"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and sat some tables away. From the snatches of conversation the three gathered that one was a literary critic and the other a publisher. They were discussing a thrilling detective story just published which the critic insisted was too fantastic. ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... turned to regard the two-story brick house and the square of lawn with a concrete deer on one side of the walk, balanced by a concrete deer on the other. Before the gate was the cast-iron effigy of a small Negro in fantastic uniform, holding an iron ring aloft. The Gashwiler carriage horse had been tethered to this in the days before the Gashwiler touring car had ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... and charms of the little Roger Stephen Osborne Hamley. She let the squire exhaust himself in wondering as to the particulars of every event, helping him out in conjectures; and both of them, from their imperfect knowledge of possibilities, made the most curious, fantastic, and improbable guesses at the truth. And so that day passed over, and ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... faith. Coningsby found that he was born in an age of infidelity in all things, and his heart assured him that a want of faith was a want of nature. But his vigorous intellect could not take refuge in that maudlin substitute for belief which consists in a patronage of fantastic theories. He needed that deep and enduring conviction that the heart and the intellect, feeling and reason united, can alone supply. He asked himself why governments were hated, and religions despised? Why loyalty was dead, and reverence only a ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... "farewell, a long farewell, to all their greatness." From the pinnacle of Congressional and Legislative honors, they have been precipitated to the shades of private life, and to political obscurity. Their chief ambition now is, to play "fantastic tricks" in courts of justice, and before grand jurors, in the way of annoying those they have neither the manliness nor courage to call to an ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... for several generations of boys. The meekest and most chicken-hearted scrubs in the school tried their apprenticeship to mischief upon him, and were tutored to more noble game by beginning with the Count. They split and cut his pens into a thousand fantastic shapes during a momentary absence; they filled his snuff with the most odious pulverulents. They placed on his desk rude, but expressive designs of a guillotine, with a meagre fellow in ruffles and no shirt, running in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... benches put end to end; the whole audience, with Lionel Varick's guests in front, were seated, when suddenly there leapt on to the platform the strangest and most fantastic-looking little figure imaginable! ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... the shore, in watchful expectation of seeing an elfin figure, more spiritlike than mortal, floating towards him through the dividing vapours of the morning. The words of Don Aloysius haunted him strangely, though his common sense sharply rejected the fantastic notions to which they had given rise. She,—Morgana Royal,—was "not capable" of love, the priest had implied,—and yet, at times—only at times,—she seemed eminently lovable. At times,—again, only at times—he was conscious of a sweeping passion of admiration ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... deepened in the little room. The music grew strange and fantastic—turbulent, insistent, plaintive and soft with entreaty. The shadows grew deeper. The music filled the room. It floated out upon the night, over the housetops, the crescent of the river, losing itself in the silence of the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... abide? Does there a spirit we know not, though seek, though we find, comprehend not, Here to entice and confuse, tempt and evade us, abide? Lives in the exquisite grace of the column disjointed and single, Haunts the rude masses of brick garlanded gayly with vine, E'en in the turret fantastic surviving that springs from the ruin, E'en in the people itself? Is it illusion or not? Is it illusion or not that attracteth the pilgrim Transalpine, Brings him a dullard and dunce hither to pry and to stare? Is it illusion or not that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... it up in silken strings With twenty odd-conceited true-love knots: To be fantastic may become a youth Of greater time than I shall show ...
— The Two Gentlemen of Verona • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... after that, each one busy with his own thoughts, each one seeing, in the fantastic, ever-changing heart of the fire, a little of his or her own future. And they ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... to belong to an imperial residence; but, on the other hand, it would be hard to find one more beautiful or better arranged. The park of Versailles is grander and more imposing; but it has not the picturesque irregularity, the fantastic and unexpected beauties, of the park of Schoenbrunn, and more closely resembles the park at Malmaison. In front of the interior facade of the palace was a magnificent lawn, sloping down to a broad lake, decorated with a group of statuary representing the triumph of Neptune. This group is ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... she can earn all the money she needs for her mother if she is willing to be paid by men. At first she refuses with pathos, but under the suggestive pressure of luring arguments she slowly weakens, and finally consents to exchange her street gown for a fantastic costume of half-nakedness. The feelings of the audience are saved by the detective who breaks in at the decisive moment, but the arguments of the advocates of sexual education cannot possibly be saved after that voluntary yielding. Sylvia knows what she has to expect, and no more intense ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the most fantastic girl in the world, although she passed for the most dazzling and the beautiful, and the one who best understood the art of bamboozling cardinals and softening the hardiest soldiers and oppressors of the people. She had brave captains, archers, and nobles, ready to serve her at every turn. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... woman in New York, and knew something of the fantastic elegance with which she could surround herself; but the house he entered surpassed anything he had ever seen in ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... credulity of the public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors. He had been the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even lunatics. Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of Patagonia, quarries in Labrador—such like speculations. Fisheries to feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them. A principality to be bought in Madagascar was another. As the grotesque details of these incredible ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... their own recollections, and even their own whims.—Caprice was liberty, and liberty was essential to the enjoyment of every thing. Thus, she loved caprice, and laid herself open to the charge of being fantastic with those who did not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... blare of music, and a stir and hum of voices, and here and there the sweet sound of a happy girl's laughter. They raised their heads, these two wild rangers of the mountain-desert, and breathed deep of the fantastic scene. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... of the frozen lake over which they were travelling were hills covered with harsh pine, that pricked funereally up to the boulder-broken snows. Above that was a stormy and fantastic sea of mountains baring many a fierce peak-fang to the hollow heavens. The sky was a waxen grey, cold as a corpse-light. The snow was an immaculate shroud, unmarked by track of bird or beast. Death-sealed the land lay in its silent ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... said—"Harding, what do you think of this?—'The Sphynx is representative of the grave and monumental genius of Egypt, the Faun of the gracious genius of Rome, the Pierrot of the fantastic genius of the Renaissance. And, in this one creation, I am not sure that the seventeenth does not take the palm from the earlier centuries. Pierrot!—there is music, there is poetry in the name. The soul of an epoch lives in that name, evocative ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... wonderful. It was as though we were the first man and woman in the world, wandering in our snow-garden, and still lost in amazement at each other. The prospect of meeting others of our kind began to be a fantastic ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... be asked at the outset, what possible connexion can there be between the practice of so fantastic and gruesome an art as the embalming of the dead and the building up of civilization? Is it conceivable that the course of the development of the arts and crafts, the customs and beliefs, and the social and political organizations—in fact any of the essential ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... for the smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici—those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... lively piece was on the Achaean hero of a fantastic romance by Mr. Rider Haggard and myself: the Ithacan, the Stormer of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to love, but not to respect; quick-witted as a soubrette, unable to refuse his pen to any one that asked, or his heart to the first that would borrow it, Emile was the most fascinating of those light-of-loves of whom a fantastic modern wit declared that "he liked them better in satin slippers ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... most ordinary feelings. But he did much more. Literature was going astray in its tone, while growing in importance; the Commedia checked it. The Provencal and Italian poetry was, with the exception of some pieces of political satire, almost exclusively amatory, in the most fantastic and affected fashion. In expression, it had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... his restless race To give Dame Fortune eager chase? O, had I but some lofty perch, From which to view the panting crowd Of care-worn dreamers, poor and proud, As on they hurry in the search, From realm to realm, o'er land and water, Of Fate's fantastic, fickle daughter! Ah! slaves sincere of flying phantom! Just as their goddess they would clasp, The jilt divine eludes their grasp, And flits away to Bantam! Poor fellows! I bewail their lot. And here's the comfort of my ditty; For fools the mark of wrath are not So much, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... I am free to tell you that a young journalist possessing (characteristically) "fantastic humour and exuberant gaiety," a famous amateur detective to boot, outwits all the official police, robs the law of its prey and finds a long-lost ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... shadow. Only an occasional chimney-pot, higher than its fellows, made a note of glowing orange where it pierced the slant of the evening sun: To Blanche's left there showed a pale gleam from the Thames between the house-backs of brownish-grey brick; to her right roof-tops and fantastic cowls were patterned in a flat purple tone against the luminous sky. In the eaves the sparrows were chirping shrilly; one flew downwards so swiftly between Blanche's eyes and the sky that his little body seemed nothing but a dark blot with a flickering upon either side of it. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the absurdity of the situation. It was in reply to "A Clerical Appeal," issued by the Rev. Nehemiah Adams, whose "South-Side View of Slavery" received more Anti-slavery attention than it deserved, for it expressed only his own fantastic ideas. In the "Appeal" he maintains that women should paint in water colors only, not ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... submarine and subterranean; cool, dimly-illuminated grottoes, some in basaltic, columnar rock, some in emerald-glowing stalactite, invited all the fantastic creatures of the sea, both fabled and real, who were promenading about on the floor of the deep, to a sweet, life-long siesta in their softly-gleaming recesses. On the second floor luxuriant equatorial palm-groves grew in startling proximity to the snow-laden pines of the North, and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... Testament has no scruple in calling men 'saints' who had many sins, and none in calling men perfect who had many imperfections; and it does so, not because it has any fantastic theory about religious emotions being the measure of moral purity, but partly for the reasons already referred to, and partly because it wisely considers the main thing about a character to be not the degree to which it has attained completeness in its ideal, but what that ideal is. The distance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fairy tale; so wild and so fantastic that Fritz listened with eyes extended and almost breathless to every word. At last, as the handsome prince was drawing his last breath, the lovely fairy sprang from his sword and brought the dead to life with her warm kisses, Fritz was in an ecstasy of excitement, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... sign of hearing, and raising himself on one elbow he lay and listened, until the music, growing fainter and fainter, died away. Then, puzzled and half convinced that his imagination had played him some fantastic ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... at least, only falls to our lot in late summer: heaven and earth merged harmoniously with one another, and, glowing wondrously in the sunshine, autumn freshness blended with the blue expanse above. Arrayed in the bright fantastic garb in which, amid the gloomy fashions now reigning, students alone may indulge, we boarded a steamer which was gaily decorated in our honour, and hoisted our flag on its mast. From both banks of the river there came at intervals the sound of signal-guns, fired according to our orders, with ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... cruel WOLE! Where is my BERTHO in this mountain hidden?— Shaping fantastic dreams of heartless OENE, With aching hands into a tangible beauty. How can'st thou keep two yearning souls apart? If thou could'st feel what love is, mighty master Of loveless War, ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... deviating for an instant into metaphor, describes it, but simply in Sans Souci. He is now no longer in the twentieth century, but the eighteenth—one hundred and fifty years ago or more—in Frederick's day, the period of pigtails, of giant grenadiers in the old-time blue and red coats, the high and fantastic shako made of metal and tapering to a point, of three-cornered hats resting on powdered wigs, of yellow top-boots, and exhaling the general air of ruffianly geniality characteristic of the manners and soldiers of ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... stands in the meadows wide,— Nor gun nor scythe to see. Sure some god his eye enchants: What he knows nobody wants. In the wood he travels glad, Without better fortune had, Melancholy without bad. Knowledge this man prizes best Seems fantastic to the rest: Pondering shadows, colors, clouds, Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds, Boughs on which the wild bees settle, Tints that spot the violet's petal, Why Nature loves the number five, And why the star-form ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of shivered mountains, whose strata are tossed about in fantastic contortions; and what we had yet to traverse below this, was something like a thousand feet of very slippery rock, lying in flakes, and sloping two ways at once. The greater length forms a rough line, at an angle of what seemed to the eye to be one of forty-five degrees,—not so steep as the Terabeh ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... to the fantastic requirements of the situation sat Mrs. Fischlowitz, her face of a thousand lines screwed to maintain the transiency of ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... Miss Pendarth, "it's difficult to know when Timmy is telling the truth, or what he believes to be the truth, about his gift. I think that often—and I know that Betty agrees with me—the boy invents all kinds of fantastic tales in order to ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... to himself. "That terrible Duchess of Knaresborough, too—I must fly my country." He pushed his horse into a canter, and was soon out of the Park. As he dismounted at his father's sequestered house, you would have hardly supposed him the same whimsical, fantastic, but deep and subtle humourist that delighted in perplexing the material Audley, for his expressive face was unutterably serious. But the moment he came into the presence of his parents, the countenance was again lighted and cheerful. It brightened ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... every bush and tree was covered with a white fleece of snow, and the morning sun added a tiny sparkle to every crystal. A thicket of spruce was changed to a grove of towering white cones and an alder swamp to a fantastic fairyland. It was all new to Frank, and as he drove away with that bright and vivacious girl for a companion it is needless to say he ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... was blowing from the north, and the fleecy particles fell in fantastic whirls and spirals, to drift in treacherous banks over the gullies and falls that lay along the path; while here and there thin black lines, sinuous in their trend, told where moorland waters flowed, and guided the hurrying mother to her distant goal. The groaning trees, tossed by the tempest, ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... slightly confused. "Only my fantastic way of speaking of my roses," he said. "They seem like real people to me, and I am apt to call them by their names. A shame, to be sure, to take such liberties with the General. Permit me to present you in due form! M. le General ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... before his meaning dawned on me. "You don't mean that fable about the fantastic ear?" I demanded. "I've heard of it, of course, but surely it must be a superstitious yarn spun out of something much simpler. I've sometimes thought it was a wild version of one of those mutilation stories. They used to crop criminals' ears ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... found his wide apartments, where we changed the robes we wore. I put on the half fantastic silken garments and the mask, Then sallied down the stair-way till I gained the street once more; Dreaming only of Eudocia, in whose ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... enjoy, as well as "natural" nature. Throughout the land, in the gardens of the middle and higher classes, may be found specimens of dwarfed and stunted trees which have required decades to raise. The branches, too, of most garden shrubs and trees are trimmed in fantastic shapes. What is the charm in these distortions? First, perhaps, the universal human interest in anything requiring skill. Think of the patience and persistence and experimentation necessary to rear a dwarf pear tree twelve or fifteen inches ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... whole thoughts were bent upon you. "Surely," thought I, "we mortals who dwell in pain and sorrow might with reason envy the birds of heaven which know not either!" And my other thoughts were similar to these. In short, I gave myself up to fantastic comparisons. A little book which I have says the same kind of thing in a variety of ways. For instance, it says that one may have many, many fancies, my Barbara—that as soon as the spring comes on, one's thoughts become uniformly pleasant and sportive and witty, ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... seriously concerned over the outcome. Public feeling was high, to be sure; the men of Sheep Camp were in a dangerous frame of mind and their actions were liable to be hasty, ill-considered- -their verdict was apt to be fantastic—but, secure in the knowledge of his innocence, Pierce felt no apprehension. Rather he experienced a thrill of excitement at the contretemps and at the ordeal which ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... a golden glow, whilst their lower steeps remained in comparative darkness. In the depths of the valley the last shades of twilight still seemed to linger, and masses of thin grey vapour rolled in billows over the rich vegetation and vivid verdure of the fields. The most fantastic variety of form was exhibited by the surrounding mountain wall; here it rose in turrets and towers, there spread out into crags, then again fell in blank abrupt precipices, their edges fringed with shrubs, the recesses of their sides sheltering wild-flowers of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Afterwards author of a learned but fantastic Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. Biesenthal had an enthusiastic reverence for what in the hands of others were the dry details of Hebrew Grammar. "Herr Doctor," a dense pupil once asked him, "ought there not to be a Daghesh in that Tau?" "God ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... difference between men and women is that the former ride the horse; the latter, the saddle. The tyranny of the side-saddle would not be so marked as it is, if this article of gear were of a uniform pattern of the best possible kind. Unfortunately it is generally built according to the fantastic ideas of fashionable makers who have no practical experience of side-saddle riding. Unaided learners have such difficulty in acquiring security and grace of seat and good hands, that many ladies who have ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... marauders of the hills were wont to sally forth. The sound, so musical to modern ears, of the river brawling round the mossy rocks and among the smooth pebbles, the dark masses of crag and verdure worthy of the pencil of Wilson, the fantastic peaks bathed, at sunrise and sunset, with light rich as that which glows on the canvass of Claude, suggested to our ancestors thoughts of murderous ambuscades and of bodies stripped, gashed, and abandoned to the birds of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... even by him. His hand may be recognised in a macaronic poem, written in Greek and English, describing the feast at which Alexander murdered Clitus. The death of the victim is treated with an exuberance of fantastic drollery, and a song, put into the mouth of Nearchus, the admiral of the Macedonian fleet, and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... who, since the attack on Kaspar in 1829, had been curious about him, came to Nuremberg, and 'took up' the hero, with fantastic fondness. Though he recognised Kaspar's mythopoeic tendencies, he believed him to be the victim of some nefarious criminals, and offered a reward of 500 florins, anonymously, for information. It ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... upon our heads. Williams and his wife appeared on the poop above us like an allegorical couple of repletion and starvation, conceived in a fantastic vein on a balcony. A cigar smouldered in his stumpy red fingers. She had slipped a hand under his arm, as she would always do the moment they came near each other. She never looked more wasted and old-maidish than when ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... minutes without my being aware of it. I am sorry for it, for Aliat is a little seaport, and I should like to have had a first glimpse of the Caspian, and of the countries ravaged by Peter the Great. Two columns of the historico-fantastic might have been made out of that, with the ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... not move now, he knew the horses were also listening. That had its meaning, for man cannot measure his keenest senses with those of the beasts of the field. The little breeze awoke again, and shook fantastic harmonies out of the shivering trees, and one horse stamped. The other wheeled and snorted, and Alton sprang back into the tent, as somewhere in the bushes there commenced a sound that suggested the snarling of a great cat. It was possibly unfortunate he ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... this? The science of the Rulans was beyond the comprehension of the Earth man. Here was telepathy in its most perfect form. Communications from the spirit plane; the orange flame—it was all so utterly fantastic that Blaine had to look earnestly at the girl to assure himself it was not a ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... like it," replied Louis, as he and his female companion each gazed with one eye into a shop window while they fixed the other upon the native, who was sporting a cane in fantastic twirls, and evidently believing he ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... by way of celebrating his arrival. That march past was unforgettable. Though the soldiers were commonplace enough, plain and businesslike the officers, of whom Gordon had about thirty of all ages, sizes and tastes, usually designed their own uniforms, which were sometimes fantastic, to say the least. On this great occasion you may be sure none had neglected to appear in the fullest of full dress, with highly comical results. Indeed their efforts amused Gordon so much that all the time they were advancing he kept repeating as he rubbed his hands gleefully together, ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... Civil Wars. Golden Grove, his beautiful retreat, with its venerable trees, was in our sight, the green mountain meadows between literally verifying its name by the brilliance of their sunshiny rich grass, where "God had showered the landscape;" to a fantastic fancy, giving the idea of the quivering of the richest leaf gold on a ground of emerald. The humbler Welsh Parnassus of the painter poet, Grongar Hill, towered also in distance. We traced the pastoral yet noble river, winding away in long meanders, up-flashing silver, through a broad ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... am no man to force a girl to a match against her will; but never trust to that, man. I know what women are; and let a fantastic stranger come across them, there's an end of old friends. But yours is an honest purpose, and you are a good youth; and if you had anything to keep her with, you should have Lucy to-morrow, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Who, with fantastic pruning-hook, Dresses the borders of his book, Merely to ornament its look— Amongst philosophers a fop is: What if, perchance, he thence discover Facilities in turning over? The Virtuoso is a Lover Of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... what a lion has done, and they go and bring home the buffalo or antelope killed when he was a lion, or rather found when he was patiently pursuing his course of deception in the forest. We saw the Pondoro of another village dressed in a fantastic style, with numerous charms hung round him, and followed by a troop of boys who were honouring him ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... obvious that we shall find him in the middle-aged party of 1936, who is gadding about in inflated trunks and with a fan in his hand. If it were not for the gloves and polka-dot neck-wear we should assume that this costume was a particularly fantastic bathing-suit. The youth of the ensuing year, in the next plate, is probably a son of the foregoing personage, for it is not difficult to detect a strong family likeness. As to the costume itself ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... recall, my famous translation from college during my banquet at the Cambridge Tavern—that Fate struck me my first severe blow. My guests were still sitting at table while one of the ladies executed a fantastic dance amid the wine-glasses, when my butler touched me upon the arm and whispered that Mr. Gottlieb was outside and desired to see me on urgent business. Excusing myself, I hurried out, greeting my partner rather impatiently, ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... of the years to come. She grew more conscious of the mystery in her own earlier life, and in the conditions which now surrounded her. A sense which at times besets all imaginative minds came upon her now and then with painful force; a fantastic unreality would suddenly possess all she saw and heard; it seemed as if she had been of a sudden transported out of the old existence into this new and unrealised position; if any person spoke to her, it was difficult to feel that she was really addressed and must reply; was ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... towered the crater-walls, while we journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified sea. Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of fantastic shape. Our way led on past a bottomless pit and along and over the main stream of the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... town. The strangers entered the first house they came to, which was also the largest, and found the floor strewn with pieces of the people who lived there. They looked much like fragments of wood neatly painted, and were of all sorts of curious and fantastic shapes, no two pieces being ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... time can be counted on to bring these modern peoples to a more reasonable, more worldly-wise, frame of mind; so that they would come to see their interest in such an arrangement, or would divest themselves of their present stubborn and perhaps fantastic prejudice against an autocratic regime of the kind spoken for. At least for the present any such hope of a peaceable settlement seems illusive. What may be practicable in this way in the course of time is of course still more obscure; but argument on the premises which ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... and Saskia's face was very expressive, at times merry and almost roguish, and again quite serious. She had also a brilliant complexion and an abundance of silky hair, waving from her forehead. The painter had collected in his studio many pretty and fantastic things to use in his pictures,—velvets and gold embroidered cloaks, Oriental stuffs, laces, necklaces, and jewels. With these he loved to deck Saskia, heightening her girlish charms with the play of light ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Edgar his pride beneath an idiot's rags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in 'all points as a man'; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen to the Youth Fidele; Jessica flees from her father's house in boy's dress, and Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, and then in white aprons and leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as for Falstaff, does he not ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... her skinny hands together, and smiled encouragingly upon her handiwork. She saw that the charm worked well. The shrivelled, yellow face, which heretofore had been no face at all, had already a thin, fantastic haze, as it were, of human likeness, shifting to and fro across it; sometimes vanishing entirely, but growing more perceptible than ever with the next whiff from the pipe. The whole figure, in like manner, assumed a show of life, such as we impart to ill-defined shapes ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... is an Entertaining Fairy Story of the wildest and most fantastic adventures and of amusing and original impossibilities, which, however, carry with them a stern puritan moral. This allegiance of unfettered imagination and straightforward, wholesome, moral teaching is unusual, and gives the ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... moments of thought and prayer sufficed to clear his healthy brain of the fantastic forms and scenes which had invaded it, and he was himself again, ready and panting ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... in a whirlwind on the road. They were coming to the hottest and most sheltered places of the Corniche—a true exotic temperature, scattering dates, cactus, and aloes. Seeing these thin trunks, this fantastic vegetation in the white hot air, feeling the blinding dust crackle under the wheels like snow, de Gery, his eyes half closed, dreaming in this leaden noon, thought he was once more on that fatiguing road from Tunis ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... and was never weary of devising a thousand methods of surprising and pleasing her. Every morning ere the McIntyre family were afoot a great bouquet of strange and beautiful flowers was brought down by a footman from the Hall to brighten their breakfast-table. Her slightest wish, however fantastic, was instantly satisfied, if human money or ingenuity could do it. When the frost lasted a stream was dammed and turned from its course that it might flood two meadows, solely in order that she might have a place upon which to skate. With ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... attempts, they kicked, plunged, and reared,—trampling heedlessly over the human form lying helpless among the shattered fragments of the sledge,—till tired out at last, they stood motionless, panting with terror. Their antlered heads cast fantastic patterns on the snow in the varying rose and azure radiance that rippled from the waving ribbons of the aurora,—and close to them, his slowly trickling life-blood staining the white ground,—his hair and beard glittering ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... farm. Nevertheless, as day succeeded day, and the lists had no end, the mistakes became more difficult to avoid. The S, W, E, and N keys on the typewriter bothered him, hypnotized him, forced him to strike fantastic combinations of their own. Once Harvey entered to point out to him ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... statesmanship is a career of daily, trivial protests, who see nothing in politics but a struggle between individuals—and those tactics no longer produce any effect either on the public or on legislative assemblies, because they have at last become wonted to them—produce just about as much effect as would fantastic champions of hygiene who should attempt to render a marsh inhabitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with shots from a revolver, instead of adopting as their method and their goal the draining of the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... bows. Under one arm he carried a huge chapeau-de-bras, and under the other a fiddle nearly five times as big as himself. In his left hand was a gold snuff-box, from which, as he capered down the hill, cutting all manner of fantastic steps, he took snuff incessantly with an air of the greatest possible self-satisfaction. God bless me!—here was a sight for the honest burghers ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Charge! why 'tis nothing for a gentleman that goes private, as yourself, or so; my intelligence shall quit my charge at all time. Good faith, this hat hath possest mine eye exceedingly; 'tis so pretty and fantastic: what! is ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... agitated nature can cling and steady itself to quiet endurance, one of the first results of sorrow is a desperate vague clutching after any deed that will change the actual condition. Poor Hetty's vision of consequences, at no time more than a narrow fantastic calculation of her own probable pleasures and pains, was now quite shut out by reckless irritation under present suffering, and she was ready for one of those convulsive, motiveless actions by which wretched men and women leap ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... deeply admired the work; and Sterne laid it heavily under contribution. But the noble and impassioned devotion of Charles Lamb has been the most powerful help towards keeping alive the memory of the "fantastic great old man." Burton's odd turns and quirks of expression, his whimsical and affectate fancies, his kindly sarcasm, his far-fetched conceits, his deep-lying pathos, descended by inheritance of genius to Lamb. The enthusiasm of Burton's admirers will not be chilled by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... humorous competition of advice between Justinus and Placebo, ("Placebo" seems to have been a current term to express the character or the ways of "the too deferential man." "Flatterers be the Devil's chaplains, that sing aye Placebo."—"Parson's Tale."), or with the fantastic machinery in which Pluto and Proserpine anticipate the part played by Oberon and Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." On the other hand, Chaucer is capable of using goods manifestly borrowed or stolen ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... her husband, but a grand ending. To prove which prediction was the correct one, the fortune-teller had recourse to the egg and lead tests—pouring the white of an egg and boiling lead into water, and watching the fantastic figures produced. Every fresh trial terminated in favour of the poor wooer. Father and mother changed their minds; the daughter almost leaped for joy; two fond hearts were united, and the promised dower was not kept back. For many years the young ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... who was himself not a man of sentiment, showed the new aspirant for the renting of the place this fantastic building, he spoke of it with a ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... her for more than twenty years the admiration of all the statesmen of Europe. She caused to be erected on the south side of her palace of Whitehall, a vast banqueting-house framed of timber and covered with painted canvass, which was decorated internally in a style of the most fantastic gaudiness. Pendants of fruits of various kinds (amongst which cucumbers and carrots are enumerated) were hung from festoons of ivy, bay, rosemary, and different flowers, the whole lavishly sprinkled with gold spangles: ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... law? Where were my proofs? I knew that the facts were true, but could I help to make a jury of countrymen believe so fantastic a story? I might or I might not. But I could not afford to fail. My soul cried out for revenge. I have said to you once before, Mr. Holmes, that I have spent much of my life outside the law, and that I have come at last to be a law to myself. So it was even now. I determined that the fate which ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... (that of Tegg's edition, 1849) will not guide those who with Elia sicken at the profanity of "unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man," and know not a "sight more heartless" than the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... produced. As he sits there, the moonlight, pouring through the diamond panes of the window, throws rhomboids of light on to the polished floor. It looks like some enchanted chessboard. Leaning back and gazing with half-closed eyes, he peoples it with fantastic rooks, and knights and bishops, when suddenly the strangely penetrating voice of Angela ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... as mine, is, to my thinking, a matter which a man should not make in accordance with his own caprices,—or even with his own affections. He owes a duty to those who live on his land, and he owes a duty to his country. And, though it may seem fantastic to say so, I think he owes a duty to those who have been before him, and who have manifestly wished that the property should be continued in the hands of their descendants. These things are to me very holy. In what I am doing I am in some respects departing from the theory of my ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the first time that night Richard's heart sank within him. The river, the mountain, the quickening east, swam before his eyes. He shut them to recover his self-control. In that brief interval, by some fantastic mental process, the little room at Simpson's Bar and the figures of the sleeping father and son rose upon him. He opened his eyes wildly, cast off his coat, pistol, boots, and saddle, bound his precious pack ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... mother and sister. She began to feel curiously jealous of these extraneous influences. She unconsciously exerted herself to make his visits at the beach more interesting. They drove together in her pony-carriage; they studied glowing summer sunsets, where fantastic clouds piled up wealth of gold and amber and purple and opaline splendors, and shot out arrowy, dazzling rays; they paced the sands after it had all faded into tintless space, and delicate vapors of grayish ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... his metaphysical opinions what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely that men will leave off endeavouring to ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... upward from the tip of the cigarette. Jimmie Dale's eyes fastened mechanically on the twisting, wavering spiral, followed it mechanically as it rose and spread out into filmy, undulating, fantastic shapes—and the strong, square jaw set suddenly hard. It was not so very strange that those words should have come back to him to-night! Things were "warm" now—and he could not let them "cool" ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... fancied that the Amahagger were much too gloomy a folk to indulge in any such frivolity; but, as will presently more clearly appear, it turned out that an Amahagger dance has little in common with such fantastic festivities in other countries, savage or civilised. Then, as we were about to withdraw, she suggested that Leo might like to see some of the wonders of the caves, and as he gladly assented thither ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... language, the infinite variety and rapidity of his discourse. Burke had something to say on every subject, from bits of personal gossip, up to the sweet and melting landscape that lay in all its beauty before their windows on the terrace. He was playful, serious, fantastic, wise. When they next met, the great man completed his conquest by expressing his admiration of Evelina. Gibbon assured her that he had read the whole five volumes in a day; but Burke declared the feat was impossible, for he had himself read it through ...
— Burke • John Morley
... heard him and had now 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... indulged in the most fantastic flights of fancy. They were interminable stories, astounding inventions, from the day of his birth until his final triumph. In the unsophisticated, passionate and moving fancy of this extraordinary little creature, who now lived chastely ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... many of the more sombre foliaged trees were draped and festooned in riotous profusion with parasitic creepers, the blooms upon which would have driven a painter to distraction, so rich and varied were their tints, while the shapes of some of them were fantastic enough to suggest that Dame Nature must have been under the influence of a nightmare when she formed them. A few of them were merely giant creepers, but Earle, who possessed more than a smattering knowledge of botany, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... whole forming a most irregular and distracting appearance to the eye. In other places, right in the heart of the city, and adjoining well-designed buildings, were vacant lots inclosed by high ugly board fences, on which were painted fantastic and ridiculous advertisements. ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... breach between the President and the Vindictives was just beginning to be evident, Greeley was pursuing an adventure of his own. Among the least sensible minor incidents of the war were a number of fantastic attempts of private persons to negotiate peace. With one exception they had no historic importance. The exception is a negotiation carried on by Greeley, which seems to have been the ultimate cause of ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... and the feet sank with a delicate pleasure into a thick velvety carpet. In the centre a small inlaid table of cedar wood held a silver tea-service. The candlesticks were of silver also, and cast in a light and fantastic fashion. The solitary discord was a black ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... third a soldier in a bad cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courage and faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly applied, intellectual power; while his younger men are the gentlemanly play-things of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged and resolutely subdued, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... University of Leyden. But his strange mission did not cease. He wandered for some time in France and England, where he printed at his own expense several small books in 1681 and 1682, amongst others one piece addressed to Mahomet IV., De Conversione Turcarum. The following passage occurs in this fantastic production: "You saw, some months ago, O great Eastern Leader, a comet of unusual magnitude, a true prognostic of the Kingdom of the Jesuelites, that is, of the restoration of all people to the one-three God. O well is thee, that thou hast turned thy mind before ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... subject, had been amusing us with an account of its various modes of celebration in various countries. He was perfectly brilliant in a description of New-York as seen under the sun of a clear, frosty New-Year's morning, with snow enough to make the sleighing good. The gay, fantastic sleighs, dashing hither and thither, and their exhilarated occupants bowing now on this side and now on that, to acquaintances rushing by almost too rapidly to be distinguished, while the silvery bells ring out their merry peals on the still air. Then ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... and deserted wing was full of fantastic shadows. He threw himself on a chair beside a window without lighting his lamp. The rose garden outside was steeped in moonlight; the magnolia bells gleamed waxen-white against their glossy green ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... clouds, which during the morning had obscured the entire face of the heavens, were breaking up their array, and the sun was looking down, in twenty different places, through the openings, checkering the landscape with a fantastic, though lovely carpeting of light and shadow. Before us there rose a thick wood, on a jutting promontory, that looked blue and dark in the shade, as if it wore mourning; while the sunlit stream beyond shone through the trunks and branches, like ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... then existing conditions, where so many irreconcilable interests were in presence, it is not to be wondered at if little harmony prevailed amid the various conflicting elements gathered together by fate for the enactment of this fantastic scene. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Hawthorne, who knew perfectly what he was about in introducing him—Hawthorne always knew perfectly what he was about—wished to give in his person an example of humorous resignation and of a life reduced to the simplest and homeliest elements, as opposed to the fantastic pretensions of the antiquated heroine of the story. He wished to strike a certain exclusively human and personal note. He knew that for this purpose he was taking a licence; but the point is that he felt he was not indulging in any extravagant ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... not look fantastic, changeable, absent, rapt in admiration, covered with sadness, various and volatile, and it should not show any signs of an unquiet mind. On the contrary, it should be open and tranquil, but not too expansive with ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... irregular crescent of serrated peak and towering mountain wall that is thrown around Italy on the north, as it unrolls itself from the plains of Lombardy and Venetia. How often one has gazed at it in sheer delight over its bewildering wealth of contrasting color and fantastic form, its effect of light and shade and measureless space! But now, for these many months past, keen eyes have been bent upon it; eyes, not of the artist or the poet, but those ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... I lived, thereafter, many thousands of thousands of years, until this day? I cannot detail that life. It is a long round of new, fantastic impressions, coming dream-like, one after another, melting into each other. In looking back, as in looking back upon dreams, I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly; and it seems that my imagination must have filled in the swift movement ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... attained the dignity of art, though in the banner of "Justice," in the Academy, the space is filled in a monumental fashion and the figure of St. Gabriel with the lily has something grand and graceful. We trace the same treatment of flying banners and draperies and rippling hair in the fantastic but picturesque S. Grisogono in the left transept of San Trovaso. Jacobello's will, executed in 1439 in favour of his wife Lucia and his son, Ercole, with provision for a possible posthumous son, shows him to have ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the critic to discover "problems" in the works of Ibsen has been one of the main causes of that impatience and even downright injustice with which his writings have been received by a large section of those readers who should naturally have enjoyed them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit and often reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in a long black coat and white choker, as though he were an ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... little doves have left a nest Upon an Indian tree, Whose leaves fantastic take their rest Or motion from the sea; For, ever there, the sea-winds go With ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... aimlessly breaking fantastic seals, and staring unseeingly at crests and coronets, when there came a knock at the door. Marianne opened it, to speak for a moment with ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... tried it. I was shaving. I had slept well, and my mind was very lively, even gay and frisky. It was reveling in a fantastic and joyful episode of my remote boyhood which had suddenly flashed up in my memory—moved to this by the spectacle of a yellow cat picking its way carefully along the top of the garden wall. The color of this cat brought the bygone cat before me, and I saw her ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... costumes, many imitating every imaginable style of garb: Gallic, Spanish, Moorish, Syrian, Persian, Lydian, Thracian, Scythian and many more; but many also devised according to no style that ever existed, but invented by the wearers, in a mad competition to don the most fantastic and bizarre garb imagination ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... over the prairies, watching the heat-waves that arose in fantastic circles, as in Spring. "You can't hurt me again," ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... sensible man to another, not with the impassioned fervour of a prophet. Nor can Pope often rise to that level at which alone satire is transmuted into the higher class of poetry. To accomplish that feat, if, indeed, it be possible, the poet must not simply ridicule the fantastic tricks of poor mortals, but show how they appear to the angels who weep over them. The petty figures must be projected against a background of the infinite, and we must feel the relations of our tiny eddies of life to the oceanic ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Cargill 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
... discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness had not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it? In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever-wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing. Our truest life is when we ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the sun, objectors were not silenced; and when the side of incredulity was supported by so considerable an authority as M. Faye, it was impossible to treat it with contempt. Two crucial tests were available. If it could be shown that the fantastic shapes suspended above the edge of the dark moon were seen under an identical aspect from two distant stations, that fact alone would annihilate the theory of optical illusion or "mirage"; while the certainty that they were progressively concealed by ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... at least a princess, to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, "How happy that doll must be!" She could not take her eyes from that fantastic stall. The more she looked, the more dazzled she grew. She thought she was gazing at paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one, which seemed to her to be fairies and genii. The merchant, who was pacing back and forth in front of his shop, produced on her somewhat the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, is simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive desire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois, desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to all ghostly influence. So I lay stretched upon the cushions, staring blankly into the dense gray fog closing up all trace of our travelled road, or watching the light edges of the trailing mist curl coyly around the roofs of houses and then settle grimly all over them, the fantastic shapes of trees or carts distorted and magnified through the mist, the lofty outlines of some darker cloud stalking solemnly here and there, like enormous dumb overseers faithfully superintending the work of annihilation. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... world's fantastic face Thro' all the turns of matter's maze did trace; Great nature's well-set clock in pieces took; On all the springs and smallest wheels did look Of life and motion, and with equal art Made up the whole ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... poem which contains much that is not exactly relevant to the main issue. It must never be forgotten that Faust is not the orderly development of a thesis in ethics, but a long succession of imaginative pictures. Some of them may seem too recondite and fantastic to meet our present-day demand for reality, but on the whole the poem deals with vital issues of the human spirit. At the end of it Faust arrives at a noble view of life, and his last words undoubtedly tell how Goethe himself thought that a good man ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... after the due politenesses with the hostess had been exchanged. The woods were fairly ablaze with bonfires and hanging lanterns, making a strangely brilliant and fantastic scene. Here and there rugs were spread out on the grass for the older people to congregate upon in gossiping groups, while the young ones had speedily converted a large, smooth spot of lawn into an ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... a deep dell, in the bottom of which ran a rivulet, very small in dry weather, but in heavy rains becoming a torrent, which had worn itself a high-banked channel, winding in fantastic curves from side to side of its narrow boundaries. Above this channel old forest trees rose to a great height on both sides of the dell The slope every here and there was broken by promontories which during centuries the fall of the softer portions of the soil had formed; ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... with Danish encampments, and now beside quiet, tomb-besprinkled burying-grounds, and the broken walls of deserted churches—that its memory still lives freshly in my mind, as one of the happiest of my life. I passed whole hours among the ruins of Craighouse—a grey fantastic rag of a castle, consisting of four heavily-arched stories of time-eaten stone, piled over each other, and still bearing a-top its stone roof and its ornate turrets ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... from Fantastic Universe May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... forcible, impressibly forcible—with the force of a squirt of tobacco juice. If "the Single Tax party will not long survive its creator," perhaps it is because it has not as much attraction for the great sovereign voter as the blessed protective tariff, which, to use your own fantastic expression, you should "cosset on your heaving brisket" for its splendid success as a survivor of its primogenitors. Look at the pinnacle of political success to which the McKinley bill has brought Bill McKinley (excuse the paltry little pun) and sound money (saving your presence) brought Grover ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... times that nobody can write English but you. With regard to the story which has been slightingly criticised, I can only say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird, fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom which is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story is indicated rather than revealed. The outlines are quite definite enough, from the beginning to the end, to those who ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Before the stern realities of life—before sickness and sorrow and the dread shadow of death—that schoolgirl's vision had utterly melted away. It is just possible that Gustave's manly outspoken love may have helped to blot from the tablet of her mind the fantastic picture of the life that might have been. She scarcely knew whether this was so; but she did know that a new and happier existence began for her from the hour in which she gave her heart in all truth ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... harp, and a golden-mouthed cornet; I heard the mirthful babble of happy voices, and peals of laughter ringing in the swelling tide of pleasure. Then I saw a vision of snowy arms, voluptuous forms, and light fantastic slippered feet, all whirling and floating in the mazes of the misty dance. The flying fingers now tripped upon the trembling strings like fairy-feet dancing on the nodding violets, and the music glided into a still sweeter strain. The violin told a story ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... cushioned feet making no sound, advanced to the bucket-chairs. But lowering his body into one of them for a better look at what vaguely resembled the control of a helicopter—like the one in which he had taken the first stage of his fantastic journey across space and time—he did not find it comfortable. He realized that it had not been constructed to accommodate a body shaped precisely like ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... rose straight on their trunks, the leaves and branches spreading in conventional style; his rocks have the usual gradations which we find in the old school; the views of distant cities are absolutely fantastic and infantile creations; only the green plain is often illumined, in an unusual manner, by tiny flowerets of many hues, while mystic roses crown the angels' locks, adorn overflowing baskets, or rise on long stalks at the foot of the Virgin's ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... Serpentine, and commenced quadrilles, polkas, and divers figures; in a few minutes their erratic motions were illuminated by red, blue, crimson, and green fires, lighted on the banks, and by rockets and other lights. This fantastic and beautiful exhibition was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it," he moralised, "with vicious propensities; the nature of the plant must be changed, or the branches will spring forth, and evil fruit will continually be produced." Other plants of the most fantastic shapes and most lovely hues seemed endued with life. One covering a wide circle of ground, and tinted with every colour of the rainbow, they stopped to admire. Suddenly it darted forth feelers of great length high into the air, and drew back hundreds of gay-coloured butterflies, ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... fantastic gesture Pierre replied: "It was said that a devil entered into me at birth, but that was mere scandal—'peut-etre.' You shall think ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... avant courier is heard proclaiming the approach of the victorious warriors. The camp is in an instant alive with excitement and commotion. Men, women, and children swarm out to meet the advancing party. Their white horses are painted and decked out in the most fantastic style, and led in advance of the triumphal procession; and, as they pass around through the village, the old women set up a most unearthly howl of exultation, after which the scalp-dance is performed with all the pomp and display their limited resources ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... see reasons, for many at any rate, of the variations of color and markings in caterpillars, which at first sight seem so fantastic and inexplicable. I should, however, produce an impression very different from that which I wish to convey, were I to lead you to suppose that all these varieties have been explained, or are understood. Far from it; they still offer a large ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its absorption in Irish affairs. But he was not writing a formal history, and these points did not appeal to him at all. He drew with inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain as a peacock and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and institutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the idol of what was then the proudest ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... great banquet was held by the whole mass of soldiery, and there was a scene of furious revelry. The soldiers arrayed themselves in costumes cut from the materials they had just received. Broadcloths, silks, satins, and gold embroidered brocades were hung in fantastic drapery over their ragged garments, and when the banquet ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... by the waters of Lake Tsana. Above the plateau rise several irregular and generally ill-defined mountain ranges which attain altitudes of from 12,000 to over 15,000 ft. Many of the mountains are of weird and fantastic shape. Characteristic of the country are the enormous fissures which divide it, formed in the course of ages by the erosive action of water. They are in fact the valleys of the rivers which, rising on the uplands or mountain sides, have cut their way to the surrounding lowlands. Some of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... fantastic tricks with her on that occasion; or did she see, as that little black box met the view, a momentary repetition of the suffering spasm which had crossed the face of Richard Crawford half an hour before, when she first ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... swiftly down the steps, leaving Mr. Magee staring wonderingly after him. Like a wraith he merged with the shadows below. Magee turned slowly, and entered number seven. A fantastic film of frost was on the windows; the inner room was drear and chill. Partially undressing, he lay down on the brass bed and pulled ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... in the doorway in the moonlight silvering the street. There were so many nooks and places in shadow that everything had a weird, fantastic look. The small garrison were quiet, and many of them asleep by nine o'clock. Early hours was the rule except in what were called the great houses. But in this out of the way nook few pedestrians ever passed in ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... opposite the crowd. On her right was the river, while southward before her lay a great flat plain, beyond which rose some hillocks covered with forest. The sun blazed between masses of slowly drifting clouds that trailed creeping fantastic shadows across ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... valuable rather as exquisite specimens of the neatness with which those slight vessels could be put together, sewn as they were merely with strips of the same bark, than from any intrinsic value they possessed. Covered over with fantastic figures, done either in paint, or in quill work artfully interwoven into the fibres of the bark, they presented, in their smooth and polished surface, strong evidence of the address of the savages in their preparation of this most useful and abundant produce of the country. Interspersed ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... saving in width meant much on streams having such narrow channels as the Missouri and the Platte, especially when barges were to be towed. Then, too, its machinery, which was covered over or boarded up, was shrouded in mystery. A fantastic figure representing a serpent's open mouth contained the exhaust pipe. If the New Orleans alarmed the population of the Ohio Valley, the sensation caused among the red children of the Missouri at the sight of this gigantic snake ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... panorama meets his eye as he suddenly reaches the top. A fantastic sea, as it were, of hills, like the waves of a storm-tossed ocean, encircles him, and at his feet, green and wooded, lies a long fertile valley. Stretching far away into the gates of distance in its vast expanse, glitters the Lake of Scutari. Round a small dim ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon |
