"Fantastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... No. 13, Standgate Street,—a baker, who has the finest collection of marine monsters in ten sea counties,—sea dragons, polypi, mer-people, most fantastic. You have only to name the old gentleman in black (not the Devil) that lodged with him a week (he'll remember) last July, and he will show courtesy. He is by far the foremost of the savans. His wife is the funniest thwarting little animal! They are decidedly the Lions of green Hastings. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... river was covered with all sorts of odd craft, and George gazed with astonished eyes at the scene before him. The moon was just rising, and the great golden globe shone over the river, causing the boats of varying build to cast weird and fantastic shadows ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of thought. It is their boast to make two words bloom where one grew before. Both garb themselves in Metaphor, and the only complaint of the captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style, Slang dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre caprices, that her whims are unstable and too ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... Hudson's ship, the Half Moon, having chanced on one of these orgies, were so impressed by the fantastic spectacle that they gave the name Duyvels Dans-Kamer to the spot. Years afterwards, when Stuyvesant ascended the river, his doughty retainers were horrified, on landing below the Dans-Kamer, to discover hundreds of painted figures frisking there in the fire-light. A few surmised that they were ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the fantastic figures with which the Americans have undertaken to estimate the cost of our propaganda, they rest—in so far as they are not simply the fruit of a malicious imagination—on the, to say the least of it, superficial hypothesis that all the money paid out by the different German ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... along he was beginning to be conscious that, side by side with this resentment, had come something fantastic, something luring, immanent in the far faintness of the scent ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... and communicating with him freely; and hushed up the matter by causing all, save the expenses of the feast, to be paid back. These are things of daily occurrence in all parts of our dominions, and the Thanadars are not afraid to play such 'fantastic tricks' because all those under and all those above them share more or less in the spoil, and are bound in honour to conceal them from the European magistrate, whom it is the interest of all to keep in the dark. They know that the people ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... One fair October night; And the stars look'd down, and the northern crown Gave its strange fantastic light. ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... one's heart good," exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, "to hear of these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into practise—it's magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... threatened by a British advance, would have united against an invading army from the north, and would, had it not been of prodigious strength, have annihilated it. The French had enormously exaggerated the power of Tippoo Sahib, with whom they had opened negotiations, and even had their fantastic designs succeeded, it is certain that the Tiger of Mysore would, in a very short time, have felt as deep a hatred for them as he ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... lingered with a caressing movement among Hilda's locks. She seemed to have forgotten Jean, whom she doubtless believed to have been lost in the general calamity. Suddenly she started up and pointed to a storm-cloud rising rapidly from the western horizon, assuming a succession of fantastic shapes as it passed upwards. "Do you not see them?" she cried—"the great, the glorious ones! they bend from their seats; they smile! see their power! Their majesty! their locks stream, their swords are half drawn! they ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... yet equally effective in its way is his "Cracovienne Fantastic," Op. 14, No. 6. The cracovienne is a Polish dance for a large and brilliant company and just as Paderewski recalled in his minuet the stately assemblage of days long past, so in his cracovienne he gives us a brilliant picture of a ballroom ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... story of the Chevalier d'Eon, one has seen that Louis XV. amused himself by carrying on a secret scheme of fantastic diplomacy through subordinate agents, behind the backs and without the knowledge of his responsible ministers. The Duc de Choiseul, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, was excluded, it seems, from all knowledge of these double intrigues, and the Marechal de Belle-Isle, Minister ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... In the west, the red tinge of the sun, which had just disappeared below the horizon, lingered well up in the sky. Against it we could see, clearly outlined in inky blackness, the distant Indian wigwams; while to the eastward the crimson light was reflected in fantastic glow upon the heaving surface of the lake. For a moment we paused, standing upon the slope of the mound on which the Fort was built, and gazed about us. There was little movement to arrest the eye. The dull, dreary level of shore and prairie was deserted; what the more ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... country's pine-clad hills, Her thousand bright and gushing rills, Her sunshine and her storms; Her rough and rugged rocks that rear Their hoary heads high in the air, In wild fantastic forms. ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... great 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 ridden all their ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... two latter articles, being susceptible of ornamentation, are usually adorned with eagle feathers, foxtails, or a string of sleigh-bells about the player's waist. The men are painted in the most grotesque and fantastic manner. It is not unusual to see some of them painted blue or yellow all over their persons, and before the paint has dried it is streaked with their fingers in zig-zag fashion from head to foot, sometimes up and down and sometimes zebra fashion. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... again—and at a tremendous rate. Still, he did not care, having mastered the great truth that he would either tall off the horse in exhaustion or arrive at Kingswood—and which of the alternatives happened did not appear to him to matter seriously. The whole affair was fantastic; it was unreal, in addition to being silly. But, real or unreal, he would finish it. If he was a phantom and Kingswood a mirage, the phantom would reach the mirage or sink senseless into astral mud. He had Colonel Hullocher in mind, and, quite illogically, he envisaged ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Christ? The Church's "saint" seems to mean less than the world's "man of honour."' God forbid that it should be fancied that Christian sainthood is more tolerant of evil than worldly morality, or has any fantastic standard of goodness which makes up for departures from the plain rule of right by prayers and raptures. But surely there may be a principle of action deep down at the bottom of a heart, very feeble in its present ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... opened out a little beyond Snowy Range. It was covered with the most curious snow hummocks, forming high cones over the whole surface, their shadows slanting over the glittering snow in the afternoon sunshine. They were most fantastic in shape, and some fifty or sixty in number. At first sight, they resembled heaped-up mounds or pyramids of snow; but as the vessel approached, one group of them, so combined as to simulate a fortification, showed ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the dreamer construed to suit circumstances. But the millions of these visions that arise nightly from the bed-chambers of the world are nothing more than the flickerings of the mind, at random, and like vapor, arising into the atmosphere of the soul, frequently assuming a variety of fantastic forms as a ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... themselves in her affairs, and they were many. One week 'twas a great general she was said to smile on; again, a great beau and female conqueror, it being argued that, having made her first marriage for rank and wealth, and being a passionate and fantastic beauty, she would this time allow herself to be ruled by her caprice, and wed for love; again, a certain marquis was named, and after him a young earl renowned for both beauty and wealth; but though ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... little improved in that respect even at his present great age. But Orsino did not argue. He suggested, and if any one disagreed with him he became silent. He seemed to possess energy in action, and a number of rather fantastic aspirations, but in conversation he was easily silenced and in outward manner he would have seemed too yielding if he had ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... though she did not believe that a ghost had visited the child, thought that perhaps her rival was not really dead, and her old hatred and jealousy were reawakened. So she told her husband that she intended to see for herself whether there was any truth in the fantastic story, and would sleep that night in the nurse's bed. She did not mention her suspicions, nor the fact that she carried a sharp dagger. She was roused in the night, as the old woman had been, by the sound of a cradle being rocked. Stealthily drawing the curtains, she saw the white-robed ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... prospects dark, uncertain, sombre as night's sable curtain, Filled them, thrilled them with fantastic funkings seldom felt before; So that now, to still the beating of faint hearts, they kept repeating Futile formulas, entreating Closure for the "Obstructive Bore"— With a view to Truth defeating, such they ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... English gentleman, evidence was not lacking last evening that he can unbend on occasion. At the lawn fete held in the spacious grounds of Judge Ballard, where a myriad Japanese lanterns made the scene a veritable fairyland, he was quite the most sought-after notable present, and gayly tripped the light fantastic toe with the elite of Red Gap's smart ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... other way. A man who had read deeply about Napoleon, or who had possibly received some hereditary family injury through the great war, might conceivably form such an 'idee fixe' and under its influence be capable of any fantastic outrage." ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sides collected the rain as does the roof of a house, and the rills and rivulets rapidly uniting soon formed veritable floods of considerable proportions seeking the bosom of the river. This seemed the most fantastic region we had yet encountered. Buttes, pinnacles, turrets, spires, castles, gulches, alcoves, canyons and canyons, all hewn, "as the years of eternity roll" out of the verdureless labyrinth of solid rock, made us feel more than ever a sense of intruding into a forbidden realm, and having ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... While this fantastic scene, illumined by the moonbeams, was taking place in the clearing, the negroes, who were awaiting their comrade to begin the fun, were growing sadly impatient, and did not know what to think of the delay of their musician, who was usually ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Jamberoo Some few fantastic shadows haste, Uplit with fires Like castle spires Outshining through a mirage waste. Behold, a mournful glory sits On feathered ferns and woven brakes, Where sobbing wild like restless child The gusty breeze of evening wakes! ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... daring enough to seem almost fantastic, but Bob quickened his step and turned toward the depot. He could yet catch the morning train ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... upon them. Perchance Sir Nigel, with his love of all the dying usages of chivalry, might have contrived some strange ordeal or feat of arms by which his love should be put to the test. Alleyne smiled as he wondered what fantastic and wondrous deed would be exacted from him. Whatever it was, he was ready for it, whether it were to hold the lists in the court of the King of Tartary, to carry a cartel to the Sultan of Baghdad, or to serve a term against the wild heathen of Prussia. Sir Nigel had ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... few hours was a trip extending over several days of time. One would have said that the forest was imbedded in a garden of the most extraordinary orchids. The shapes of some of the flowers were so fantastic that it seemed impossible that Nature could have produced them. And their colors were no less unparalleled, inimitable, ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... writhed their bodies in and out under this arch, he occasionally stooping to snatch a kiss, and all the time their feet waltzing in perfect time to the music. Suddenly, with another yell, he leaped into the air, and, with Rosa waltzing demurely in front of him, began the fantastic part of the schuplattle, which consists, as Jimmie says, "of making tambourines all over yourself, spanking yourself on the arms, thighs, legs, and soles of your feet, and the crown of your head, and winding up by boxing your partner's ears or kissing her, just as you ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... usually improved these occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes. Yet it did seem (though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... etext was produced from Fantastic Universe January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... even excelled his expectation. He had four rooms and a private garden enclosed by a thicket of bamboo. His bathroom walls were slabs of glossy actinolite, inlaid with cinnabar, jade, galena, pyrite and blue malachite, in representations of fantastic birds. His bedroom was a tent thirty feet high. Two walls were dark green fabric; a third was golden rust; the fourth ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... 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
... man? All that could be seen of his body—legs, arms and chest—was as hairy as the skin of an ape; his hands and feet were crooked, like the claws of a tiger. As to his visage, nothing more fantastic and frightful could be imagined. Amid a thick, bristling beard, a nose like an owl's beak and a mouth whose corners were drawn by a wild-beast-like rictus were just discernible. The eyes were half hidden by his thick, bushy, curly hair. Each curl ended in a spiral, pointed and twisted like a ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.—Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... impatiently reverted to the old belief in the law of the sword, or to the fantastic conception that they, and they alone, are chosen to fulfill a mission and that all the others among the billion and a half of human beings in the world must and shall learn from and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... immeasurable distance from me. It was the countenance of a stranger—one with whom I had never exchanged a word, who was probably ignorant of my existence, whom I might never see again, and yet whom I had felt to be my fate. Such are the fantasies, the caprices of that most fantastic of things—the the unfledged mind. But I have not taken up my pen to write either the triflings or the tendernesses of the heart. I leave to others the beau ideal of life. Mine has been the practical, and it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... effective resource lay in some constitutional amendment to safeguard the rights of the South. What amendment could effect this, he did not say. But it transpired later that he had in mind the election of two Presidents, one from each section,—a fantastic and impossible scheme. In truth, Calhoun in this last utterance was less a statesman aiming to guide events than a prophet predicting an inevitable woe. He was too wise to share the elation with which hot-heads talked of an independent South, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... that kept the current in a state of turmoil, and made it show distinctly in the twilight gloom of the canyon. On one of the dripping rocks was a man, standing so like a statue that in the indistinct light Fred Greenwood took him for some fantastic formation of stone, worn by the eroding action of the angry waters, but the suggestion of a living person was so striking that the two called ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... Yates will return?" "Return, my good sir!" answered the barrister, with an air of surprise, "I am Mr. Yates, and it will give me the greatest pleasure to talk with you about those papers." Having taken a deliberate survey of the young Templar, and made a mental inventory of all the fantastic articles of his apparel, the honest attorney gave an ominous grunt, replaced the papers in one of the deep pockets of his long-skirted coat, twice nodded his head with contemptuous significance, and then, without another word—walked out of the room. It was his first visit to those chambers, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... of the thought appalled me. It seemed to chill the beating of my heart; I grew cold from head to foot. Still the boat held its course steadily, swept onward by the resistless current; still the willows nodded their fantastic farewells. Along the level meadows far and wide the white mist lay like a vast winding-sheet; now and then through the stillness I heard, or seemed to hear, a moan—a mournful wail, as of some spirit just released from earthly bonds, and forced to leave its ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... feeders?" asked Strong. "With ordinary reactant, and no new cooling units aboard your ship, you must have oversized feeders to make such fantastic speeds." ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... Arabs were probably uneasy. They may have feared an attack from the Somalis or some other foe, for they kept a close watch, and held their rifles in constant readiness. But presently the moon came up in the east, casting a pale glamour over the desert, and tracing on the sand in weird, fantastic designs the shadows of the camels ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... into the room: Raby is so sound asleep it will not wake him; and Sally is asleep too;" and he led her slowly towards the door. The night-lamp was burning low; its pale flame, and the flickering blaze of the big hickory logs on the hearth, made a glimmering twilight, whose fantastic lights and shadows shot out through the door-way into the gloom of the hall. As the first of these lights fell on Hetty's face, Dr. Eben started to see how white it was. Involuntarily he put his arm around ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... revolutions and political movements—unless when they have been conducted with the most guarded caution and moderation—have generally terminated in results just the opposite of what was expected from them, the angry ape will still play his fantastic tricks, and put in motion machinery, the action of which he no more comprehends or foresees than he comprehends the mysteries of infinity. The insect that is borne upon the current will fancy that he directs its course. Besides the fear of insurrection ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... trimmed with lace. Her rich dark hair was allowed to hang loose, and a gold-embroidered gauze scarf was twisted lightly round the top of her head, the long ends falling below her waist. She wore sequin ornaments and a quantity of Oriental bangles, which enhanced the fantastic effect, and gave her the appearance of a true Romany. She was not at all afflicted with shyness, and performed her share of the entertainment with a zest that charmed her audience. Her southern songs, with their crooning refrains, seemed to bring visions of ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the baby now and then, or laughing with the rest when the little woman called it by its father's name, and asked it all manner of fantastic questions concerning him, in the joy of her heart. It was something of a blow to the little woman that when we were within twenty miles of our destination it became clearly necessary to put the baby to bed; but she got over that with the same good humor, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... "busy." So, when I cannot entertain her, I have to make the nearest approach I can to the truth, and tell her I am sick, or something of that kind; but nothing avails, with her, short of the absolute truth. She is so very fantastic and entertaining, that I should cultivate her acquaintance more, if it were not for this deficiency in the language, which makes it impossible to convey the idea to her when I want to get rid of her. As old as she is, she still carries home the great sacks of flour—a hundred pounds—on ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... third of a mile in length. Some had perpendicular sides, with level summits—fit foundations, it might seem, for building cities of marble palaces, or fortresses for the kings of the East. Some, again, were broken into every fantastic form conceivable—towers and turrets, spires and minarets, domes and cupolas; here, the edifices found most commonly under the symbol of the crescent; there, those of the cross: Norman castles, Gothic cathedrals, Turkish mosques, ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... the philosopher's life and character. Thus the work took the form of a "Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdroeckh," and as such it was offered to the world. Here, of course, we reach the explanation of its fantastic title—"Sartor Resartus," or the Tailor Patched: the tailor being the great German "Clothes-philosopher," and the patching being done by Carlyle as his ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... undertaken to construct a railway, quays, and harbour works, and offered fair wages for workmen. The Montenegrins demanded fantastic payment and imagined that by standing out they would get it. To their astonishment the Italians imported gangs of far better workmen and finished the work. Then the Montenegrins cursed the Italians and hated them bitterly. Even Montenegrin ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... century) were in the same characters. The most ancient manuscripts, written previous to the fourteenth century, are very beautiful, each letter being set separately, and the capital letters often assuming the form of fantastic beasts and birds, or of flowers, or gilded. The oldest manuscript of Russian work preserved dates from the middle of the eleventh century—a magnificent parchment copy of the Gospels, made by Deacon Grigory for Ostromir, the burgomaster ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... special information, and I deem it best to make them now, when the most fantastic descriptions of the all-absorbing desire of conquest on the part of Germany have circulated in the press of the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrill'd me—fill'd me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, "'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber-door,— Some late visitor, entreating entrance at my chamber-door; This it is, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... any possible occasion. He may, for a moment, neglect to breathe; but, when the pipe is forgotten, he must be dying, indeed. There were no such sad cases here. Wreaths of smoke were rising from every possible quarter. The more fantastic the smoke-wreath, the more placid and solemn ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... nook in a valley With a canopy of leaves, Such as a forest Titan In fantastic beauty weaves; Or some vine-embowered tangle O'ershadowing murmuring stream Where scarce a ray of sunlight May on its waters gleam, Is a dwelling-place more restful To a man by right controlled Than the courts of kings and ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... and died, and now from this gloomy shadow came something that whirred by my ear and was gone. But in that moment I had swept my companion behind a rock and with sword advanced leapt straight for the tree; and there, in the half-light, came on a fantastic shape and closed with it in deadly grapple. My rusty sword had snapped short at the first onset, yet twice I smote with the broken blade, while arm locked with arm we writhed and twisted. To and fro we ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... anyone. Having learnt from her father's papers that he was of an old family, she considered herself anybody's equal. Her brain held a crazy enough jumble of ideas, no doubt; but given a strong imagination, no experience, and omnivorous reading, a young girl's mind is exactly the place where fantastic ideas will breed and multiply. She went about with Mrs. Gordon to the small festivities of the district, and was welcomed everywhere, and deferred to by the local settlers; she had yet to know what a snub meant; so the world to her seemed a very easy sort of place to get along in. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... secret even from his men, three means of escape as he hoped from any peril that might meet him on the sea. One of these was the floating island that the Book of Wonder tells of, another was so fantastic that we may doubt if even the brilliant audacity of Shard could ever have found it practicable, at least he never tried it so far as is known in that tavern by the sea in which I glean my news, and the third he determined on carrying out as he turned that ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... should study particularly his Allegory of Spring in the Academy for full length figures in motion. You will find the color of this picture happily weird to agree with the fantastic conception. Then in the Uffizi Gallery you will find several pictures of the Madonna; notable among them is his Coronation of the Virgin, painted, as he was fond of doing, on a round board. Such a picture is called a tondo. Here you will find all ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... remarkable story: full of vivid fancy and quaint originality. In its most fantastic imaginings it carries with it a sense of reality, and derives a singular attraction from that combination of simplicity, originality, and subtle humour, which is so much appreciated by lively and thoughtful children. Children of a ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... our daylight with him"—one of his fellow journalists has written that he was a jester, but not of the kind that Shakespeare drew in Yorick. He was not only,—so the writer implied,—the maker of jibes and fantastic devices, but the bard of friendship and affection, of melodious lyrical conceits; he was the laureate of children—dear for his "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" and "Little Boy Blue"; the scholarly book-lover, withal, who relished and paraphrased his Horace, who wrote with delight a quaint ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... progress of the foregoing scene, Colonel Sziszkinski, so full of amazement at what was transpiring that he found it difficult to persuade himself that he was not the victim of some fantastic hallucination, stood silent and watchful where he had first halted upon the deck of the Flying Fish. He had, of course, upon the instant of his arrival, recognised among the strangers who, for some mysterious reason, were thus interfering ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... have me ransomed. Wattasacompanum, who is a good chief and a praying Indian, promised that I should be faithfully guarded. The next day, before Philip's messengers departed, I was carried outside the wigwam, where the Indians danced a wild, fantastic war-dance about me, to the music of their own strange screaming. I lay trembling with fright, until the old squaw came out and sat by me, somewhat quieting my fears by repeating, 'They no kill you; they no kill.' They wished to paint my face and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... glum as any and there was a tic at the side of his mouth. He said now, "We've got to come up with something. Sooner or later one of them will spot us and this next time we won't have any fantastic breaks like Homer being able to knock him off with a Tommy-Noiseless. He'll drop a couple of neopalms and burn up a square mile of desert including El Hassan ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... that must be hid, Shyly, in some fantastic shade, Where pity droops a tender lid On ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... of Scotland is Caithness, a wild region of mountain, marsh, and rock-ribbed headlands, in which the storms of the Atlantic have worn every variety of fantastic indentation. Much of the land has been reclaimed in modern days by rich proprietors. There are manufactures of linen, wool, rope, and straw, besides important fisheries; so that forty thousand people now find habitation and subsistence in the county. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... indulged. To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds, as the volcanic earth is moved, as if in travail, and, according to the Socratic fancy, bring them to the birth, was the true function of the teacher, however unusual it might seem in an ancient university. Fantastic, from first to last that was the descriptive epithet; and the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre-eminently due to Italy. ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... avert bloodshed, but, above all, effectively to strengthen the forces of right. The Golden Rule should be, and as the world grows in morality it will be, the guiding rule of conduct among nations as among individuals; though the Golden Rule must not be construed, in fantastic manner, as forbidding the exercise of the police power. This mighty and free Republic should ever deal with all other States, great or small, on a basis of high honor, respecting their rights as jealously as ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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
... often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the willful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,—the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... on! Idle fancy as it is, this mysterious mantle has thrown an awe around my image of her, partly from its fabled virtues and partly because it was the handiwork of a dying woman, and perchance owed the fantastic grace of its conception to the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the comedy of what is, absolutely, a deception. Losing, as we do, something of the particularity of these painted faces, we are able to enjoy all the better what it is certainly important we should appreciate, if we are truly to appreciate our puppets. This is nothing less than a fantastic, yet a direct, return to the masks of the Greeks: that learned artifice by which tragedy and comedy were assisted in speaking to the world with the universal voice, by this deliberate generalising of emotion. It will be a lesson to some ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... idealise the man and magnify his exploit, as they magnified the deeds of some strong man to make the legends of Hercules, and there, full-grown from a mere legend, is the first record of a pioneer of flying. Such a theory is not nearly so fantastic as that which makes the Capnobates, on the strength of their name, the inventors of hot-air balloons. However it may be, both in story and in picture, Icarus and his less conspicuous father have inspired the Caucasian mind, and the world is the ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... purred the Rev. Wallace Stillwell, "that the whole exploit is worse than fantastic. It is hardly in good taste. Investigations of the kind this girl has undertaken ought to ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... nineteenth century bears clear traces of the influence exercised on receptive minds by the French revolution. Three of the leading poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, were deeply infected by its spirit, and indulged in their youth fantastic dreams of a social millennium; Wordsworth, especially, who in his maturer years could be justly described as the priest of nature-worship and the poet of rural life, had imbibed violent republican ideas during a residence of more than a year in France. These were passing off ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... A fantastic, waggish crew—yet Francis minded them not, so long as they observed sufficient etiquette to keep their distance from his royal person and immediate following. This nice decorum, however, be it said, was an unwritten law with these waifs and scatterlings, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... realised, in the first place, how undefined is the Hindu's religious position. From the rudest polytheism up to pantheism, and even to an atheistic philosophy, all is within the Hindu pale, like fantastic cloud shapes and vague mist and empty ether, all within the same sky. To the student of Hinduism, then, the first fact that emerges is that there are no distinctive Hindu doctrines. No one doctrine is distinctive of Hinduism. There is no canonical ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Croton and Sybaris were two ancient Greek cities situated on the Gulf of Tarentum, Southern Italy. Little is known of them except their luxury, fantastic self-indulgence, and extravagant indolence, for which qualities their names remain ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... the case with the 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 for a purpose never ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... find Evelyn here," said George Brand. He was in truth, just a little bit bewildered as yet. He had been assured that there would be no foolish mummeries or fantastic rites of initiation; but all the same he had been much occupied with this step he was about to take; he had been thinking of it much; he had been looking forward to something unknown; and he had been nerving himself to encounter whatever might come before him. But that five minutes ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... the old folks smiling and the children's cheeks aglow, And a saucy maiden standing there beneath the mistletoe; I can hear the laughter mingle with the strains of music sweet As we tripped the light fantastic with the "many-twinkling feet;" I can see the moonlight gleaming through the trees upon the snow, When memory takes me back again to scenes I used ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... This fantastic theory has been defended in a large number of German books, of which the 'Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,' by the renegade Englishman Houston Chamberlain, is the most widely known. The objections to it are numerous. It is notorious that until the invention of gunpowder ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, "'T is some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; This it is, and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... 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 is only enough to secure good grass, then do every thing that is necessary to furnish ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ignorant, though wondrous proud, Though very turbulent and very loud; The crazy composition shows, Like that fantastic medley in the idol's toes, Made up of iron mixt with clay, This crumbles into dust, That moulders into rust, Or melts by the first shower away. Nothing is fix'd that mortals see or know, Unless, perhaps, some stars above be so; And those, alas, do show, Like all transcendent excellence below; ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... me back to a sense of the proportion of things. I saw that in the combination of influences that had brought Mr. Tottenham to the point of proposing to marry my daughter consideration for me, if it had a place, would be fantastic. Inwardly I laughed at the egotism of raw nerves that had conjured it up, even for an instant, as a reason for gratitude. The situation was not so peculiar, not so interesting, as that. But I answered his stare with a smile; what I had ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Tourelle, and begged to be taken to the rooms he had occupied before his marriage, he seemed angry with me, although he affected to laugh, and so decidedly put aside the notion of my having any other rooms but these, that I trembled in silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called up as peopling the background of those gloomy mirrors. There was my boudoir, a little less dreary—my bedroom, with its grand and tarnished furniture, which I commonly made into ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... scissors on the unlucky prepuce. When the surgeon arrived at the scene of carnage, he was directed to the wood-shed, on the outskirts of which hovered the family, frantic with fear and apprehension; within, in the darkest corner, with wildly dilated eyes, and performing a fantastic pas seul, was a man with a huge pair of scissors dangling between his legs, warning all hands as they valued his life not to approach or lay a hand on him. He had shut the scissors down so that it clinched ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... These fastidious, and sometimes fantastic ceremonies, originally devised as the very extremities of anti-barbarism, were often themselves but too nearly allied in spirit to the barbaresque in taste. In reality, some parts of the Byzantine court ritual were arranged in the same spirit as that ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up the fashionable ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... in 1992, and intend to do it again in 1995. I do not find the Olympic distance exhausting, in fact I think it is great fun and truly exhilarating. I get to see all these wonderful age group competitors from all over the world who look and feel fantastic. It does my soul good to see a group of people aging so gracefully, not buying into the popular notion that old age is inevitably disabling, depressing, and ugly. Sport brings a degree of balance to my life ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... having been shot when actually calling, we might still believe that it is the male only that makes this sound. The note is joyous only in the poet's fancy, just as he has also read sadness into the "sobbing" of the nightingale. There is, indeed, when we consider its life, something fantastic in the hypothesis that the cuckoo can know no trouble in life, merely because it escapes the rigours of our winter. Eternal summer must be a delight, but the cuckoo has to work hard for the privilege, and it must at times be harried to the verge of desperation by the small ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... by this time, and it wasn't long before old Colin limbered considerable. There it was, nice bright moonlight, nobody around to pass remarks; nothing to trouble. So bime-by we pasted her hide, wide and fantastic, with the bagpipes screechin' like a tom-cat fight in a cellar. I was tickled to death lookin' at our shadows flyin' around—one of the times I was easily pleased; I must say I enjoyed ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... could dimly be seen walking about or sitting at tables; and the wild strain of the Tsigane musicians, as they swayed to and fro in their red coats on the bandstand, floated towards the dome through the heavy summer air. In the near distance the fantastic shapes of chimney-cowls raised themselves against the starry but moonless sky, and miles away the grandiose contours of a dome far greater than Hugo's—the dome of St. Paul's—finished the prospect in solemn majesty. It was a scene well calculated to intensify ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... shorter as the dream thread holds, the vagaries of the night are shuttled into the warp of life. But presently comes the master-weaver Reason to point out this or that fantastic pattern; to bid the ear listen to the measured clacking of the day-loom, and the eye to mark that the web of reality has grown never an inch for all the shuttlings of the sleeping-time. Whereupon, full-blood consciousness regains her sway, and you sigh, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... and landscapes, and write verses, and rear temples, and dig grottoes; and he will stand in a clear summer night in the colonnade before the hall, and gaze on the deer as they stray in the moonlight, or lie shadowed by the boughs of the huge old fantastic oaks; and he will repeat verses to his beautiful wife, who will hang upon his arm;—and he ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... he could not assent to all the titles and rewards which Columbus demanded as a price for his services. Barros, the Portuguese historian, on the other hand, represents that the whole idea was too fantastic to be seriously entertained by the King for a moment, and that although he at once made up his mind to refuse the request he preferred to delegate his refusal to a commission. Whatever may be the truth as to King ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... us stretched the gardens of the palace, and thousands of lights glowed, in many-coloured radiance, from within the foliage of the trees wherein they were set; or, raised high in the air, burned in rainbow-hued arches and fantastic ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... pictorial exactitude and bizarrerie of color these poems remind one of Flemish masters and Dutch tulip gardens; again, they are fine and fantastic, like Venetian glass; and they are all curiously flooded with the moonlight of dreams. . . . Miss Lowell has a remarkable gift of what one might call the dramatic-decorative. Her decorative imagery is intensely dramatic, and her dramatic pictures are in themselves vivid ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... compact from the desire of gratifying his own vanity, by galloping about on a neutral ground, and attracting the admiration of both armies, but especially of the Cossacks, by his horsemanship, and the brilliant, if not fantastic, dresses in which it was at all times his delight to exhibit his fine person. But King Joachim never displayed his foppery so willingly as on the field of battle: he committed only, on a smaller scale, the same error which detained his ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... to misuse and pervert this part of the face which I scarcely dare to touch upon, for it is so utterly fantastic and mystical that I fear the charge of heresy if I give words to my thoughts. It occurs among bats, a tribe of obscure creatures about which common knowledge amounts to this, that they fly about after sunset, are uncanny, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton) |
