me today in the form of the autograph letter of the 26th. The vase, which arrived in good time, is a truly monumental expression of Royal favor, and at the same time so substantial that I may hope not the "fragments" but the whole will be evidence to my descendants of the gracious sympathy evinced by your majesty on the occasion of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... these physical details expressed the reserves and inhibitions of generations. The only flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained. She knew that he excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and precedents. He would always reach the goal, but his race would never carry him beyond the end of the course; he would always fulfil the law, but he would ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... Professor Child's Introduction, we cannot exactly tell what his definition of a 'popular' ballad was, or what qualities in a ballad implied exclusion from his collection—e.g. he does not admit The Children in the Wood: otherwise one can find in this monumental work the whole history and all the versions of nearly all ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick

... Aaron kept guard over the Commandments in black and gold, and walls bristling with genii and angels of all descriptions, weeping over Underwoods of different generations. Lance stood open-mouthed before a namesake of his own, whose huge monumental slab was upborne by the exertions of a kind of Tartarean cherub, solely consisting of a skull and ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... arrived, but Paris was still a city of absentees. The weather was warm and charming, and a certain savour of early autumn in the air was in accord with the somewhat melancholy aspect of the empty streets and closed shutters of this honorable quarter, where the end of the monumental vistas seemed to be curtained with a hazy emanation from the Seine. It was late in the afternoon when Bernard was ushered into Mrs. Vivian's little high-nestling drawing-room, and a patch of sunset tints, faintly red, rested softly upon the gilded wall. Bernard had seen these ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... the day she would go from library to library in New York, verifying data for her father's monumental work. At night he would dictate and she would write. O'Connell took a newer and more vital interest in the book, and ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners

... particular in which the monumental records and the biblical tradition are in accord. During those obscure centuries that saw the work sketched out from which the civilization of the Tigris and Euphrates basin was, in time, to be developed, the Chaldaean population was not homogeneous; the country was ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... picturesque friend Sam Brannan was deeply concerned. In matters of initiative for the public good, especially where a limelight was concealed in the wing, Brannan was an able and efficient citizen. Headquarters were chosen and a formal organization was perfected. The Monumental Fire Engine Company bell was to be tolled as a summons for the Committee ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White

... gunnybags filled with sand which we piled up in a wall some six feet through and about ten feet high. This barricade was about twenty feet from the building. Guards were stationed at the passageways through it as well as at the stairs and Committee by the members of the Monumental Fire Engine Company No. 6, stationed on the west side of Brenham Place, opposite the "Plaza." Our small field pieces and arms were kept on the ground floor, and the cells, executive chamber and other departments ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley

... Besides the monumental and artistic features of Rome, the human side of it appealed to me. There was something congenial in the Romans, and, indeed, in the Italians generally, so that I seemed to be renewing my acquaintance with people whom I had partly forgotten. I picked ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... native artist, in which she appears kneeling in her peasant's dress, one hand pressed upon her heart and the other lifted towards Heaven. And in a little clump of fir-trees near her house stands a sort of monumental fountain, surmounted by a bust of the Pucelle. The house itself remained in the possession of the last descendant of the family, a soldier of the Empire named Gerardin, down to the time of the Restoration. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... selection of these monumental relics, the explanatory letterpress, or the engravings which reproduce them, we are struck by the admirable taste, science, and fidelity with which the largest as well as the smallest gems have each and every one been made to tally in size ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various

... agony in the sands of the wilderness, had but to "look and live;" and still does He say, "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." Up-reared by the side of his own cross there was a monumental column for all Time, only second to itself in wonder. Over the head of the dying felon is the superscription written for despairing guilt and trembling penitence, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... the appearance of Dr. Tylor's Primitive Culture—Klausen, Preuner, Preller, Kuhn, and many others, who worked on the comparative method but with slender material for the use of it—we see at once what an immense advance has been effected by that monumental work, and by the stimulus that it gave to others to follow the same track. Now we have in this country the works of Lang, Robertson Smith, Farnell, Frazer, Hartland, Jevons, and others, while a host of students on the Continent are writing in all languages on anthropological ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... He dreamt of magnificence and boot-brushes kept sticking out of this dream like black mud out of snow. In his reverie he looked about for Ruth Earp, but she was invisible. Then he went downstairs again, idly; gorgeously feigning that he spent six evenings a week in ascending and descending monumental staircases, appropriately clad. He was determined to be as sublime ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... of the monumental stupidity of her diplomacy Germany has found it necessary to invent explanations. The form these have taken as regards America has been the attributing of fresh low motives. Her object at first was to prove to the world at large how very ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... and the two manage to seat themselves with some approach to comfort. The First Lord of the Admiralty further eases the pressure on his colleagues by throwing his left arm over the back of the bench, where it hangs like a limb of some monumental tree. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... It almost startled Henry on his first introduction to this family of two daughters and two brothers, where the father was rather like a brother grown prematurely bald, and the stepmother supplied with monumental dignity that element of solemnity without which no properly regulated household is complete, to notice the camaraderie which prevailed amongst them all. Jokes were flying about from one to another all the time, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... This monumental work stands alone. "As a work of constructive criticism it has never been surpassed. To every one and especially to philosophers and men of natural science, it is an amazing revelation of how the ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... latter however presents him as a thinker, and it is maintained by many critics that Plato put into the mouth of Socrates his own ideas. It is lamentable that this great philosopher committed nothing of his monumental work in writing. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... the previous interruption in my work, which had lasted rather a long time, Hartel had engraved the first act of the score, and Bulow had arranged it for the piano. Thus a portion of the opera lay before me in monumental completeness, while I was still in a fruitful state of excitement with regard to the execution of the whole. And now in the early months of the year the orchestration of this act, which I continued to send in groups of sheets to the publisher to be engraved, also neared completion. ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... and not with the faery grace and ephemeral loveliness of the Chinese;—though they learned the trick of that, too,—as they learned in the west kindred qualities from the Saracens. Grand Pekin is of their architecture; which is Chinese with a spaciousness and monumental solemnity added. Such a capital Ts'in She Hwangti built him at Hien fang or Changan. In the Hall of audience of his palace within the walls he set up twelve statues, each (I like this barbarian touch) weighing twelve thousand pounds. Well; we ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... sculpture permits the purest expression of the classical ideal; painting, music, and poetry bear a romantic character. This does not exclude the recurrence of these three stages within each art—in architecture, for example, as monumental (the obelisk), useful (house and temple), and Gothic (the cathedral) architecture. As the plastic arts reached their culmination among the Hellenes, so the romantic arts culminate among the Christian nations. In poetry, as the most perfect and universal ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... he does under such circumstances, but it will be but little and feeble in comparison with what he might do. The community must see its way to paying some to eschew plumbing and stick to design, if they mean to have any design. This has been done, indeed, in the matter of monumental-glass, and to a certain extent in wall-decoration by means of painting; but it must be done in what is more vital yet—in architectural sculpture of all sorts and all grades; of vegetable, animal and human subjects; in low relief, in high relief and in the round; in detached ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various

... burial-ground of Edgartown,—where the dead have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to its original barrenness,—in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated a century back, or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers, and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, cross-bones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and there ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... just manage to see it—the first portrait of Jack's I had ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place of honour—say the central panel in a pale yellow or rose Dubarry drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the half-light, all the characteristic qualities came out—all ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... Si-ngan where the Chou dynasty set up its throne in the twelfth century B. C. Since that date many dynasties have made it the seat of empire. Their palaces have disappeared; but most of them have left monumental inscriptions from which a connected history might be extracted. To us the most interesting monument is a stone, erected about 800 A. D. to commemorate the introduction of Christianity by some Nestorian missionaries ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... monumental significance: it started the scramble in China: and all the history of the past 22 years is piled like a pyramid on top of it. Now that the Romanoff's have been hurled from the throne, Russia must prove eager to reverse the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... on the west side, five on the east, and three on each of the remaining sides. Each of the porticos has three distinct roofs raised one above the other, thus nobly contributing to the monumental effect of ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... might advert first to the vote of thanks, and then to the piece of plate, to remain with the gentleman's family as a monumental testimony of the opinion which was entertained by the community ...
— The Provost • John Galt

... monumental "Thousand Nights and a Night" lay upon a littered desk before which I presumed Mr. Camber had been seated at the time of my arrival. Some wet vessel, probably a cup of tea or coffee, had at some time been set ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... Contemporary History. The thorough student of this period will find a wealth of suggestive material in Smith's Old Testament History and in Schuerer's monumental work, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ. The later development of Israel's religion is presented in Marti's Religion of the Old Testament, in the first part of Toy's Judaism and Christianity, in Bousset's Judaism, and in ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... coursed with their accustomed speed Since England hailed its previous apparition, Since every man and woman who could read, Wanting the nearest way to erudition, Bought as an ornament of her (or his) home The monumental masterpiece ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various

... The monumental stone, designed to commemorate some feat of an ancient King of Man, which had been long forgotten, was erected on the side of a narrow lonely valley, or rather glen, secluded from observation by the steepness of its banks, upon a projection of which stood the tall, shapeless, solitary rock, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... neglected to sleep in an undistinguished grave. But this neglect does not extend alone to Mr. Crawford. I believe, of all her distinguished men, James A. Meriwether is the only one whose grave has been honored with a monumental stone by the State. Crawford, Cobb, Dooly, Jackson, Troup, Forsyth, Campbell, Lumpkin, Dawson, Walker, Colquitt, Berrien, Daugherty, and many others who have done the State some service and much honor, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... Standish deliberately have uttered so monumental a falsehood about the losses of her aunt at cards? She might, of course, be simply and sincerely mistaken, misled by over-solicitude for a ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... wonder, and wait, fuming with impatience. What had happened? Had the fleets met? Had the wonderful day which the German Navy was popularly supposed to be living for—had it arrived? And if it had—what had been the result? They could only lean over the stern and try and grasp the one monumental fact—war. And what did it hold ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... accomplished among us. Such is the work he has left us, lofty and solid, a pile of granite, a monumental edifice, from whose summit his renown will henceforth shine. Great men make their own pedestals: the future ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... Beat upwards to God's throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries lieth silent-bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death; Most like a monumental statue set In everlasting watch and moveless woe, Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet— If it could weep, it could ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... the rustling leaves With minute drops from off the eaves. And when the sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me, goddess, bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown, that Sylvan loves, Of pine, or monumental oak, Where the rude axe, with heaved stroke, Was never heard the nymphs to daunt Or fright them from their hallow'd haunt. There in close covert by some brook Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from day's garish eye, While the bee with honey'd thigh, That at her flowery work doth sing, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... this modest monastery went a handful of humble missionaries who were to preach the gospel and to bring civilization into countries far beyond the boundary line of the Roman empire. Of their success in the British Islands we have monumental evidence everywhere in Rome. Here in the vestibule of this very church is engraved the name of Sir Edward Carne, one of the Commissioners sent by Henry VIII. to obtain the opinion of foreign universities respecting his divorce from Catherine of Aragon; and, not far from it, that of Robert Pecham, ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... majority of contests the man who keeps his head will win. Notably this is true in boxing, a fine instrument of education, whatever may be the objections to the prize ring. So dispassionate a scientist as Professor Hall in his monumental work on Adolescence, describes boxing as "a manly art, a superb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, full of will and self-control. The moment this is lost, stinging punishment follows. Hence it is the surest ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... humbled the Barbary flag—which, for a hundred years, had been the terror of Christendom,—drove it from the Mediterranean, and put an end to the infamous tribute it had been accustomed to extort? It was the American sailor, and the name of Decatur and his gallant companions will be as lasting as monumental brass. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... acknowledge the receipt of the net proceeds of your lecture on "Echoes from the Revolution," delivered in our city July sixth, 1876, and by your direction have forwarded the amount to Chaplain William Earnshaw, President of the "Soldiers' Home Monumental Fund," at Dayton, to assist in erecting a monument to the memory of the veterans, who by the fortunes of war await the long roll at the National Military Home: and may your reward be no less than the love and gratitude ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... "the monumental hireoglyphics of the Egyptians were almost invariably painted with the liveliest tints; and when similar hireoglyphics were executed on a reduced scale, and in a more cursive form upon papyri or scrolls made from ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... of any American city pass, from one end to another, through strange degrees and vicissitudes of splendour and distress, running under the same name between monumental warehouses, the dens and taverns of thieves, and the sward and shrubbery of villas. In San Francisco, the sharp inequalities of the ground, and the sea bordering on so many sides, greatly exaggerate these contrasts. The street for which we were now bound took its ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... this monumental crime against the peace of the world is eternally fixed upon her, not only by these outward and visible acts and negotiations, not only by her years of patient preparation for the war into which she plunged the world. The responsibility is fastened upon her ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... noted for the most remarkable of the monumental remains in the United States. They are situated upon the right bank of the Etowah river near the railroad, some two miles south of the town, in the midst of a perfectly level alluvial bottom, towering above all surrounding ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear

... the halls connected with the trade guilds. The rulers of the city and of the guilds were often the same men, in any case usually men of the same set. These secular buildings were really distinguished in appearance, but not monumental. They reflected something of the wealth that accrued from trade. They were of good size and proportions, built to be worthy of the practical use for which they were intended. The lower stages were of stone, the upper for the most part of wood and plaster ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson

... and winding coasts, laved on every side by the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Egypt was a plain, diversified only by the varieties of vegetation, and by the towns and villages, and the enormous monumental structures which had been erected by man. Greece was a picturesque and ever-changing scene of mountains and valleys; of precipitous cliffs, winding beaches, rocky capes, and lofty headlands. The character and genius of the inhabitants of these two countries took their cast, in ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... specialist has not made an error of some 20,000 years? A fair proof of this we have in the scientific and historic labeling of the Cyclopean architecture. Traditional archeology bearing directly upon the monumental is rejected. Oral literature, popular legends, ballads and rites, are all stifled in one word— superstition; and popular antiquities have become "fables" and "folk-lore." The ruder style of Cyclopean masonry, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire, whose handsome monument—in a finished and carefully colored lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely groomed willow—hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were, monumental parlor. Her household consisted of herself, her son, nineteen years of age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small children, twins, left upon her doorstep when little more than mere marsupial possibilities, taken in for the night, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the Sloman cottage, waiting with Mrs. Sloman by the tea-table. Why do I always remember her, sitting monumental ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... upon a heap It stood—but let us say—St. Peter's cock, Lacking not many a holy, rousing charm For one with whose known self it was coeval, Dawning with it from darkness of the unseen! And its low mounds of monumental grass Were far more solemn than great marble tombs; For flesh is grass, its goodliness the flower. Oh, lovely is the face of green churchyard On sunny afternoons! The light itself Nestles amid the grass; and the sweet wind Says, I am here,—no more. With sun and wind And crowing cocks, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... incarnation of the national conscience, of the national dignity. The dignity is absent here, and I am told that the conscience is an abyss. "L'etat c'est moi" even—I like that better than the spittoons. These implements are architectural, monumental; they are the only monuments. En somme, the country is interesting, now that we too have the Republic; it is the biggest illustration, the biggest warning. It is the last word of democracy, and that word is—flatness. It is very big, very rich, and perfectly ugly. ...
— The Point of View • Henry James

... of the two first acts of "Sigurd." [Opera by Draseke.]—Imagining that you may also want the score of the first act, which had remained here, I send it also, sorry as I am to part from this monumental work. Under present existing circumstances, which on my side are passive and negative, as I intimated to you after the performance of Cornelius's Opera, there is no prospect of putting Sigurd on the boards at present. But I promise myself the pleasure and satisfaction of ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... the sonnet-writers of the Elizabethan age, comes a somewhat technical study of the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time — a restatement of Ellis's monumental work on that subject. His discussion of music in Shakespeare's time has already been noticed. He next tried to reproduce for his class the domestic life of the age, commenting in full on the sermons, the plays, the customs of the time. In order to give unity to this study, he sketches in ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... Cross to him; he wouldn't even bark at it. I called his attention to the poster outside the Euston Theatre of The Two Biffs; for all the regard he showed he might never even have heard of them. The monumental masonry by Portland Road ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various

... painted face, and below lay a long, gaily coloured scroll in hieroglyphics. Exalted stiffly in a seat placed on a seeming block of stone, was a figure, with elbows, as it were glued to its sides, and hands crossed, altogether stone-coloured and monumental, and with the true Sphynx head, surrounded with beetles, lizards, and other mystic creatures (very chocolate-coloured). And beside her stood the Herr Professor, in a red fez, long dark gown, and spectacles, a flowing beard concealing the ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... past power and greatness: the noble royal palace, degraded, alas, into barracks for the Austrian soldiery; the grand, impressive cathedral, in which the tombs of the kings present an epitome of Polish history; the town-hall, a building of the 14th century; the turreted St. Florian's gate; and the monumental hillock, erected on the mountain Bronislawa in memory of Kosciuszko by the hands of his grateful countrymen, of which a Frenchman said:—"Void une eloquence touts nouvelle: un peuple qui ne peut s'exprimer par ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... their thoughts, and the grandest problems of human life and destiny that ever interested the mind of man are investigated not by the aid of the millions that ostentation wastes, but by the heroic labors of the impoverished scholar, thankless until his only reward can be but a monumental stone. How seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that of the Rev. S. R. Calthrop, "If the governments of the world would spend on scientific discovery a hundredth part of what they spend on killing men, or rather ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... Consul, censor, aedilis hic fuit apud vos. But Cicero's words (nolum ... sepulcro) seem to imply a longer inscription than one of three lines; the analogy of the Scipionic inscriptions points the same way. The older monumental inscriptions of Rome were written in the Saturnian metre, which depended partly on accent. ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... content with his first telescope, he made another and another, and he had such genius for the work that he soon possessed a better instrument than was ever made before. His patience in grinding the curved reflective surface was monumental. Sometimes for sixteen hours together he must walk steadily about the mirror, polishing it, without once removing his hands. Meantime his sister, always his chief lieutenant, cheered him with her presence, and from time to time put food into ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... rev'rence tread These sacred mansions of the dead. Not that the monumental bust, Or sumptuous tomb, here guards the dust Of rich, or great,(let wealth, rank, birth, Sleep undistinguished in the earth.) This simple urn records a name, That shines with more exalted fame. Reader! if genius, taste refin'd, A native elegance of mind; If virtue, science, ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye

... the appearance in one of our streets of a venerable relic of the Revolution, said to be one of the party who threw the tea overboard in Boston Harbor. He was a fine monumental specimen in his cocked hat and knee breeches, with his buckled shoes and his sturdy cane. The smile with which I, as a young man, greeted him, meant no disrespect to an honored fellow-citizen whose ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... through the hills, his unhurt right hand began crying out for action and a brush to nurse. As he watched, day after day, the unveiling of the monumental hills, and the transitions from hazy wraith-like whispers of hues, to strong, flaring riot of color, this fret of restlessness became actual pain. He was wasting wonderful opportunity and the creative instinct in him ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... Second Reading of Small Holdings Bill. House received him with hearty cheer. No one more popular than BOBBY. Delight uproariously manifested when, daintily pulling at his abundant shirt-cuff, and settling his fair young head more comfortably upon summit of his monumental collar, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various

... wife!' Some haughty Greek, who lives thy tears to see, Imbitters all thy woes, by naming me. The thoughts of glory past, and present shame, A thousand griefs shall waken at the name! May I lie cold before that dreadful day, Press'd with a load of monumental clay! Thy Hector, wrapt in everlasting sleep, Shall neither hear thee ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... riverside city of a hundred thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe. Here, in a broad thoroughfare, once the abode of wealthy City merchants, we found the sculpture works for which we searched. Outside was a considerable yard full of monumental masonry. Inside was a large room in which fifty workers were carving or moulding. The manager, a big blond German, received us civilly, and gave a clear answer to all Holmes's questions. A reference to his books showed that hundreds of casts had been taken from a marble copy of Devine's head ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... his novel. But, frankly, one does not expect this of the third daughter of an Irish soldier, an ex-journalist and the author of a Drury Lane pantomime. Nevertheless the erudition is all here. From this standpoint, The Just Steward is truly monumental. I will show ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... worth of property went up in flame and smoke in Seattle's great fire of June 6, 1889. The ashes were scarcely cold when her enthusiastic citizens began to build anew, better, stronger, and more beautiful than before. A city of brick, stone, and iron has arisen, monumental evidence of the energy, pluck, and perseverance of the people, and of their fervent faith in the future of Seattle. Then Port Townsend, with its beautiful harbor and gently sloping bluffs, "the city of destiny," beyond all doubt, of any of the towns on the Sound. Favored ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax

... to the memory of a family servant who had been a faithful attendant of his lamented daughter, the Princess Amelia. George III. possessed much of the strong domestic feeling of the old English country gentleman; and it is an incident curious in monumental history, and creditable to the human heart,—a monarch erecting a monument in honour of the ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving

... held at right angles to the rays of the sun kindle tinder set opposite them? What is the cause of the prismatic colours of the rainbow, or of the appearance in heaven of two rival images of the sun, with sundry other phenomena treated in a monumental volume by Archimedes of Syracuse, a man who showed extraordinary and unique subtlety in all branches of geometry, but was perhaps particularly remarkable for his frequent and attentive inspection of mirrors. If you had only read this book, Aemilianus, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... front." He was much disappointed when Early eluded the forces which Grant hurried to the Capitol. Mrs. Lincoln was outspoken to the same effect. The doughty little lady had also been under fire, her temper being every whit as bold as her husband's. When Stanton with a monumental playfulness proposed to have her portrait painted in a commanding attitude on the parapet of Fort Stevens, she gave him the freedom of her tongue, because of the inadequacy ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... bright way into regions where he, in another life, might follow and sing beside her in liquid, throbbing notes to pierce the stars. He ended by saying that he was not very fit—the opera season had been a monumental experience this year—and he was taking refuge with an English brotherhood to lead, for a time, a cloistered life instinct with beauty and its worship, but that there as everywhere he was hers eternally. How glad I was of the verbal memory I have been so often praised for! ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo

... works is endless, monumental; it shows us an untiring soul, an immense and indomitable will, a total ignoring of himself for the benefit of his fellow-members. This is not the conduct of the charlatan, not of the self-seeker. It is that of one of those brave and long-tried souls who have fought ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... odors of the coast in blooming time often oppressed him. The fragrance of the tropic blossom had never become sweeter in his nostrils than the breath of northern pines. He wanted to go home, but feared to do so. Mrs. Appleman was assuming monumental proportions in his estimation. And so the years went by, and John Appleman, dealing out groceries in Guaymas for such brief hours of the day as people bought things, his partner relieving him half the time, hungered more with each passing year to ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... wild bank where swine had formerly pastured had been transformed into a superb avenue skirting the Gave. It had been necessary to put back the river's bed in order to gain ground, and lay out a monumental quay bordered by a broad footway, and protected by a parapet. Some two or three hundred yards farther on, a hill brought the avenue to an end, and it thus resembled an enclosed promenade, provided with benches, and shaded by magnificent ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... figured, one of whose bones is preserved there as a relic, a relic of a martyr who suffered for the truth. The facade of the University is very beautiful; four Doric columns give it a severe and monumental air; but solitude reigns in the class-rooms where to-day scarcely a thousand ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... too. A planted crew, piracy—and he, Dennison Cleigh, was eventually to chuckle over it! He had his doubts. And where did the glass beads come in? Or had Cunningham spoken the truth—a lure? A big game somewhere in the offing. And the rogue was right! The world, dizzily stewing in a caldron of monumental mistakes, would give scant attention to an off-side play such as this promised to be. Not a handhold anywhere to the puzzle. The old boy might have the key, but Dennison Cleigh could not go to him ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath

... faint flicker in them, or in one of them, every time we hear of the "triumphal discovery of Neptune"—this "monumental achievement of theoretical astronomy," as ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... road over the Janiculum, I think—which also, if I remember right, was the way that Shelley came—but I despair of Paris, and certainly of London. I cannot even recall an entry for Brussels, though Brussels is a monumental city with great rewards for those who love the combination ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... Buck Thornton!" she cried, making a monumental failure of the frown with which she tried to draw her placid brows. "Here I thought all the time you ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory

... yesterday, in how crestfallen a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so intolerably ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... myriad wires throb with the nation's tale! How despot trembles in his castled hall, When liberty's wild shouts of power prevail, And give their gladness unto every gale! Fetters and chains dissolve in holy trust, Scepters and swords in puny weakness fail, While crowns and thrones make monumental dust, And kingly Might is dead, Oppression ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller

... petty beginning, like your monumental oak from your pigmy acorn, there grew up a great feud between the families of the two girls, and like a poison the plague of the quarrel spread to Florence, and in a twinkling men were divided against each other in a deathly hatred that in their hearts knew little of the original ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... in command, on board the ship, opened fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing. It looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy twilight. But there is no other monument to Captain Cook. True, up on the mountain side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... clay, took it home, and moulded it for himself after all the casts he could lay his hands on. Mr. Francis, the proprietor of the marble works, had a German workman in his employ of the name of Luge, who used to model small figures, chiefly, no doubt, for monumental purposes. Young Gibson borrowed a head of Bacchus that Luge had composed, and made a copy of it himself in clay. Mr. Francis was well pleased with this early attempt, and also with a clever head of Mercury in marble, which Gibson carved ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen

... has a pretty young girl to regret in such a life as she has left? It's the most arid and joyless existence under the sun. She has never known anything like society. In the country with us, the social side must always have been somewhat paralyzed, but there are monumental evidences of pleasures in other days that are quite extinct now. You see big dusty ball-rooms in the old taverns: ball-rooms that have had no dancing in them for half a century, and where they give you a bed sometimes. There used to be academies, too, in the hill ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... the report of several rifles in quick succession, and the Bowery boy, who was now at the top of the great monumental stairs, fell dead. His body rolled to the bottom ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney

... surrounded by memories of his childhood. The building was next door to that in which Ellis & Allan had their tobacco store in Poe's school days in Richmond. The old Broad Street Theatre, on the site of which now stands Monumental Church, was the scene of his beautiful mother's last appearance before the public. Near Nineteenth and Main she died in a damp cellar in the "Bird in Hand" district, through which ran Shockoe Creek. Eighteen days later the old theatre was ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... ventured to go past 1280, and as there is no mention in the Domesday Book of any such building, the last supposition is probably nearest the mark. The founder of the church was most likely Sir William de Bermingham, of whom there is still a monumental effigy existing, and the first endowment would naturally come from the same family, who, before the erection of such church, would have their own chapel at the Manor House. Other endowments there were from the Clodshales, notably that of Walter de Clodshale, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... In the monumental piece of work which issued in 1897 from the Cape Observatory, under the direction of Dr. Gill, the final results from the observations of Iris, Victoria, and Sappho have been obtained. From this it appears that the angle which the earth's ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... curious to remark that at the very height of her colonial commerce, when the riches of South America were pouring at the greatest rate into her coffers, how little actual wealth was accumulated by the Mother Country. Indeed, a monumental proof of the inefficiency of her organization is that, although she bled the filial nations with an almost incredible enthusiasm, Spain remained in debt. The influx of gold from her colonies demoralized and ruined ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... sun stared down in his fulness, the air circulated, and the public not less; the limit stood off, the way round was easy, the east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west, and there were also side doors for entrance, between the two—large, monumental, ornamental, in their style—as for all proper great churches. By some such process, in fine, had the Prince, for his father-in-law, while remaining solidly a feature, ceased to be, at ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... days of great suffering, but grandfather was a man of monumental patience, and no word of complaint passed his lips. It was just at this time that a crushing blow had been dealt the hopeful, cheery little wifey, who had always been laughingly termed "boss of the ranch," "head of ...
— Grandfather's Love Pie • Miriam Gaines

... choir, and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion, above the prostrate flock, when the verse "Et homo factus est" took its slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their last meeting, to the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... flower he could enjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himself the flower’s inherited beauty and the ancestors from which the flower got its inheritance. And as regards the lyrical flow imported into so monumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needs study the book with the greatest interest. His very latest work, however, is in prose. I find it extremely difficult to write about ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’ It is full of remarkable ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... wandering through the classic shades of the Abbey next door, looking over the memorial tablets of "sculptured brass and monumental marble," erected to the honour of departed worthies:—I wished, you know, to keep my mind in a properly reflective state for the afternoon hours of examination—history and other abstruse studies being usually ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... said Professor Gray to Mr. Hooper. "I hurried back to invite some of my pupils to hear a message from Mr. Edison's laboratory; but trust Bill to do the thing in a monumental fashion!" ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... completed and becomes more monumental in style in the sketch next to it (MS. B, 35a, see p. 45 Fig. 1). An outer aisle is added by circles, having for radius the distance between the columns in the middle ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... address, in any such tangible and monumental form, has ever been possible. It was impossible to canvass our vast territories with the zealous and indefatigable industry with which England was canvassed for signatures. In America, those possessed of the spirit which led to this efficient action had no leisure for it. All their time and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... semi-feudal, semi-humanistic culture, out of which the Masque and Drama, music and painting, scholarship and poetry, emerged with brilliant originality, blending mediaeval and antique elements in a specific type of modern romance. This culminated in the permanent and monumental work began by Boiardo in the morning, and completed by Ariosto in the meridian of the Renaissance. Within the circuit of the Court the whole life of the Duchy seemed to concentrate itself. From the frontier of Venice to the Apennines a tract of fertile ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... town. In another hour we were walking through Edinburg, admiring its palace-like edifices, and stopping every few minutes to gaze up at some lofty monument. Really, thought I, we call Baltimore the "Monumental City" for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner! These, too, not in the midst of glaring red buildings, where they seem to have been accidentally dropped, but framed in by lofty ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... and that day gave it also their lives. I was born in that little town, and bred up amid the memories of that day. When a boy, my mother lifted me up, on Sunday, in her religious, patriotic arms, and held me while I read the first monumental line I ever saw— "Sacred to Liberty and ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... the flowerbeds they walked to the boxwood hedge which bordered the park on the southern side. They passed before the orange-grove, the monumental door of which was surmounted by the Lorraine cross of Mareuilles, and then passed under the linden-trees which formed an alley on the lawn. Statues of nymphs shivered in the damp shade studded with pale lights. A pigeon, posed on the shoulder of one of the white women, fled. From time to time ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow mythic, the contemporaries who had once seen him, being all dead. And in three-hundred years, and three-thousand years—!—To attempt theorising on such matters would profit ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... of these children of hers have been! Are there any criminals in history so monumental as Catholic criminals? Have any men ever fallen so low as, let us say, the Borgia family of the Middle Ages, as Gilles de Rais and a score of others, as men and women who were perhaps in their faith 'good Catholics' enough, yet in their lives a mere disgrace to humanity? Look at the Latin countries ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson

... a somber reproduction of the Taj, a monumental bridge was to span the Jumna and link the shrines of emperor and empress. Instead of this fair dream, there is now only a flat, sandcovered shore, upon which lazy tortoises range themselves under ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... of tears and praise. Let the luckless one ask of me no more; let him call only upon the succulent; let him recruit among the full ranks of the adipose. Be it mine to lay these spare-ribs athwart no gridiron more fervid than the pavement of his own monumental Escurial. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... second week with disaster staring him in the face, and before it was over it was plain to everyone that the enterprise was doomed to monumental failure. The public after the first night became curiously apathetic. This apathy would have been justified had any considerable number of the city's habitual opera-patrons attended any of the performances. The welcome came from the Italians dwelling within the city's boundaries; the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... hanging over it from vague consecrated lamp-studded heights and taking in, spread below and afar, the great scroll of all its irresistible story, pricked out, across river and bridge and radiant place, and along quays and boulevards and avenues, and around monumental circles and squares, in syllables of fire, and sketched and summarised, further and further, in the dim fire-dust of endless avenues; that was all of the essence of fond and thrilled and throbbing recognition, with a thousand things understood and a flood of response conveyed, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... Switzerland, taking Mother with him; Aunt Emily, in her black silk dress that crackled with disapproval, went to Tunbridge Wells—an awful place in another century somewhere; and Uncle Felix was left behind to "take charge of ''em'"—"'em" being the children and himself. It was evidence of monumental trust and power, placing him in their imaginations even above the recognised Authorities. His sway was never for ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... monumental stones for the dead are several with caps figured on them. The like are to be seen at Nimes, Avignon, and elsewhere. These are freedmen's caps. When a noble Roman died he left in his will that so many of his slaves were to be given their liberty, and then this was represented by caps ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... that the glaciation of Europe was not one continuous process, but that it could be divided into several episodes, glaciations, or advances of the ice, separated by a warm interglacial period. The monumental researches of Penck and Bruckner in the Alps have there established four glaciations with mild interglacial periods, but all of these cannot be clearly traced in Britain. One very important point also is the recognition ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... some fine examples of decorative stone from South Dover, Dutchess county, the black marble from Glens Falls, monumental and building marbles from Gouverneur, St. Lawrence county, and white building ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... with men who were simply going their own way. The Highlanders only knew Gaelic, yet political wiseacres were to be found objecting to their having the Bible in their own tongue. Johnson flew to arms: he wrote one of his monumental letters; the opposition was quelled, and the Gael got his Bible. So too the wicked interference with Irish enterprise, so much in vogue during the last century, infuriated him. 'Sir,' he said to Sir Thomas Robinson, 'you talk the language of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... other beast. And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons, standing on one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare of monumental effigies.—A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... Duchesse had in the meanwhile followed Hector along the corridor and down the finely carved marble staircase. At a monumental door on the ground floor the man paused, his hand upon the massive ormolu handle, waiting for Madame la Duchesse ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... said Phoebe, as she saw him standing shy, grave, and monumental, with nervous hands clasped over the back of a chair, neither advancing nor retreating, 'what ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... her marble couch was reared A monumental shrine, Where cloistered sisters gathering round, Made night and morn the aisle resound ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... the late Lord Sidmouth, is like taking a walk through Westminster Abbey. All the literature, is inscriptions; all the figures are monumental; and all the names are those of men whose characters and distinctions have been echoing in our ears since we had the power to understand national renown. The period between 1798, when the subject of this memoir made his first step in parliamentary life as Speaker, and 1815, when the close of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... of Carlisle, quoted by William Borlase, Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of the County of Cornwall ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... white hope. So far, so good. But reclamation work, experimenting, blooded stock, up-to-the-minute machinery, labor-saving devices, chemicals, high-priced experts, labor itself, all that calls for money, plenty of money. Your father's work grew to its monumental proportions because he'd gotten other men interested in it—all sorts and conditions of men, but chiefly—and here's at once his strength and weakness—farmers, planters, small-town merchants and bankers. They backed him with everything ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... epitaph subsequently inscribed on the tomb was penned by Yule himself, but is by no means representative of his powers in a kind of composition in which he had so often excelled in the service of others. As a composer of epitaphs and other monumental inscriptions few of our time have surpassed, if any have equalled ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... gigantic dimensions, with lofty arches springing from wall to nave met the eye of the beholder, and stunned by the solemn surroundings, vain man wonders at his own handiwork, trembling with doubt amid the monumental glory ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... experimenter or observer has no large experience to correct his hasty generalization. He wants to believe that the means he employed effected his cure. He feels grateful to the person who advised it, he loves to praise the pill or potion which helped him, and he has a kind of monumental pride in himself as a living testimony to its efficacy. So it is that you will find the community in which you live, be it in town or country, full of brands plucked from the burning, as they believe, by some agency which, with your better training, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... my reflections is that the only kind of literature worth writing is literature with some original intention. Solid works have a melancholy tendency to be monumental, in the sense that they cover the graves of literary reputations. Historical works are superseded with shocking rapidity. One remembers the description which FitzGerald gave of the labours of his friend Spedding upon Bacon. Spedding gave up the whole of his life, said FitzGerald, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... was struck by lightning in 1848, and restored under the care of G. E. Street, R.A. The font, of Norman design, was preserved from mutilation in Puritan times by veiling its beauties beneath a covering of plaster. During the restoration a granite monumental stone was unearthed, of Romano-British character; it has been placed in the wall outside the tower, and its inscription reads Conectoci fili Tegerno Mali. Whether legends of the lost Langarrow are true or not, there was evidently a considerable ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... children find your judgment such, They'll scorn their sires, and wish themselves born Dutch; Each haughty poet will infer with ease, How much his wit must under-write to please. As some strong churl would, brandishing, advance The monumental sword that conquered France; So you, by judging this, your judgment teach, Thus far you like, that is, thus far you reach. Since then the vote of full two thousand years Has crowned this plot, and all the dead are theirs, Think it a debt you pay, not alms you ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... Avenue d'Antin. A few months previously Valentine had given birth to a daughter, and her husband had obstinately resolved to select a fit nurse for the child himself, pretending that he knew all about such matters. And he had chosen a big, sturdy young woman of monumental appearance. Nevertheless, for two months past Andree, the baby, had been pining away, and the doctor had discovered, by analyzing the nurse's milk, that it was deficient in nutriment. Thus the child was ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... regarded as one lacking in all due modesty. I forsooth feel no hostility towards one whose path never crossed mine, nor envy of one whose shadow never touched mine; the numerous and weighty questions dealt with in his monumental work urged me on to undertake the task of gaining some knowledge of the same. After the completion of the Commentaries on Subtlety, he published as a kind of appendix to these that most learned work the De Rerum Varietate. And in this case, before news was brought to me of his death, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... academic fame; Here mingling view the names of Sire and Son, The one long grav'd, the other just begun: These shall survive alike when Son and Sire, Beneath one common stroke of fate expire; [10] Perhaps, their last memorial these alone, Denied, in death, a monumental stone, 160 Whilst to the gale in mournful cadence wave The sighing weeds, that hide their nameless grave. And, here, my name, and many an early friend's, Along the wall in lengthen'd line extends. Though, still, our deeds amuse the youthful race, Who tread our ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... appreciated the fact that the new science of sociology required an extensive body of materials as a basis for its generalizations. Through the work of assistants he set himself the monumental task of compiling historical and cultural materials not only upon primitive and barbarous peoples but also upon the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, the French and the English. These data were classified and published in eight large volumes under the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... wall as one squeezes paint from a tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets. Moreover, I do not see at all why the walls of small dwelling-houses should be so solid as they are. There still hangs about us the monumental traditions of the pyramids. It ought to be possible to build sound, portable, and habitable houses of felted wire-netting and weather-proofed paper upon a light framework. This sort of thing is, no doubt, abominably ugly at present, but that is because architects and designers, being for the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... of the walled city, has found its finest use in the far-western city of St. Francis. Quite apart from their frequent occurrence in the mission architecture of old Alta California, these simple wall spaces well befit the monumental structure that honors an achievement so important to all Spanish America as ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in question hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... most prosperous was the renowned Amenothes III., who is immortalised by the wonderful monumental relics of his long and peaceful reign. Amenothes devoted immense energy to the building of temples, palaces and shrines, and gave very little of his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... the Prince of Wales presented them with new colors; and up in the gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses and governor-generals and so forth, to sit in when they are here. There are tablets and monumental busts about the walls; and one to the memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general who died in the middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an odd fate for a duke, and somehow made ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... of the Africa continent has been emphatically true of the people. The world has always seen the African race in its lowest form. This seems true as far back as Egyptian monumental times. One is struck, when looking at copies of ancient hicroglyhics, with the degraded type of negro feature which always appears when these captive people are delineated. The African race seems to have been fated to be always ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman

... should resort to the fixed and monumental rather than to these auguries of great nations—such, for instance, as were embodied in those Palladia, or protesting talismans, which capital cities, whether Pagan or Christian, glorified through a period of twenty-five hundred years, we shall find a long succession of these enchanted pledges, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... chance meeting thrilled all the spectators with the sense of monumental drama. The convicts stared; Howard, the second guard, forgot his vigilance and stared with open mouth. He started absurdly, rather guiltily, when the ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... ago that Ruskin startled the literary and artistic world with that marvellous book entitled "Modern Painters; Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters." The title contained the argument of the book, and it was a monumental heresy to utter at that time. Not that there was the least doubt as to its truth, but no voice had then been raised to proclaim it. The English people at that time were blind worshippers of Claude and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist, go ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... Michelangelo's death he issued an enlarged edition of his own book, unscrupulously incorporating all that was valuable in Condivi's work, and adding thereto many reminiscences of the master's life. The fame of Vasari's monumental work caused Condivi's little book to be entirely forgotten for long years, and it has been one of the tasks of modern scholarship to restore it to its true place. Even now, however, there is no available form ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... the framework of a good dozen of them, arranged in an orderly manner around the statue of Stanislas Leczinski, reassured the population and served as an interesting spectacle for the visitor who could no longer have the pleasure of admiring, behind Lamour's gates, the two monumental fountains consecrated to Neptune and Amphitrite, by Guibal, and which were then covered by coarse ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux

... have travelled much along the old turnpike road from Barkway by the Flint House to Cambridge, must have noticed the monumental character of the mile-stones with their bold Roman figures, denoting the distances. These mile-stones, an old writer says, were the first set up in England. I do not know whether this be true or not, but as the writer at the same time commented upon the system adopted ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston

... Church, eventually going abroad to study for the priesthood. On taking orders he returned to New York, and during the rest of his life was an earnest and influential, though somewhat independent toiler in the vineyard of Rome; gaining, unsought, fame as Father Hecker. His monumental work was the founding of the Paulist Fathers, a strong organization, influential in the religious life of New York, though the church and the home of the fraternity are located across the Hudson river, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears

... 'Well, now, old man, what about going up to this room of yours and having a look at this monumental history?' Saw him shoot a glance in his wife's direction, and he said, 'Oh, no, not now, Hapgood. Never mind now.' And his wife said, 'Mark, what can there be for Mr. Hapgood to see up there? It's too ridiculous. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... tombs, so numerous in the vicinity of all the large cities. These necropoles, excavated in the rocks or hillsides, or built within the pyramids, consist of rows of chambers with halls supported by columns, which, with the walls, are often covered with paintings, historical or monumental, representing scenes from domestic or civil life. The great pyramids were probably built for the sepulchres of kings and their families, and the smaller ones for ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... in life he condensed his ten great volumes to six. Posterity will doubtless condense these in turn, as posterity has a way of doing, but Bancroft the historian realized his own youthful ambition with a completeness rare in the history of human effort and performed a monumental service to his country. He was less of an artist, however, than Prescott, the eldest and in some ways the finest figure of the well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of Boston historians. All of these men, together with their ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry



Words linked to "Monumental" :   monument, monolithic, massive, important, big, large, significant



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