"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kept the best of all—that is, the Egyptian fire- eater, called "Phosphorus"—for the last part. The curtain went up for the third time, and on the stage, in fantastic scarlet dress, with a burning torch in his left hand, there stood a tall—ah! a form only too well known to me. It was Lipp, who had been ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... loyal and cavalier portion of society threw itself into dramatic amusements of every kind. It was an unreal revival of the Mask, stimulated by political passion, in the wane of genuine taste for the fantastic and semi-barbarous pageant, in which the former age had delighted. What the imagination of the spectators was no longer equal to, was to be supplied by costliness of dress and scenery. Those last representations of the expiring Mask were the occasions of an extravagant outlay. The Inns ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... beyond all bounds; Owls, ravens, crickets seem the watch of death; Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons; Echoes, the very leavings of a voice, Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves; Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus; While we fantastic dreamers heave and puff, And sweat with an imagination's weight; As if, like Atlas, with these mortal shoulders We could sustain the burden of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... the Revolution. They coloured thoughts about government, about laws, about morals. They effected a transformation of religion, but, resting on no basis of philosophical acceptance of history, the transformation was only temporary. They spread a fantastic passion of which Byron was himself an example and a victim, for extraordinary outbreaks of a peculiar kind of material activity, that met the exigences of an imperious will, while it had not the irksomeness of the self-control which would ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... congratulation upon his own escape. It might be that she did not know how, or did not think it was her place to speak. She was curiously estranged. He felt as if he had been away, and she had grown from a young girl into womanhood during his absence. This fantastic conceit was strongest when he met her with Captain Jenness one day. He had found friends at the hotel, as one always does in Italy, if one's world is at all wide,—some young ladies, and a lady, now married, with whom he ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... experiment to his listeners and they watched anxiously. They knew that that kind of tobacco must form a man's acquaintance gradually. It will brook no sudden familiarity. The smoke curled in fantastic wreathes about Boyton's head and the stories became less thrilling. His eyes gradually became yellow and his swarthy countenance turned a pale green. The words tumbled over one another and, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... it, Jean!" exclaimed Hippy. "Be merry, and gayly dance as I do." He essayed several fantastic steps over the frozen ground, stubbed his toe on a projecting root and lunged forward, falling heavily into a huge snowdrift, his hands and face plowing ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... in the library below, and I courageously resolved that I too would read them all and try to understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course of reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some fantastic notion of chronological order and early legendary form. Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's "Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I longed, and I finally gave them up for a thick book entitled "The ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering masses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure world, a shifting world, Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled, Or serpentine, or driving arrows, Or serene slidings, or March narrows. There slipping wave and shore are one, And weed and mud. No ray of sun, But glow to glow ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... that be Big[8]as old women, wanting gravity. Then do not blame me, 'cause I thus describe them. Flatter I may not, lest thereby I bribe them To have a better judgment of themselves, Than wise men have of babies on their shelves.[9] Their antic tricks, fantastic modes, and way, Show they, like very boys and girls, do play With all the frantic fopperies of this age, And that in open view, as on a stage; Our bearded men do act like beardless boys; Our women please themselves with childish toys. Our ministers, long time, by word and pen, Dealt with ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... adds beauties and interests. Falls, glaciers and lakes are on a grand scale. The Tasman glacier is eighteen miles long and more than two miles across at the widest point; the Murchison glacier is more than ten miles long; the Godley eight. The Hochstetter Fall is a curtain of broken, uneven, fantastic ice coming down 4,000 feet on to the Tasman glacier. It is a great spectacle, seen amid the stillness of the high Alps, broken only by the occasional boom and crash of a ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... ridiculed the girl's fantastic vagaries; her sound common sense rallied to her aid. "They are the people who remember; sane folk forget. Work is the only cure ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... be a turkey a-piece was not shared by Company I; but no one denied it in Charley's hearing. The boy held it as sick people often do fantastic notions, and all fell into the humor of strengthening the reasoning on which ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... opulence furnishes an inexhaustible fund of enjoyment; and that luxurious tables, sumptuous palaces, and a splendid retinue, confer a never-failing enjoyment; forgetting that riches create a thousand artificial wants, a thousand fantastic desires, which it is utterly impossible to supply. The wealthy look with pity upon the indigent, as condemned to an irksome and perpetual drudgery, and destitute of all means of enjoying life; a pity they might well spare, did they know ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... decoration represents a British and a Japanese flag intercrossed, celebrates the Anglo-Japanese alliance; another represents an officer's cap and sword; and the best of all is surmounted by a tiny metal model of a battleship. The battleship-pin is not merely fantastic: it ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... signal to the moon may sound fantastic, but is easily within the range of possibility, says Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor, Chief of the Radio Division of the United States Naval Research Laboratories at Washington, who plans such an attempt in the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... business and energy the country stretched lone and uninhabited; a great waste of naked, hot, resplendent land blotched with white and red, showing not a green spot except the course of the Platte; with scorched, rusty hills rising above its fantastic surface, and, in the distance, bluish mountain ranges that appeared to float and waver ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... employment was a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect Truscomb's removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager's place; but his dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in sympathy with the awakening ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... danger. The feeling increased as he climbed from the leaning tree to the great trunk of the Basswood, to lose sight of his comrades in the wilderness of broad leaves and twisted tree-arms. The dancing firelight sent shadow-blots and light-spots in a dozen directions with fantastic effect. Some of the feelings of the night at Garney's grave came back to him, but this time with the knowledge of real danger. A little higher and he was out of sight of his friends below. The danger began to appal him; he wanted to go back, and to justify the ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and have Henry crowned. Not that Maximilian desired to forsake all earthly authority; he sought to combine a spiritual with a temporal glory; he was to lay down the imperial crown and place on his brows the papal tiara.[255] Nothing was too fantastic for the Emperor Maximilian; the man who could not wrest a few towns from Venice was always deluding himself with the hope of leading victorious hosts to the seat of the Turkish Empire and the Holy City of Christendom; ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... come in answer to his prayers. He sat up on the bed, feeling mechanically at the place where the handle of his sword would have been but two hours since, feeling his hair stand on end, and a cold sweat began to stream down his face as the strange fantastic being step by step approached him. At length the apparition paused, the prisoner and he stood face to face for a moment, their eyes riveted; then the mysterious stranger spoke ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... three rows of galleries with colonnades of most beautiful workmanship. At each angle there were light, lofty or low towers, standing either singly or in pairs: no two were alike, and they looked like flowers growing out of that graceful plant of Oriental architecture. All were surmounted by fantastic roofs, like coquettish ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... originality and perfect coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height. And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that the picture carries a delightful overtone—that it is witty, whimsical, fantastic. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... than this first night-bivouac in the absolute wilderness. The moon, seeming to race through the clouds, and the camp-fire flashing in the wind, appeared to give movement and animation to the landscape. The Indians, grouped around the flame, seemed like swarthy imps tending the furnace of some fantastic pandemonium. Meanwhile, amidst the constant murmurs of the trees, the nephew of Aragon was heard drawing the notes of some kind of amorous despair from the hollow of his melodious calabash. The examinador and Colonel Perez lulled themselves to sleep with a conversation about ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... with a curious laminated clayey rock, with white and ochraceous layers intermixed. The tints most various, as well as the sculpture of the mountains: here ravines representing tracery occur: there, columnar curiously carved cliffs, exhibiting all sorts of fantastic forms: here, as it were, a hill thrown down with numberless blocks into the stream, scattered in every direction; and here, but this is rare, very red horizontal strata, colours various, generally rosy, especially ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... and satisfying dream. It included a wonderful period of convalescence, a delightful and ever-increasing appetite, a painless return voyage over a road that had been full of suffering on the way out, a fantastic experience in the matter of legs that wouldn't work and wobbled fearfully, a constant but properly subdued desire to sing and whistle—oh, it was a glorious ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... think about it," was Miss Jane's answer, when the dame told her. "I am not an admirer of fetes and fantastic worldly doings such as I conclude will take place at Texford. I fear there is more ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... eye glances over a map of the coasts of Norway, can the imagination fail to marvel at their fantastic indentations and serrated edges, like a granite lace, against which the surges of the North Sea roar incessantly? Who has not dreamed of the majestic sights to be seen on those beachless shores, of that multitude of creeks and inlets and little ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... spot, now that midsummer had come, and inhabited with winged and crawling creatures, with whom I claimed companionship, especially with the red, furry caterpillars, that have, alas, nearly passed away, and given place to a variegated, fantastic tribe, which gentleman farmers are fond ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... for these forced and fantastic analogies, Donne, with the greater number of the learned prelatic divines from James I. to the Restoration, acquired from that too great partiality for the Fathers, from Irenaeus to Bernard, by which they sought to distinguish themselves ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... sentimental reason why I should not, for the truth is, of course, that the signs of death were clearly evident on your poor boy before what we had to do was done. But the bare thought must have shocked Mary. We know emphatically that Hardcastle is dead, and we need not mention to her this fantastic theory from London." ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... first impulse had been to look to the right and left for the means of avoiding this encounter, but there was no escape; and he was moreover in most fantastic motley, arrayed in one of the many suits provided for the occasion. It was in imitation of a parrot, brilliant grass-green velvet, touched here and there with scarlet, yellow, or blue. He had been only half disguised on the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... it is at once "possessed" by the soul of that planetary globe from whose chemistry it drew its elemental life and from whose chemistry, although the form of it has changed, it still draws its life. For it is no fantastic speculation to affirm that every living thing whether human or otherwise plays, while it lives, a triple ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... had been the best Terran Intelligence agent on the complex and mysterious planet of Wolf. He had repeatedly imperiled his life amongst the half-human and non-human creatures of the sullen world. And he had repeatedly accomplished the fantastic missions until his name was emblazoned ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... undertaken so Quixotic an enterprise, none would have exposed himself so recklessly to the dreadful accidents of circumstance. There had been other ways to overcome this crisis, but he had rejected them for a course fantastic and fatal when looked at in the light of ordinary reason. A struggle between the East and the West was here to be fought out between two wills; between an intellectual libertine steeped in Oriental guilt and cruelty and self-indulgence, and a being selfless, human, and in an agony of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the empty sea!' said Logan. 'The Highlanders beat the world for fantastic visions, and the Islanders beat the Highlanders. But, look here, am I too inquisitive? The night when we first thought of the Disentanglers you said there was—somebody. But I understood that she ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... playing all the time now broke into a more blatant march, a gaily accoutred "herald" galloped forth from a wide opening at the rear of the tent, then turned his steed about to face that opening, waving his staff and curveting about in the most fantastic manner. Then the silence of expectation fell upon that mass of humanity, the promenaders settling into any seats available, warned by men in authority not to obstruct the view of those on the ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... witness the approach of the two contending parties of English and Danes; and after a signal had been given, the gate which opened in the circuit of the Chase was thrown wide to admit them. On they came, foot and horse; for some of the more ambitious burghers and yeomen had put themselves into fantastic dresses, imitating knights, in order to resemble the chivalry of the two different nations. However, to prevent fatal accidents, they were not permitted to appear on real horses, but had only license to accoutre ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the people came in the evening and learned that everything was sold out but the lanterns, they declared they would buy them for souvenirs. So the merry guests walked about the grounds, carrying the lighted lanterns they had bought (at astonishing prices), and it lent a fantastic effect to the scene to see the lanterns bobbing about among the trees ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... engineer, when they heard the sound of an approaching multitude. They looked out of one of the windows and perceived the house surrounded by the galley-slaves, in number, apparently, about a hundred. They were all dressed in a most fantastic manner with whatever they could pick up: some had fire-arms, but the most of them were supplied with only swords or knives. With them came also their cortege of plunder: carts of various descriptions, loaded with provisions of ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pavement—worn satin-smooth—its carved gray facades of palaces, picked out with gold, and its vista of copper beeches rose-red against a sky of pearl, had been designed as a sober background for the colour and fantastic fashion of the eighteenth century, whereas we and others like us but added ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... on the point of the promontory, where the land made its final slope, ending in a precipitous descent to the shore. Beneath lay rocks of all sizes and of fantastic forms, some fallen from the cape in tempests perhaps, some softly separated from it by the slow action of the winds and waves of centuries. A few of them formed, by their broken defence seawards, the unsafe natural harbour which ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... the horse, and entered the garden, the Doctor singing, now in fantastic high notes, now producing deep reverberations from his chest. He took a seat, rapped loudly on the table, assailed the waiter with witticisms; and when the bottle of Bass was at length produced, far more charged with gas than the most delirious champagne, he filled ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... affected by education looks askance distrustfully, and even he will be silent. The cross by the roadside, the dark bales of wool, the wide expanse of the plain, and the lot of the men gathered together by the camp fire—all this was of itself so marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours of legend and fairy-tale were ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... intact, but veiled with frost and hung with icicles. The week's washing, swinging under the peaked roof on a long, sagging clothes-line, added further to the gloom. Stiff and specter-like, it moved gently in the currents of air that blew down from the bare, slanting rafters, each garment taking on a fantastic shape of its own. Near the pipe hung the stockings of the family, limp and steaming in ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... sledges with welcome bags of flour was passing through the square. Soldiers of the Red Army were coming off parade, laughing and talking, and very noticeably smarter than the men of six months ago. There was a bright clear sky behind the fantastic Cathedral of St. Basil, and the rough graves under the Kremlin wall, where those are buried who died in the fighting at the time of the November Revolution, have been tidied up. There was scaffolding round the gate of the ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... for bribery, of which mention has been made, his removal as state printer, and his defalcation as postmaster, prostrated him financially and politically. In the hope of retrieving his fortunes he embarked in real estate speculation, thus completing his ruin and making him still more visionary and fantastic. Nevertheless, he struggled on with industry and courage for more than twenty years, occasionally coming into public or political notice as a writer of caustic letters, or ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Arch had passed out of view, and presently the train of cars began to be shut in by buildings, and the usual indications appeared of the approach to a great station. Queer-looking signals, of mysterious meaning,—some red, some blue, some round, some square,—glided by, and men in strange and fantastic costumes stood on the right hand and on the left, with little flags in their hands, and one arm extended, as if to show the locomotive ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... hideous, fantastic, appalling, flashed through his mind. He was beginning to learn what Zani Chada had meant when he had said: "I have followed your career ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... called Frank Tracy said, "The worst case yet. This one had quite a clear picture of the true situation. He saw the necessity—given their viewpoint, of course—of getting out of the fantastic rut their economy has fallen into." He ran his hand over his mouth in a gesture of weariness. "Chief, do you have any idea of how long it would take us to catch up to them, if we ever did, if they really turned this economy on ...
— Subversive • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... went flitting about through the long grass, hither and thither like a will-o'-the-wisp, her long hair floating around her, her arms waving in gestures sometimes fantastic, but always graceful. Peggy could think of nothing but her cousin Rita, as she used to dance in the old days at Fernley. What a pair she and Grace would make! What a mercy they had never come together. Moreover, her heart, the heart of a farmer's ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... Calderon's dramas are characteristically national: fervid loyalty to Church and King, and a sense of honor heightened almost to the point of the fantastic. Though his plays are laid in a great variety of scenes and ages, the sentiment and the characters remain essentially Spanish; and this intensely local quality has probably lessened the vogue of Calderon in ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... mind, and its objects are real in exactly the same way that the cube, the square, the circle, the sphere or the straight line. We are enabled to see with the penetrating vision of the mathematical insight that no less real and no more real are these fantastic forms of the world of relativity than those supposed to be uncreatable or indestructible in the play ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Bliss had newly Alighted, and shut close his rainbow wings, To rest at ease, nor dread intruding ill. Plants of superior growth now sprang apace, With moon-like blossoms crown'd, or starry glories; Light flexible shrubs among the greenwood play'd Fantastic freaks,—they crept, they climb'd, they budded, And hung their flowers and berries in the sun; As the breeze taught, they danced, they sung, they twined Their sprays in bowers, or spread the ground with net-work. Through the slow lapse of undivided time, Silently rising from their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... fantastic blocks of stone, which would have tempted an artist to draw out his sketch-book, they got excellent shots at the party below them, and as there was no chance of a return, they being entirely concealed, and ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... of timber in the mill-yard and disappeared with a shrill toot of warning for unseen workmen upon the tracks ahead. The boy froze to granite-like immobility as it flashed into view. Long after it had passed from sight he stood like a bit of a fantastic figure cut from stone. Then a tremor shook him from head to foot, and when it came slowly about Caleb saw that his small face was even whiter than it had been before beneath its coat ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... and fantastic escort, the English and Arabs entered the town, where a similar military display had been ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... of the Pieve; and other works to other places in Valdichiana. In the Madonna, the principal church of Orvieto, he finished with his own hand the chapel that Fra Giovanni da Fiesole had formerly begun there; in which chapel he painted all the scenes of the end of the world with bizarre and fantastic invention—angels, demons, ruins, earthquakes, fires, miracles of Antichrist, and many other similar things besides, such as nudes, foreshortenings, and many beautiful figures; imagining the terror that there shall be on that last and awful day. By means of this he ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... he must know how to produce other combinations, vary them as much as possible and test them by substitution and interchange. Lastly, to provide science with a solid basis of facts, he must experiment. In this way, the evidence of formal records will one day dispel the fantastic legends with which our books are crowded: the Sacred Beetle (A Dung-beetle who rolls the manure of cattle into balls for his own consumption and that of his young. Cf. "Insect Life", by J.H. Fabre, translated by the author of "Mademoiselle Mori": ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... to older beliefs in religion, government, philosophy, art—and the stylistic expression of such beliefs—formal verse satire and epistle, mock-poem, heroic or Hudibrastic couplet, diction of polite conversation, ironic metaphysical conceits, fantastic fictional situations—become irrelevant to the satirist writing when the past seems lost. In his later works, Pope took Augustan satire about as far as it could go. The Epilogue to the Satires becomes an epilogue to all Augustan satire ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... property here), who had employed me as arpenteur to measure their fields in order to double their taxes." We here take the unconscious, apprehensive, popular imagination in the act; a slight indication, a word, prompting the construction of either air castles or fantastic dungeons, and seeing these as plainly as if they were so many substantial realities. They have not the inward resources that render capable of separating and discerning; their conceptions are formed in a lump; both object and fancy appear together and are united in one single perception. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... upon me, and I can never cease to be thankful for that one outburst of absolute fear which tore from my lips and attracted a passing policeman; otherwise I might have been Number Seven in the grim line of epitaphs that marked the close of this fantastic case. Only by bludgeoning Carse with his stick could the officer overcome him, and it was necessary to keep him in a straitjacket until the hour ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... fruit-stalls and bathing-saloons. Fortunately the fine sands around Newquay have not yet become a mart for sweetmeats and cocoanuts, nor are they the happy hunting ground of the negro minstrel and other troupes of fantastic entertainers. ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... Janina had been torture, Mme. Anna followed her immediately and, in the most unconcerned manner, began to relate something about a fantastic customer. Then, suddenly, as though she had remembered something, she said: "Oh yes, I almost forgot! Perhaps you will let me have that half-month's rent, for I ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... went. The moon threw fantastic shadows through the trees to the surface of the stream. Now the boat would glide along in the darkness, caused by the overhanging branches, and again it would forge ahead into a bright patch of ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman
... de media noche: the poet begins with a characteristic Romantic landscape, gloomy, medieval, fantastic, uncanny. He is trying to create a mood of horror. He follows the Horatian precept of beginning the plot in the middle (in medias res). The situation here introduced is not resumed until Part Four is reached. ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... sob passing loudly down his father's throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... not only in novel-reading, as the Emperor in after years confessed to Mme. de Remusat, but in attempts at novel-writing, to relieve the tedium of idle hours. It is said that first and last Buonaparte read "Werther" five times through. Enough remains among his boyish scribblings to show how fantastic were the dreams both of love and of glory in which he indulged. Many entertain a suspicion that amid the gaieties of the winter he had really lost his heart, or thought he had, and was repulsed. At least, in his "Dialogue on Love," written five years later, he says, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... we look for stratification in crystalline rocks, we must be on our guard not to expect too much regularity. The occurrence of wedge-shaped masses, such as belong to coarse sand and pebbles— diagonal lamination (Chapter 2)— ripple- marked, unconformable stratification,— the fantastic folds produced by lateral pressure— faults of various width— intrusive dikes of trap— organic bodies of diversified shapes, and other causes of unevenness in the planes of deposition, both on the small and on the large scale, will interfere with parallelism. If complex and enigmatical appearances ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... perceived a large tassel depending from its apex, and, around the upper rim or base of the cone, a circle of little instruments, resembling sheep-bells, which kept up a continual tinkling to the tune of Betty Martin. But still worse. Suspended by blue ribbons to the end of this fantastic machine, there hung, by way of car, an enormous drab beaver hat, with a brim superlatively broad, and a hemispherical crown with a black band and a silver buckle. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that many citizens of Rotterdam swore to having seen the same hat repeatedly before; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lands that once a year brings me my provisions. It puts off from my Aunt Amelia's yacht—The Tattooed Quaker. My Aunt Amelia is the only relative that remains to me. It is she who supplies the tinned meats and the pears. She really has admirable taste, although her choice in names may be a little fantastic. In addition to the provisions, it is my aunt's custom to send a letter beseeching me to return in the yacht to England, and declaring that if I do not, that particular supply of food will be the last. For forty years she has done this. She is a noble ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... her, I tell you. That girl is an angel. Do you know that? Do you know that?" Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed suddenly with extraordinary warmth. "She is one of the most fantastic of fantastic creatures. I know how bewitching she is, but I know too that she is kind, firm and noble. Why do you look at me like that, Alexey Fyodorovitch? Perhaps you are wondering at my words, perhaps you don't believe me? Agrafena Alexandrovna, my angel!" she cried suddenly to some ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... foot of yonder nodding beech, That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... the words of that girl still ringing in her ears and the debris of her hopes lying in a heap about her feet, she was going through the process of being nice to this man who had his claims. It was unreal, fantastic. It wasn't really happening. She must be lying face down on some quiet corner of Mother Earth and watering its bosom with tears of blood. Martin—Martin! It was all ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... wits, philosophers, beauties, dandies, blacklegs, adventurers, artists, idlers, the king and his court, beggars with matches crying for charity, wretched creatures dying of disease and want in garrets. There is no condition of life which is not to be found in this gorgeous and fantastic Fairyland." ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... and consolidated outside the conscious mind, and function automatically, involuntarily, by themselves, then they have become dangerous to the mental stability. Their pressure and influence may be felt in the conscious life—in fantastic imaginations, in fears, phobias, and obsessions—in morbid dreams—in morbid emotional and moral reactions throughout the entire psycho-physical life. It is these automatic, self-acting complexes which originate many of the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... more the memory of a voice that had reassured, a hand that had lulled her to rest. Had he really spoken that word of tenderness? Had his lips really touched her hair? Or had it all been a trick of her fancy already strung to fantastic imaginings by ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... came, and Alice was satisfied. Mignon looked prettier and daintier than ever in her light fantastic robe of white and spangles, with silver bracelets on her wrists and little anklets hung with bells about her slender ankles. Round and round and round galloped the white horse, the fairy figure on his back now standing, now lying, now on her knees, now poised on one small foot, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... traces of one who had interested me so much, but that was impossible, as unfortunately I did not even know her name. The ruin, from its position and features, is a most impressive object. I could not but deeply regret that its solemnity was impaired by a fantastic new Castle set up on a projection of the same ridge, as if to show how far modern art can go in surpassing all that could be done by antiquity and nature with their united graces, remembrances, and associations. I could have almost wished for ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... was being written a good deal of discussion about it found its way into the newspapers. It was rumored that it would be translated into Irish, and then back again, by Lady Gregory, into English, but no such fantastic scheme as that Mr. Moore tells us of in "Ave" was suggested in any of the paragraphs that came my way. Because they could not agree on the kind of diction they were to use in the play, Mr. Yeats, who wanted a peasant Grania, agreed, writes Mr. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... that of his contemporaries, is often marred by fantastic conceits which show the influence of Donne. Although much of Crashaw's poem, The Weeper, is beautiful, he calls the eyes ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... when I oblige myself to look back on this time of my life, I seem to be recalling such a dream. I see myself passing on among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets—the old abiding places of History and Fancy—as a dreamer might; bearing my painful load through all, and hardly conscious of the objects as they fade before me. Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was the night that fell on my undisciplined ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... privileged person with licence to range where she will. Nay, Sir Morgan would court her hither with gifts—and rain bounties upon her, if she would accept them. This desire of having her before his eyes, Mr. Bertram, is a fantastic and wayward expression of misery—one of those tricks of sorrow—most apt to haunt the noblest minds. Some have worn about their persons the symbols, the instruments, or the mementos of their guilt: and in Mrs. Godber Sir Morgan sees a living memorial of what he now deems ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... to be given to that blue when she was young, but she says now she is too big and red to wear anything but brown or black. You must have a taxi to go in. I will attend to it for you. I hope Miss Kean will not do herself up in any fantastic, would-be artistic get-up, but will do you and your daughter credit, to say nothing of me, after I have got her this invitation," and Mrs. Pace bustled off, filled ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... man entertain of such a fantastic philosopher, if he should persist seriously to assert that such a house displays no art? When we read the fabulous story of Amphion, who by a miraculous effect of harmony caused the stones to rise, and placed themselves, with order ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... rolls the restless stone. Yet all I saw was pleasure mixed with profit, Which proved it to be no tormenting Tophet[17] For in this honest, worthy, harmless hell, There ne'er did any damned Devil dwell; And th' owner of it gains by 't more true glory, Than Rome doth by fantastic Purgatory. A long mile thus I passed, down, down, steep, steep, In deepness far more deep, than Neptunes deep, Whilst o'er my head (in fourfold stories high) Was earth, and sea, and air, and sun, and sky: That ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... of fairy tale and science. By this combination one loses what is essential to each, namely, the fantastic on the one side, and accuracy on the other. The true fairy tale should be unhampered by any compromise of probability even; the scientific representation should be sufficiently marvelous along its own lines to need no supernatural ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Avoid all fantastic ornament, and all decoration of every sort, that would be appropriate only to work of a more complete and substantial character. Let whatever is done be done in the most thorough way. If the ability ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... time when European politicians considered that he was the mouthpiece of schemers for a Russo-French alliance in his repeated and successful endeavors to gain Napoleon's good-will, he was adroitly sounding the French emperor's mind and character. He soon convinced himself that it was shallow and fantastic, and he built upon this conviction one of the most hazardous designs which ever originated in a brain observant of realities—that identical design which eventually led Prussia, some years later, first to Schleswig and then to Sadowa, with the "arbiter of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to igloo reminds us of the "first-footing" of the Scottish village. The mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the old ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... supernatural fear that was ever known among our ancestors. But if it had ended there the matter would not have been so important socially. In their constant association with white children they brought their fears of "ghost-hauntings" and other fantastic ideas into the minds of the very young. The peculiarity of the Negro slave as compared with the other superstitious races was his own sinister imaginative productions. They related none of the valuable tales of ancient mythology, but rather did they fill the earth with goblins, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... their gambols, and one made a bow, whilst another skipped up the scarlet runner that had suddenly shot up out of the ground, and twined in and out in fantastic knots, and brought himself to ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... encircled with its moist green every stone and stem on the island, fulfilled its longing at length in a tumultuous possession of the sumac, making a massive yet aerial patched green curtain or canopy to the fantastic bed, and ending seemingly in two tiny transparent spirals curling ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... at night. The yellow lamplight left hard faces almost repulsive under the fantastic shadows it so fitfully impressed upon them. The low-ceiled room, too, gained in its sordid aspect. An atmosphere of moral degradation looked out from every shadowy corner, claiming the features of everybody who came within the dull radiance of the two cheap oil lamps swinging ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... in 1837, and the second in comparatively recent times. It is needless to say that the proprietor of each cave affirms his to be the better—as a matter of fact, both are well worth seeing. One looks with something like awe on the fantastic shapes of the stalagmites and stalactites in these huge caverns, where the moisture, percolating through the earth, has been dripping in the darkness for countless centuries, each lime-laden drop lengthening imperceptibly the stalactite ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... more like those of the Christians than those of Greece; but they mingled with them much that was borrowed from the Orient and Egypt: and taught the primitive truths, mixed with a multitude of fantastic errors and fictions. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... eyes, ringed though they were with the shadow of tears. Mary Ann, in her neat white cap—yes—and in her tan kid gloves. He rubbed his eyes. Was he really awake? Or—a thought still more dizzying—had he been dreaming? He had fallen asleep and reinless fancy had played him the fantastic trick, from which, cramped and dazed, he had just awakened to ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... hours on hypnotic suggestion. He undertook to prove that, not only Gabrielle Bompard, but Troppmann, Madame Weiss, and Gabrielle Fenayrou also, had committed murder under the influence of suggestion.(18) In replying to this rather fantastic defence, the Procureur-General, M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire, quoted a statement of Dr. Brouardel, the eminent medical jurist who had been called for the prosecution, that "there exists no instance of a crime, or attempted crime committed under the influence of hypnotic suggestion." ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... the devil; for the roused Indian—cowed as is his present nature by a hard-bought conviction of his inferiority—is yet a fearful object to behold when decked in paint and plume and all his horribly fantastic ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... the town in style; hired a man-servant; replenished his wardrobe at considerable expense, and appeared in a professional wig and cane, purple silk small-clothes, and a scarlet roquelaure buttoned to the chin: a fantastic garb, as we should think at the present day, but not unsuited to ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... visible in one view. Rocky cliffs and arid sands appear in close combination with rounded fertile hills, and long grassy slopes; salt spray leaping over the first, spring-water lying calm beneath the last! No fairy vision of Nature that ever was imagined is more fantastic, or more lovely than this glorious reality, which brings all the most widely contrasted characteristics of a sea view and an inland view into the closest contact, and presents them in one ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... also is stated in a somewhat too sweeping way:—"Had there been no drama, Shakespeare would, in all likelihood, have been but the author of Venus and Adonis and of a few sonnets forgotten among the numerous works of the Elizabethan age, and Otway had been only the compiler of fantastic odes."[157] A final plea, in favor of the stage as a democratic agency—though this of course is not Scott's phrasing—seems slightly unusual for him, although not essentially out of character. "The entertainment," ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... persecutors of this primitive people were regarded by them as true friends, whilst the relation of imaginary and fantastic perils distracted their minds from the more practical dangers ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... protruded from the lock of the private drawer. With a tremor of excitement John extended his hand, turned it and opened the drawer; then he caught his breath. There lay a square white envelope addressed to himself in his uncle's fantastic, ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... those who have a mind to canvass this subject, I will recapitulate the most material arguments that tend to disprove what has been asserted; but as I attempt not to affirm what did happen in a period that will still remain very obscure, I flatter myself that I shall not be thought either fantastic or paradoxical, for not blindly adopting an improbable tale, which our historians have never given ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... the whole affair became more fantastic—and more intriguing for Jason. He looked at his watch. There was still enough time to find out if Kerk was lying ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... hairpin Annie had loaned her to pin up a lock of her heavy hair, and began tracing out pictures on the window-pane. There was already a magic tapestry there, woven by the frost-fairies; ferns, and sea-weed and tropical flowers of fantastic shapes, and wonderful palm branches all exquisitely intertwined. To these Elizabeth added the product of her imagination. Lords and ladies rode through the sea-weed, and Joan of Arc stood surrounded by palms. She had almost forgotten her woes in their icy beauty, and had quite forgotten the ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... heath and short furze, through which Ranger coursed, barking joyously. The view was splendid, on one side the moors rising one behind the other, till they faded in grey distance, each crowned with a fantastic pile of rocks, one in the form of a castle, another of a cathedral, another of a huge crouching lion, all known to the two cousins by name, and owned as familiar friends. On the other side, between two hills, each surmounted by its own rocky crest, lay ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a great philosopher, he was not a great naturalist, he was not a great poet, but as a nature-writer and an original character he is unique in our literature. His philosophy begins and ends with himself, or is entirely subjective, and is frequently fantastic, and nearly always illogical. His poetry is of the oracular kind, and is only now and then worth attention. There are crudities in his writings that make the conscientious literary craftsman shudder; there are mistakes of observation that make the serious naturalist wonder; and ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... Judith passed into the subterranean church, where she beheld a sight that almost petrified her. In the midst of the nave, which was illumined by a blue glimmering light, whence proceeding it was impossible to determine, stood a number of grotesque figures, apparelled in fantastic garbs, and each attended by a skeleton. Some of the latter grisly shapes were playing on tambours, others on psalteries, others on rebecs—every instrument producing the strangest sound imaginable. Viewed through the massive pillars, beneath ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the honesty or friendliness of their intentions. The head of each was shaved and painted as well as his person, and only on the extreme crown had been left a tuft of hair, to which were attached feathers, and small bones, and other fantastic ornaments peculiar to their race—a few of them carried American rifles—the majority, the common gun periodically dealt out to the several tribes, as presents from the British Government, while all had in addition to their pipe-tomahawks ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... Mr. Rogers's, to which I had been asked to meet Lord and Lady Holland, by special desire, as I was afterwards informed, of the latter, who, during dinner, drank out of her neighbor's (Sydney Smith's) glass, and otherwise behaved herself with the fantastic, despotic impropriety in which she frequently indulged, and which might have been tolerated in a spoilt beauty of eighteen, but was hardly becoming in a woman of her age and "personal appearance." When first I came out on the stage, my father and mother, who occasionally went to Holland House, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... individuals. All the figures are turned with lifted faces towards the vision in the dome. Each expresses, by a gesture, the wonder, joy, rapture, or admiration aroused by the spectacle. Their attitudes are somewhat extravagant and self-conscious. The drapery, too, is rather fantastic, flung about their figures, leaving arms and legs bare. Were the picture taken out of its surroundings it would scarcely suggest a Christian subject. These colossal beings are like Titans moving through the figures of a sacred dance, and murmuring the mystic ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... This fantastic, savage vengeance was a thing dreadful to hear; what it must have been to see I can only guess. I know that I wished I might have fled from it and that I pleaded with Jodd for mercy on these men. But neither he nor his companions ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... struggle with an enemy that threatened to rob his people of home, of country, and of freedom; in the stories, the king and his knights, like Richard Coeur-de-Lion, sought adventure for adventure's sake, or, as in the case of Sir Peredur, took fantastic vows for the love of a lady. The Knights of the Round Table are sheathed from head to foot in plate armour, although the real Arthur's warriors probably had only shirts of mail and shields with which to ward off the blows of the enemy. They live in moated castles instead of in halls of wood, and ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... amongst the sand and gravel, I found samphire, growing somewhat like asparagus. It is an excellent salad at this season, salt, yet with an herb-like vivacity, and very tender. I strolled slowly through the pastures, watching my long shadow making grave, fantastic gestures in the sun. It is a pretty sight to see the sunshine brightening the entrance of a road which shortly becomes deeply overshadowed by trees on both sides. At the Cold Spring, three little girls, from six to nine, were seated on the stones ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and without a trace of the fantastic or miraculous, were the other dreams, of which we were informed. Moreover, I remember that once, as a boy, I was turning over his books and memoranda, and found, among some other remarks which related ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... us that the first book he ever read was Don Quixote (in the translation by Tieck). At about the same time he read Gulliver's Travels, the tales of noble robbers written by Goethe's brother-in-law, Vulpius, the wildly fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Schiller's Robbers; but also Uhland's ballads, and the songs collected by Arnim and Brentano in The Boy's Magic Horn. That is to say: At the time when in school a critical and skeptical mind was being developed in him by descendants ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... ibid. 1872, tom. ii. p. 181.), they do not then look at the moon, but at some fixed point near the horizon. Houzeau thinks that their imaginations are disturbed by the vague outlines of the surrounding objects, and conjure up before them fantastic images: if this be so, their feelings ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... It seemed a fantastic theory, yet a likely one. It would give method to the search, yet more alarm to the searchers. The mountain was a wide region in which to ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... they wished to defend us against the half-breeds. No matter what our inclinations or misgivings might then be, we could not however refuse the arms. They seemed quite pleased and went away. An hour had scarcely elapsed when over thirty Indians painted in the most fantastic and hedious manner came in. Big Bear also came, but he wore no war-paint. He placed himself behind my husband's chair. We were all seated at the table taking our breakfast. The Indians told us to eat plenty as we would not be hurt. They also ate plenty themselves—some ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a green, ghostlike light illumines the garden of Venus! Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... much to acknowledge that she had scarce to turn round. She had a long pause before the fire during which she might have been fixing with intensity her projected vision, have been conscious even of its taking an absurd, fantastic shape. She might have been watching the family coach pass and noting that, somehow, Amerigo and Charlotte were pulling it while she and her father were not so much as pushing. They were seated inside together, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... space of several seconds no one moved or spoke. In the flickering light of the candle they looked at one another, and then at the fantastic pillars of salt all about them. Then Mr. Damon ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... year passed. If it had not been for the very tangible loss of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the little community at Bright's Cove might almost have come to doubt the evidence of their senses and the accuracy of their memories, so fantastic on sober reflection did all the circumstances become. Even the indisputable four hundred pounds of gold could not quite avert an unconfessed suspicion of the uncanny. Miners are superstitious folk. Old Man Bright remembered ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... I worked furiously on my notes. All of Marchare's people talked that way. They did the most fantastic things sometimes, and then talked about them as if anyone would have done the same thing. I had complained about this oddity to Mr. Spardleton when I first came to work for him; I was used to inventions that were ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... I guess. He almost receded into complete paranoia. Had a virtually complete case of empathic paralysis when he came to us. Simply no conception of any other person's point of view, and a hatred of people that was fantastic. But ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... were still lying under the wreck when I came. The fire was out. The water running over the edge of the tank had frozen into huge icicles that hung like a great white shroud over the bier of the two dead heroes. It was a gas-fixture factory, and the hundreds of pipes, twisted into all manner of fantastic shapes of glittering ice, lent a most weird effect to the sorrowful scene. I can still see Chief Gicquel, all smoke-begrimed, and with the tears streaming down his big, manly face,—poor Gicquel! he went to join his brothers in so many a hard fight only a little while ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... journey. Each yard of ground passed was now a battle gained—every breath drawn a sobbing groan. Hills and dales rose successively before him, clothed in the dead-white snow that had become a nightmare to his darkening sight. He reeled sometimes as he walked, dizzy from lack of sleep; a thousand fantastic fancies flitted through his hot brain; a deadly lethargy began once more to creep over his senses, but he gnawed the flesh of his lips to keep back consciousness. And still, when will grew powerless, he felt the ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... the begging letter which lifts it often to the realms of genius. Experienced though we all are, it has surprises in store for every one of us. Seasoned though we are, we cannot read without appreciation of its more daring and fantastic flights. There was, for instance, a very imperative person who wrote to Dickens for a donkey, and who said he would call for it the next day, as though Dickens kept a herd of donkeys in Tavistock Square, and could always ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... in his "Royal and Noble Authors," designates the Marquis as a "fantastic protector and fanatic," and describes the " Century of Inventions" as "an amazing piece of folly;" and Hume, who does not even know the title of the book, boldly pronounces it "a ridiculous compound of lies, chimeras, and impossibilities." In 18@5, however, an edition of this curious and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... still a mournful one. Those who know the great river, under which lies hid the treasure of the Nibelungs, with its "gleaming towns by the river-side and the green vineyards combed along the hills," and who have felt the romance of the rugged crags, crowned by ruined castles, that stand like fantastic and very ancient sentries to guard its channel, can well understand how easy of belief was the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang |
