"Fantastical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... You have the approximate cause—causa causans. Was it Cupid? No, for like Bacon, your sex's 'fantastical' charms move me not." ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... shepherd. But when the long month of September comes, a shroud of snow spreads itself from the peak of the mountains down to their base, respecting only this deeply excavated path, a few gorges open by torrents, and some rocks of granite, which stretch out their fantastical forms, like the bones ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... observed a number of buildings erected on the right bank, with roofs of matting, but decorated in the most fantastical manner, with different coloured ribbands and variegated silks; and about three hundred soldiers in their uniforms (which appeared to our eye not much adapted to military purposes) were drawn out, with a band of music, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... the first place is due to religion.——They saw clearly, that of all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed through the mind of man, none had ever been more extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law, which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity, reverence and right, reverend eminence, and holiness around the idea of a priest, as no mortal could deserve and as always ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... not always possible to follow with our sympathy that literal, childlike rendering of every incident in the life of the Master, which sometimes looks fantastical and often unmeaning. He was a man of his time, and could live only under the conditions which that time allowed. He made visible to a literal, practical, unquestioning age the undeniable and astounding fact that the highest of all beings chose ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... most fantastical history, and one which leaves us in some doubt whether it be a genuine legend of Heidelberg, or one of M. Dumas's dreams in the diligence after dining upon pig and cherry sauce. At any rate, if not true ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... manners were excruciatingly vulgar, and that they were people of no education. His studio was a pattern of elegance; he kept a couple of magnificent footmen; took a number of dandified pupils; had his hair curled; dressed half-a-dozen times a-day in various fantastical costumes. He was perpetually rehearsing improvements in his way of receiving visitors; meditating on all possible means of beautifying his person, and of producing an agreeable impression on the ladies. In short, it soon became impossible to recognise in him the modest student who once laboured ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... I know that many of you will adopt it. It is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies, has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable substances and principles. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the same period, but were quite distinct from each other: the one was grave and prosing, the other melancholy and fantastical. There are a number of good lines and good thoughts in the Cooper's Hill. And in Cowley there is an inexhaustible fund of sense and ingenuity, buried in inextricable conceits, and entangled in the cobwebs of the schools. He was a great man, not a great poet. But I shall say no more on this subject. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... hill-top a few scattered olives, peaches, and wild cherries scrawled upon the blue, their bare, leaning stems, their pearly whites, their golden pinks and feathery grays all in a glory of sunset that made of them things enchanted, aerial, fantastical, like a dance of Botticelli angels ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterflies—in short, send him adrift ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... fantastical adventure was Banks, the vintner of Cheapside, that same Banks who taught his horse to dance and shod him with silver. Now once upon a time a right witty sport was devised between them. The vintner bet Moll ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... wooden doors set between pillars. They were painted green and red, and fastened with clamps and bolts of hammered copper that looked enormously old. Against them were nailed two pictures of winged horses with human heads, and two more pictures representing a fantastical town of Eastern houses and minarets in gold on a red background. Balls of purple and yellow glass, and crystal chandeliers, hung from the high ceiling above these doors, with many ancient lamps; and two tattered and dusty banners of pale pink and white silk, fringed with ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... and therefore still more impossible to give an idea to others. Mrs. Farrinder was perceptibly irritated; she appeared to have made up her mind, after her first hesitation, that the Tarrant family were fantastical and compromising. She had bent an eye of coldness on Selah and his wife—she might have regarded them all ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... hanging shelves, and in elegant glass cupboards, there were a thousand knick-knacks; small vases, statuettes, groups in Dresden china, and grotesque Chinese figures, old ivory, and Venetian glass, which filled the large room with their precious and fantastical array. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... threads in each that can be woven into the other. That the artist should be eccentric, homeless, dreamful may almost seem a natural law, but it is none the less a scandal. An artist's business is not really to cut fantastical capers or be licensed to play the fool. His business is simply that of every keen soul to build well when it builds, and to speak well when it speaks, giving practice everywhere the greatest possible affinity to the situation, the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... figure was draped in a fantastical costume, grinned broadly, and did justice to the host's invitation. The sharply curved nose and the large mouth with dazzling teeth, the full blond hair, and the broad, muscular shoulders, were on a colossal scale. The tight-fitting coat of the athlete ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... seem to be suggestive rather of another poetical maxim in great favour with anchorites and recluses—"Retire, the world shut out." We cannot agree with Miss Seward, who describes this hermitage as "a retreat which breathes all the witchery of genius, taste, and sentiment." It is rather fantastical than tasteful, and savours more of eccentricity than sentiment. In the Gothic entrance, there are undoubtedly many fine specimens of carved wood-work, some of which we suspect were the plunder of despoiled convents and churches during the continental wars of the last century; but classical, ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... You see the child's heart is set thereon. Be ruled by me, I pray you, and leave your fantastical objections, and go seek Don John. Make him to grant you oath, on the honour of a Spanish gentleman, that Blanche shall be allowed the free using of her own faith—and ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... our country, pulling down our churches, and slaughtering our brethren. His pride, cherished by a band of villains who are constantly anxious to offer incense on his shrine, and tolerated by numberless victims who pine in his chains, has caused him to conceive the fantastical idea of proclaiming himself Lord and Ruler of the whole world. There is no atrocity which he does not commit to attain that end.... Shall these outrages, these iniquities, remain unpunished while Spaniards—and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Watteau here, and a rare piece of fantastical brightness and gayety it is. What a delightful affectation about yonder ladies flirting their fans, and trailing about in their long brocades! What splendid dandies are those, ever-smirking, turning out their toes, with broad blue ribbons to tie ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... last traces, in these matter-of-fact days, of the motley population of former times; and are whimsically associated in my mind with fairies and witches, Robin Goodfellow, Robin Hood, and the other fantastical ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... fickle, franticke, madde; These be the humors that content me best, And therefore will I stay with Cynthia.... Nat. Now rule, Pandora, in fayre Cynthias steede, And make the moone inconstant like thy selfe; Raigne thou at womens nuptials, and their birth; Let them be mutable in all their loves, Fantastical, childish, and foolish, in their desires, Demaunding toyes: And stark madde when they cannot have their will. Now follow me ye wandring lightes of heaven, And grieve not, that she is not plast with you; Ail you shall glaunce at her in your aspects, And in conjunction dwell with ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... lived thus in their boat, abandoning to God sail and rudder, and only stopping on their course to celebrate the feasts of Christmas and Easter on the back of the king of fishes, Jasconius. Every step of this monastic Odyssey is a miracle, on every isle is a monastery, where the wonders of a fantastical universe respond to the extravagances of a wholly ideal life. Here is the Isle of Sheep, where these animals govern themselves according to their own laws; elsewhere the Paradise of Birds, where the winged race lives after the fashion of monks, singing matins and lauds ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... that they were only extracted from such persons by the tortures employed by the Spanish officials; that the supposed introduction of arms into the Colony through an estate owned by Pedro P. Rojas is purely fantastical, and that the only arms possessed by the rebels were those taken by them in combat from the Spanish soldiers." [174] But his second cousin, Francisco L. Rojas, a shipowner, contrabandist, and merchant, was not so fortunate. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... inveigh against the poulaines, which had more than ever come into favour, and which were only considered correct in fashion when they were made as a kind of appendix to the foot, measuring at least double its length, and ornamented in the most fantastical manner. The Pope anathematized this deformity as "a mockery of God and the holy Church," and the King forbad craftsmen to make them, and his subjects to wear them. All this is as nothing in comparison with the ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... to solicit pardon for! We have each a right, around this hospitable table, to indulge our book whims: and mine may be as fantastical as any. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze, weary and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on the threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face deepened. He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire, would have graced a beau of an earlier decade. "Will you be pleased to enter?" he suggested punctiliously. "My house, such as it is, is quite at your disposal. And," he added, with a glance over his shoulder, "I fancy that a word ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... laughter is always fatal to feeling; the magical land of love was suddenly far away, and there was the sound of china, and the heavy tones of Rem's voice—dissatisfied, if not angry—and Arenta's lighter fret; and they stood once more among fetishes and forms so foreign, fabulous and fantastical, that it was difficult to pass from the land of love, and all its pure delights, into ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... as no man ever saw; And there, within a closet, on the flags Were two grim shapes which, vaguely seen at first In the half light, grew presently distinct— Two gnomes or vampires seemed they, or dire imps Straight from the Pit, in guise fantastical Of hose and doublet: one stretched out full length Supine, and one in terror-stricken sort Half toppled forward on the bended knee, Grasping with vise-like grip the other's wrist, As who should say, Arouse thee, sleep ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Christian raised his voice two centuries ago against this mode of applying and of often wresting the sense of the Scriptures to make them conformable to human fancies; 'from which,' says Lord Bacon, 'arise not only false and fantastical philosophies, but likewise heretical religions.' If the Scriptures are to be literally interpreted and systems of science found in them, Gallileo Gallilei merited his persecution, and we ought still to believe that the sun turns ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... indeed be ingenious who can make out the words her hrilir from any characters in the inscription in question, which, whatever else it may be, is certainly not mortuary. And even should the reverend gentleman succeed in persuading some fantastical wits of the soundness of his views, I do not see what useful end he will have gained. For if the English Courts of Law hold the testimony of grave-stones from the burial-grounds of Protestant dissenters to be questionable, even where it is essential in proving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... opinion who should win; and I have seen those who reproached them do the very same thing the instant their own vanity or prejudices are concerned. The most mechanical people, once thrown off their balance, are the most extravagant and fantastical. What passion is there so unmeaning and irrational as avarice itself? The Dutch went mad for tulips, and —— —— for love! To return to what was said a little way back, a question might be started, whether as thought relates to the whole circumference of things and interests, and business is ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... idea as over-precipitous even for a mere fantasy. I was therefore entertained when I found that what I had refused as too fantastical for fantasy was accepted in certain occult ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... a dense atmosphere, which became an obstacle to the disclosure of truth as the clouds are to the rays of the sun, his image only appeared in fantastical outlines borrowed from "Conrad the Corsair," or "Childe Harold," or "Lara," or "Manfred," or indeed "Don Juan." Analogies were sought which do not exist, and to the poet were attributed the sentiments, and even the acts, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... from the isolation. In addition, the various torments of the region are worse at this season. Sitting beside the muddy banks of the Itecoahy at sunset, when the vapours arose from the immense swamps and the sky was coloured in fantastical designs across the western horizon, was the only relief from the sweltering heat of the day, for a brief time before the night and its tortures began. Soon the chorus of a million frogs would start. At ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... allowed to impose his own terms upon its judgment; and suffering himself the worst consequences of that order of success, he achieved too early a fame for his permanent reputation. A want of sobriety, a fantastical seeking after strange effects—in short, the characteristics of artistic charlatanerie—mixed themselves up with all that he did, and, as is inevitably the case, deteriorated the fine original gifts ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... world; some being drawn from Plutarch, Pliny, Ovid, Virgil, and other sources, but many springing simply from Lyly's exuberant fancy. In the second place Euphues is a collection of similes borrowed from "a fantastical natural history, a sort of mythology of plants and stones, to which the most extraordinary virtues are attributed[22]." "I have heard," says Camilla, bashfully excusing herself for taking up the cudgels of argument with the learned Surius, "that the Tortoise in India when ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... an Art movement has sprung up called AEstheticism, which has been defined as the "Science of the Beautiful and the Philosophy of the Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... said by Wood to have been John Eaton, who was a minister and preacher at Wickham Market, in which situation and capacity Smith succeeded him. This Smith published many other tracts and sermons, chiefly fanatical and with fantastical titles. One is described by Wood, and is called 'Directions for Seekers and Expectants, or a Guide for Weak Christians in these discontented times.' 'I shall not give an extract from these sermons,' writes Beloe, who is ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... had read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, Sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged behind. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... symbolized the unknown quantity in all the problems that absorbed him. His idealism was not a thing of the air, but a flowering from old and vigorous roots. His politics was a kind of religion, and it did not prove upon analysis to be either so fantastical or so fanatical as she had believed at first. As the days shortened, he would prolong their walk until the shops and factories discharged their employees upon the streets. The fine thing about the people was, he said, the fact ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... fantastical!" he said. "We are not holding a debate on sex. If we are to be normal, we must declare that man ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... the net-work, I had barely time to observe that the whole country, as far as the eye could reach, was thickly interspersed with diminutive habitations, ere I tumbled headlong into the very heart of a fantastical-looking city, and into the middle of a vast crowd of ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable, or gave themselves the least trouble to render me assistance, but stood, like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader—(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... went to Paris, where he became a Roman Catholic; fell into pecuniary difficulties, but was befriended by Cowley and recommended to a post; was an imitator of George Herbert, and his poems were of the same class, but more fantastical; his principal poems were "Steps to the Temple" and the "Delights of the Muses"; both Milton and Pope are indebted to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... evidently believed in his great powers; for I am informed by Francis Galton, Esq., F.R.S., that there is a fantastical monument on the right-hand side of the central avenue of the Kensal Green Cemetery, about half way between the lodge and the church, which bears the following inscription:—"Tomb of Frederick Albert Winsor, son of the late Frederick Albert Winsor, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... But this fantastical experiment was cut short by the interference of the law. A public prosecution was instituted against the St Simonians; and Pere Enfantin, and other chiefs of the sect, were brought before the tribunal at Paris. It will be easily understood ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... up together the most heterogeneous mass of trumpery novels, French translations, and the best English authors, provided only they were unworldly or sentimental. Neither did he know how far to take what he read and use it in his daily life. He often selected some fantastical motive which he had found set forth as operative in one of his heroes, and he brought it into his business, much to the astonishment of his masters and customers. For this reason he was not stable. He changed employers two or three times; and, so far as I could make out, his ground of objection ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... of intelligence, and has a good heart, but even with these qualifications a man may commit many errors, and do a great deal of mischief. Louis is naturally inclined to be capricious and fantastical, and the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau have contributed to increase this disposition. Seeking to obtain a reputation for sensibility and beneficence, incapable by himself of enlarged views, and, at most, competent to local details, Louis ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... ease, pay for the monopoly which you enjoy! The rich have invented judges and courts of law to secure their goods, and the guillotine—that candle in which so many lie in silk, under silken coverlets, there is remorse, and grinding of teeth beneath a smile, and those fantastical lions' jaws are gaping to set their ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... Utopian, Quixotic. ideal, unreal; in the clouds, in nubibus[Lat]; unsubsantial[obs3] &c. 4; illusory &c. (fallacious) 495. fabulous, legendary; mythical, mythic, mythological; chimerical; imaginary, visionary; notional; fancy, fanciful, fantastic, fantastical[obs3]; whimsical; fairy, fairy-like; gestic[obs3]. Phr. "a change came o'er the spirit of my dream" [Byron]; aegri somnia vana[Lat][obs3]; dolphinum appingit sylvis in fluctibus aprum [obs3][Latin][Horace]; "fancy ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... commonly know enough of the reality, to be aware of the absurd illusions and exaggerations of such poetical voluptuaries. In them, therefore, such a composition can work neither corruption nor deception; and it will, in general, be despised and thrown aside, as a tissue of sickly and fantastical conceits, equally remote from truth and respectability. It is upon the other sex, that we conceive its effects may be most pernicious; and it is chiefly as an insult upon their delicacy, and an attack upon their purity, that we are disposed to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... human being. At last I thought I had made a discovery. The nearest clump of trees was undoubtedly the same which I had admired and pointed out to my companions soon after we had left the house. It bore a fantastical resemblance to a snake coiled up and about to dart upon its prey. About six or seven miles from the plantation we had passed it on our right hand, and if I now kept it upon my left, I could not fail to be going in a proper direction. So said, so done. I trotted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... irregular but picturesque and beautiful structures by which that court—quadrangle it cannot be called, for no uniformity is observed in the disposition of the buildings—is surrounded. Here the eye is attracted by a confused mass of roofs, some flat, turreted and embattled, some pointed, with fantastical gables and stacks of tall chimneys—others with cupolas and tall clock-towers—others with crocketed pinnacles, and almost all with large gilt vanes. A large palace is a city in miniature; and so is it with Whitehall. It has two other courts besides the ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... all that, the artistic qualities of his novels are incomparably below those of any one of the great Russian masters Tolstoi, Turgenev, or Goncharov. Pages of consummate realism are interwoven with the most fantastical incidents worthy only of the most incorrigible romantics. Scenes of a thrilling interest are interrupted in order to introduce a score of pages of the most unnatural theoretical discussions. Besides, the author is in such a hurry that he seems never to have had the time himself to ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Boston; in November, in New York; in December, in Philadelphia; in January, in Washington. I can show you three or four great natures, as yet unsung by Harriet Martineau or Anna Jameson, that content the heart and provoke the mind. And for yourself, you shall be as cynical and headstrong and fantastical as you can be. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... entirely agree with you as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers and the fantastical conceits of others. I am even so far gone of late in this way of thinking, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it you on my word, that since this revolt from metaphysical ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the direction of the lake; and after him they thundered, straining every sinew in the desperate chase. It was a wild and extraordinary sight, and partook of the fantastical character of a dream. ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of the man who had killed Professor McMurray; yet you proceed to build up a fantastical case ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... me, a Person so much above me in Title and Birth, makes me think it my Duty to conceal no part of my Heart to you,—Know then this Isabella, Daughter to old Francisco, and your Cuckold that shall be I hope, is, though fair, most ridiculously proud, vain and fantastical; as all of her Birth and Education, grown ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... not much heavier in appearance than so many huge sponges. A priest, however tall or stout, must be lost in the midst of all these queer gimcracks; in order to be consistent, they ought to dress him up, too, in some odd fantastical suit. I can fancy the Cure of Meudon preaching out of such a place, or the Rev. Sydney Smith, or that famous clergyman of the time of the League, who brought all Paris to laugh and ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and smiled. "Young enthusiasts like yourself are great at forming theories which well-seasoned men like myself must regard as fantastical. However," he went on, "there is no doubt that Miss Page was a witness to, even if she has not profited by, the murder we have been considering. But, with this palpable proof of the Zabels' direct connection with the affair, I would not ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... honesty and good sense. So it was with Johnson himself. Behind all his learning lay something which no learned language could conceal. "On s'attend a voir un auteur et on trouve un homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical, namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities, indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody could ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... subtle, crafty, and unlawful games and plays, and some of them feigning themselves to have knowledge in physick, physnamye, and palmistry, or other crafty science, whereby they bear the people in hand that they can tell their destinies, dreams, and fortunes, and such other like fantastical imaginations, to the great deceit of the king's subjects, shall, upon examination had before two justices of the peace, if by provable witness they be found guilty of such deceits, be punished by whipping at two days together, after the manner before rehearsed. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... down the path, and stood under it in the shadow, listening to the whisper and rustle of its multitudinous leaves. It is curious the unearthly glamour which moonlight seems to throw over everything, and though Madge knew every flower, tree, and shrub in the garden, yet they all looked weird and fantastical in the cold, white light. She went up to the fountain, and seating herself on the edge, amused herself by dipping her hand into the chilly water, and letting it fall, like silver rain, back into the basin. Then she heard the iron gate open and shut with a clash, and springing to her ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... break through the horizontal lines; yet the general impression at a distance and at first sight, is essentially different from that of any of the towns of the middle ages. The outlines are far from being so sharp, so angular, so irregular, so fantastical; a certain softness, a peculiar repose, reigns in those broader, terrace-like rising masses. Only in the creations of Claude Lorraine or Poussin could we expect to find a spot to compare with the prevailing character of this picture, especially ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... irresistible force he brings himself to the view that the Hegelian idea of the existence of the absolute idea before the world, the pre-existence of the logical categories before the universe came into being, is nothing else than the fantastical survival of the belief in the existence of an extra-mundane creator; that the material, sensible, actual world, to which we ourselves belong, is the only reality, and that our consciousness and thought, ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... of the little birds brains, phenicopter's tongues, &c. and of the actor who regaled his guests with nightingale-pie, with just detestation of such curiosity and expence: but thrushes, larks, and blackbirds, are so very frequent between Turin and Novi, I think they might serve to feed all the fantastical appetites to which Vitellius himself ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... lady," answered Rose, "my father discouraged my listening to such discourses. I might see evil spirits enough, he said, without my imagination being taught to form, such as were fantastical. The word Bahr-geist, I have heard used by Gillian and other Saxons; but to me it only conveys some idea of indefinite terror, of which I never ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... chabi, joovel, gairo, rakle, raklia, pen penya, or the plural of the masculine gender dada, chavi, and the feminine gender deia, chavo; but, being a matter of fact kind of man—out of the region of romance, fantastical notions, enrapturing imagery, nicely coloured imagination, clever lying and cleverer deception, beautiful green fields, clear running rivulets, the singing of the wood songster, bullfinch, and wren, in the midst of woodbine, sweetbriar, and roses—with ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... conjured up in a jumbled picture the devotion, the fury, the zeal, the terror of Antonio-Pericles—a mixture of demoniacal energy and ludicrous trepidation. She imagined his long figure, fantastical as a shadow, off at huge strides, and back, with eyes sliding swiftly to the temples, and his odd serpent's head raised to peer across the plains and occasionally to exclaim to the reasonable heavens in anger at men and loathing of her. She laughed ungovernably. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... clue to guide them out of the labyrinth into which he had led them. He understood, in its perfection, the great art of throwing the onus probandi on his adversary; and so could maintain almost any opinion, however absurd or fantastical, with fearless impunity. I have heard a sensible and well-informed man say, that he never was in company with Mr. Tooke without being delighted and surprised, or without feeling the conversation of every other person to be flat ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... vast deal of beautiful poetry pass into oblivion, in spite of our feeble efforts to recall or retain it in remembrance. The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber:—and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,—and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,—and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to humour the fantastical turn of his ideas; "thou knowest if he sell that grave to another, he shall escape, and the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... flattered, as you will easily believe, by the fisherman's magnanimous intentions towards him; but like the finished seducer that he was, he appeared enchanted at them. Recollecting his character as a fantastical student and an out-at-elbows poet, he fell upon his knees and shouted a thanksgiving to the planet Venus; then, addressing the young girl, he added, in a calmer voice, that he was going to write immediately to his own father, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... are bits of delicate landscape, with here and there a group of figures dancing or picnicking in the shadow of tall trees or under fantastical porticos. The furniture of the room is no less marvellous than its hangings. One turns from a harpsichord of vernis-martin to the clock, a relic from Louis XIV.’s bedroom in Versailles; on to the bric-à -brac ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... loveliness, Who chose from God one virgin gift above All gifts, and fleeth from the lips of love? Ah, deck not out thine own heart's evil springs By making spirits of heaven as brutish things And cruel. The wise may hear thee, and guess all! And Cypris must take ship-fantastical! Sail with my son and enter at the gate To seek thee! Had she willed it, she had sate At peace in heaven, and wafted thee, and all Amyclae with thee, under Ilion's wall. My son was passing beautiful, beyond His peers; and thine own heart, that saw ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... have a chapter of the wisdom of Paragot before bed?" I said, and, going to our small, carefully selected knapsack library, I found the gay-hearted fantastical book we had promised to read together on our wayfaring; and so the day drew to ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... a pompous, fantastical Spaniard, a military braggart in a state of peace, as Parolles (3 syl.) was in war. Boastful but poor; a coiner of words, but very ignorant; solemnly grave, but ridiculously awkward; majestical in gait, but of very low propensities.—Shakespeare, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... something of a quandary. In an ordinary way, finding a story with this title, in which moreover the chief characters are spoken of as Princess and Principal Boy, and the narrative is broken every now and then by fantastical little dialogues with Fairies, I should have said at once that here was a clever young writer whom a natural admiration for the work of Mr. DION CLAYON CALTHROP had betrayed into the sincerest form of flattery. But Mr. (or perhaps Miss) G. B. STERN has disarmed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... foaming water, and a strange-looking hill beyond it, below which, with a wood on either side, stood a white farm-house—sending from a tall chimney a thin misty reek up to the sky. I crossed the bridge, which, however diabolically fantastical it looked at a distance, seemed when one was upon it, capable of bearing any weight, and soon found myself by the farm-house past which the way led. An aged woman sat on ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... floating in the thin air. Our earth hung over his head like a great dark red ball. Presently he discovered a number of beings, which might certainly be called men, but were very different to ourselves. A more fantastical imagination than Herschel's must have discovered these. Had they been placed in groups, and painted, it might have been said, "What beautiful foliage!" They had also a language of their own. No one could have expected the soul of the watchman to understand it, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... this—for I may not be the chronicler in another year—I could not but say he was right. Indeed, my ideas of literature, nourished as they have been in much solitude, and by the reading, if I may say so, mainly of our classical authors, are very high placed, though I hope not fantastical. And, therefore, I would not discourage anyone in expending whatever thought and labour might be in him upon ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... stared her in the face. The dress was so airy, so fantastical, and so extensive, that to get out in her new clothes by the rift which had admitted her in her old ones was an impossibility. She heard the Baron's steps crackling over the ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... considered in the light of a commentator, who avails himself of the best assistances to explane any genuine author. But in many other instances, where the words are either not ancient or not used in their ancient sense, the interpretations are totally unfounded and fantastical; and at the same time the words cannot be altered or amended consistently with any rules of criticism, nor can the interpretations be varied without destroying the sense of the passage. In these cases, I think, there is a just ground for believing, that the words as well as their ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... rabbet began uniformly with the day of the rabbet, the year of the cane with the day of the cane, &c., and never with the days which we have mentioned; but we ought to give more faith to Siguenza, who was certainly better informed in Mexican antiquity. The system of this gentleman is fantastical ...
— Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts • Cyrus Thomas
... Moore introduced Laforgue in company with Rimbaud to the English reading world and Mr. Symons devoted to him one of his sensitive studies in The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Mr. Hale did the same years ago for American readers in a sympathetic article, The Fantastical Jules Laforgue. He also translated with astonishing fidelity to the letter and spirit of the author, his incomparable Lohengrin, Fils de Parsifal. I regret having it no longer in my possession so ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... will not sourly your brows bend At such a fantastical conceit as this, But can be content to hear and see the end, I woll go show the Players what your pleasure is; Which to wait upon you I know be ready ere this. I woll go send them hither into your presence, Desiring that they may have ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... justify the expression I just made use of—which may have seemed to some of you fantastical—that the fire and the candles in the crowded room were breathing the same breath as you were. It is but too true. An average fire in the grate requires, to keep it burning, as much oxygen as several human beings do; each candle or lamp must have ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... a visible emblem of the manner in which their contents were crowded into Cotton Mather's brain. And in the middle of the room stood table, on which, besides printed volumes, were strewn manuscript sermons, historical tracts, and political pamphlets, all written in such a queer, blind, crabbed, fantastical hand, that a writing-master would have gone raving mad at the sight of them. By this table stood Grandfather's chair, which seemed to have contracted an air of deep erudition, as if its cushion were stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and other ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Many people, among them his wife, regretted that, having proved his ability to handle the concrete, he still should devote himself to ideal and unpopular abstractions, such as 'The Witch of Atlas' (1821), a fantastical piece in rime royal, which seems particularly to have provoked Mrs. Shelley. A "lady Witch" lived in a cave on Mount Atlas, and her games in a magic boat, her dances in the upper regions of space, and the pranks which she played among men, are described ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... and hedge-king Of English morrice-dancery for ever! His nine-days' wonder, through the countryside Was hawked by every ballad-monger. Kemp Raged at their shake-rag Muses. None but I Guessed ever for what reason, since he chose His anticks for himself and, in his games, Was more than most May-fools fantastical. I watched his thin face, as he rocked and crooned, Shaking the squirrels' tails around his ears; And, out of all the players I had seen, His face was quickest through its clay to flash The passing mood. Though not a ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... escape without daunger of her life and honour, whereof she declared herselfe to be so carefull. Alas, what blindnes is that, which captiuateth the wittes and spirite of him, that feedeth himselfe of nothing els, but vpon the rage of fantastical despite and vpon the furie of dispaire. Do wee not see, that after Reason giueth place to desired reuenge of wrong thought to be receiued, man dispoyleth himselfe of that, which appertayneth to the kinde of man, to put on the fierce nature of the ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... was a complete coquette, capricious and fantastical. As Mr Alworth was the prettiest man at the place and known to have a good fortune, she soon singled him out as a conquest worthy of her and successfully played off all her arts. By appearing to like him, she enticed ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... undeviating the course of nature may have been from the earliest epochs, it was impossible for the first cultivators of geology to come to such a conclusion, so long as they were under a delusion as to the age of the world, and the date of the first creation of animate beings. However fantastical some theories of the sixteenth century may now appear to us,—however unworthy of men of great talent and sound judgment,—we may rest assured that, if the same misconception now prevailed in regard to the memorials of human transactions, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... these pictures, they could only come to the conclusion that they were strange fantastical conceits, not worthy to be called ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... valued them too highly to incur such risk; they were hidden where he knew no one could possibly steal them away from him. Then the little phial which he carried in the receptacle with his Bible was uncorked and the crimson paint applied with his forefinger to his face. The ornamentation was as fantastical as the imagination of the ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... down the light and stretched himself out. He couldn't sleep in trains and he got deep into a combination of fantastical plans and ideas. When they stopped at stations and the noise of the moving train was gone from the silence of the night, Caesar ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... archbishop to return to Manila. These men went about talking and declaiming to everyone in the community about the great difficulties, both spiritual and temporal, which must follow from [the banishment]; but in reality all these were fantastical, since there would be no further difficulties than those which the governor chose—as there were none when the archbishop was banished the previous time; [141] for one would hardly believe how great is the hatred that most persons feel toward the archbishop ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... showed 'em again that there could be only one end to it—quick death on the sea, or slow death in Philip's prisons. They asked no more than to embrace death for my sake. Many men have prayed to me for life. I've refused 'em, and slept none the worse after; but when my men, my tall, fantastical young men, beseech me on their knees for leave to die for me, it shakes me—ah, it shakes me to the marrow of my old bones.' Her chest sounded like a board as she hit it. 'She showed 'em all. I told ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... sparing goodness, to leave me that proof of attachment to duty and to principle. It may draw around it, over it, or through it, black lines, or red lines, or any lines; it may mark it in any way which either the most prostrate and fantastical spirit of man-worship, or the most ingenious and elaborate study of self-degradation, may devise, if only it will leave it so that those who inherit my blood, or who may hereafter care for my reputation, shall be able to behold it where ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his Irish Sketch-Book, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost" (why "almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of the giant's breath ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of any thing completely and consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person impresses us as an unreality, and as having hardly pith enough to cast a shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all this resulted in a wild, extravagant, and fantastical impression, as if his life and being were akin to the smoke that curled upward from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... only when philosophy, which is essentially progress, outgrew its first acquisitions, that religion became a thing apart, cherishing as unalterable dogmas the notions which philosophy had abandoned. Separated from philosophy, it became arrogant and fantastical, professing to have already attained what its more authentic representative was ever pursuing in vain; and discovering, through its initiations and Mysteries, all that to its contracted view seemed wanting ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... for counsel, but merely for state. These assumed such an appearance of mingled displeasure and confusion as might best suit with the perplexity of Alexius, while the wily features of the Norman-Italian, Bohemond of Tarentum, who was also present, had a singular mixture of fantastical glee and derision. It is the misfortune of the weaker on such occasions, or at least the more timid, to be obliged to take the petty part of winking hard, as if not able to see what they ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... which it did not settle. This image, or faint motion, we persuade ourselves, could, at that time, have been compleated into the thing itself; because, should that be denied, we find, upon a second trial, that, at present, it can. We consider not, that the fantastical desire of shewing liberty, is here the motive of our actions. And it seems certain, that, however we may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves, a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even where he cannot, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... said Mr. Hardie, with wonderful dignity, all things considered. "Instead of brooding on your one fantastical idea, and shutting out all rational evidence to the contrary, take the trouble to look through my books: and they will reveal to you a fortune, not of fourteen thousand, but of eighty thousand pounds, honourably sacrificed in the vain struggle to fulfil my engagements: who, do you think, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... fantastical," she said, "or she should wed with Jack's old friend Mr Monke, that would fain have her. My Lady my mother desireth the same much. It should ease her vastly as matter of money. This very winter doth she sell two parcels of the Frithelstoke lands, for to raise money; and at after, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... a strange fantastical account of the original of Dr. Johnson's belief in our most holy religion. 'At the age of ten years his mind was disturbed by scruples of infidelity, which preyed upon his spirits, and made him very uneasy, the more so, as he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... say for itself as the other, and no more. We may leave the prophets to fight it out between them while we attend to our business, and examine facts and probabilities as they are, without the aid of capriciously adopted precedents and fantastical analogies. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... adore, in the forms of beasts, birds, and insects, the good and evil Genii; who, under a principal, but indolent god, govern the universe. In their idolatry they call to mind the ancient paganism of the West. You observe the fantastical dress of the Chamans; who, under a robe of leather, hung round with bells and rattles, idols of iron, claws of birds, skins of snakes and heads of owls, invoke, with frantic cries and factitious convulsions, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... who is hump-backed, big-bellied, crook legged, and as ugly as a hobgoblin; and after having commanded the vizier to marry his daughter to this ghastly slave, he caused the contract to be made and signed by witnesses in his own presence. The preparations for this fantastical wedding are all ready, and this very moment all the slaves belonging to the lords of the court of Egypt are waiting at the door of a bath, each with a flambeau in his hand, for the crook-back groom, who is bathing, to go ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... fifty-six, when objects of ambition continue to operate with full force on the mind, and are pursued with the greatest ardor, to take a resolution so singular and unexpected. But, while many authors have imputed it to motives so frivolous and fantastical as can hardly be supposed to influence any reasonable mind; while others have imagined it to be the result of some profound scheme of policy, historians more intelligent and better informed neither ascribe it to caprice, nor search for mysterious secrets ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... in regard to the institution of slavery or the black race, and this is the whole of it: anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastical arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution in the States where it exists. I believe ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... sins; the devil of vice-royal rule, with its life-draining monopolies and gross incapacity for government; the devil of an insolent soldiery, quartered on the people, clamorous for pay, outrageous in their lusts and violences; the devil of fantastical taxation, levying tolls upon the bare necessities of life, and drying up the founts of national well-being at their sources; the devil of petty-princedom, wallowing in sloth and cruelty upon a pinchbeck throne; the devil of effeminate hidalgoism, ruinous in expenditure, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... dance out the answer. For hear me, Hero; wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance, and with his bad legs falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster till he sink into ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... after this to the Abbey, where he shut himself up to brood over his disgraces; grew gloomy, morose, and fantastical, and indulged in fits of passion and caprice, that made him the theme of rural wonder and scandal. No tale was too wild or too monstrous for vulgar belief. Like his successor the poet, he was accused of all kinds of vagaries ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... on her way; hearing all the time Harald's footsteps a little behind her, and yet not venturing to turn round to look at him. As by chance she cast her eyes to heaven, she perceived a little white cloud, which took the fantastical shape of a dragon, and which, with the speed of an arrow, came hastening over the valley. Immediately afterwards was heard a loud noise, which turned Susanna's glance to the heights, where she saw, as it were, a pillar of smoke whirlingly ascend upwards. ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... our partial, if not entire concurrence, in the general criticism on the central front, and of the two wings. The first impression is far from that produced by unity, grandeur, or elegance; there is a fantastical assemblage of turrets, attics, and chimneys, and a poverty or disproportion, especially in "the temple-like forms" which complete the ends towards the park. The dome, too, has been sarcastically compared with a "Brobdignagian egg." It strictly belongs to the back part of the palace, and had it been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... then the body, but in other kind of Flies they are of very differing proportions to the body. These films, in many Flies, were so thin, that, like several other plated bodies (mention'd in the ninth Observation) they afforded all varieties of fantastical or transient colours (the reason of which I have here endeavoured to explain) they seem'd to receive their nourishment from the stalks or wires, which seem'd to be hollow, and neer the upper part of the wing LL several of them seem'd jointed, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... to eat till four of his priests have offered his meat in this manner to the idol; lifting their hands above their heads with many fantastical gesticulations and murmuring voices, they present the meat to the idol, and after many foolish ceremonies bring back the meat to the king. The meat is offered in a wooden tray, after which it is laid on the broad leaves of a certain tree. The meat of the king consists of rice and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... breaking rapidly. As it gave way, the moonlight poured into the breaches that the wind made; the vast black-and-silver spectacle, the Falls, the gorge, the town opposite, the bridge, the clouds, began to appear in fragments, grandiose and fantastical. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... often experienced it myself, their poetic minds did not create what had never existed. Their old Indian traditions attributed to that cavern an immense extent. There, they would say, are to be seen fairy palaces, with which nothing could be compared, and which were the residences of fantastical beings. Determined, then, on seeing with our own eyes all these wonders, we set out for San-Mateo, taking with us an Indian, having with him a crowbar and a couple of pickaxes, to dig us out a way, should we have the chance of prolonging our subterraneous walk beyond the limits which ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... glitter, he will, it is true, engage the attention for a time, but build up and confirm nothing in the understanding. His playfulness is, like the gravity of the other, thoroughly unpoetical. To string together at will fantastical images, is not to travel into the realm of the ideal; and the imitative reproduction of the actual cannot be called the representation of nature. Both requisites stand so little in contradiction to each other that they are rather one and the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... value in the line of Science Fiction. However, I did not like "The Corpse on the Grating." It did not have an inkling of scientific background. I really am surprised it was published in a Science Fiction magazine. Aside from the fact that the idea of the story was merely a fantastical surmise I was very favorably impressed with the author's style and his use of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... beside a diminutive Shepherdess of the Alps, a little woman of forty, coquettish as a Zerlina. A footman announced that 'Mme. la Baronne's carriage stops the way,' and Godefroid forthwith saw his beautiful maiden out of a German song draw her fantastical mother into the cloakroom, whither Malvina followed them; and (boy that he was) he must needs go to discover into what pot of preserves the infant Joby had fallen, and had the pleasure of watching Isaure and Malvina coaxing that sparkling ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... friends were stupefied. "What, in Heaven's name, is this?" wrote Jules Neraud, the Malgache. "Where have you been in search of this? Why have you written such a book? Where has it sprung from, and what is it for? . . . This woman is a fantastical creature. She is not at all like you. You are lively and can dance a jig; you can appreciate butterflies and you do not despise puns. You sew and can ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... answer are necessary to this curious argument, which is nothing less than an effort to define the mental by the unreal, and to suppose that an appearance cannot be physical. No doubt, we say, every image, fantastical as it may seem as signification, is real in a certain sense, since it is the perception of a physical impression; but this physical nature of images does not prevent our making a distinction between true and false images. To take an analogous example: we are given a sheet of proofs to correct, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... significance to which I have referred lies. It is romantic in subject and the source of its inspiration. This source is the same to which the creators of the romantic school of literature went for its subjects—the fantastical stories of chivalry and knighthood, of which the principal elements were the marvellous and supernatural. The literary romanticists did a great deal to encourage patriotism among the Germans in the beginning ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... fantastical lady upon earth, suspecting that I held a secret correspondence with the Queen, could not forbear murmuring and threatening what she would do. She said I had declared to her a thousand times that I could not imagine how it was possible for anybody to be in love ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... personal attachment: but he was neither a poet nor a judge of poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of poetry as it falls within the limits and rules of prose, but not as it is poetry. Least of all was he qualified to be a judge of Shakespeare, who 'alone is high fantastical'. Let those who have a prejudice against Johnson read Boswell's Life of him: as those whom he has prejudiced against Shakespeare should read his Irene. We do not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Sir, come up of late," answers Ned: "whereby, when a gentlewoman and a gentleman be in treaty of love,—or without the same, being but friends—they do agree to call each other by certain dainty and fantastical names: as the one shall be Perfection, and the other Hardihood: or, the one Sweetness, and the other Fortitude: and the like. I prayed Wat to show me how it were, or else had I wist no more than a baker ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... experience was bounded by the suburbs of Barlingford, be otherwise than delighted by the glare and glitter of foreign cities? Georgy was childishly enraptured with everything she saw, from the sham diamonds and rubies of the Palais Royal, to the fantastical ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... he cried excitedly, "that stout young gentleman with the black face and eyebrows, and the blacker heart, I may say,—the one dressed in the fantastical costume called by a French name,—is Mr. Charles Fox. He has been sent by the devil himself, I believe, to ruin this country. 'Ods, sir, that devil Lord Holland begot him. He is but one and twenty, but his detestable arts have saved North's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Elijah, he gave him no worldly and fantastical compliment, nor did he glory in his promotion by Ahab the king of Israel, but gravely, and after a gracious manner, said, "I thy servant fear the Lord from my youth." Also when the mariners inquired of Jonah, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Douglas Jerrold whose comedy of manners was acted at the Haymarket in the midsummer of 1834. There is a charm about these Beaux, these odd blossoms of last century civilisation, the Brummells and the Nashes and the Fieldings, so "high fantastical" in their bearing, such living examples of the eternal verities contained in the clothes' philosophy of Herr Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh of Weissnichtwo. Their wigs were more important than their wit; the pattern of their waistcoats more important ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... judged it altogether too fantastical. The most interesting of his opponents was a certain Antonio Roselli, a very judiciously-minded civil lawyer, who goes very thoroughly into the point at issue. He gives Innocent's views, and quotes what authority ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... logicians for they have never yet fallen upon the barbarous niceties that our youth are forced to learn in those trifling logical schools that are among us. They are so far from minding chimeras and fantastical images made in the mind that none of them could comprehend what we meant when we talked to them of a man in the abstract as common to all men in particular (so that though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our fingers, yet none of them could perceive ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... perception, to render Tasso's actual belief in such visions not at all surprising. It is not uncommon for the sanest people of delicate organisation to see faces before them while going to sleep, sometimes in fantastical succession. A stronger exercise of this disposition in temperaments more delicate will enlarge the face to figure; and there can be no question that an imagination so heated as Tasso's, so full of the speculations of the later Platonists, and accompanied by a state of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... everywhere they lighted on shapes inexplicable, whose forms to the first questioning thought suggested instruments of torture; but cruel as some of them looked, they were almost too strange, contorted, fantastical for such. Still, the wood-cuts in a certain book she had been familiar with in childhood, commonly called Fox's Book of Martyrs, kept haunting her mind's eye—and were they not Papists into whose hands she had fallen? she said to ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... Rather shall we feel that we have accomplished much if we have shown that the lad had no slight justification for the budding seeds of religious doubt within his mind, and for concluding that of the constitution of God men know nothing, despite their fantastical theories and their bold affirmations, as if He were a man in their immediate neighborhood, with whom they were on the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... silver tones rose upon the air; and this time I recognized that the song was in the Greek language. I remained looking intently in that direction, until the form faded into a mere shadow; and then, as darkness increased, seemed to multiply before my aching eyes, and assume all sorts of fantastical shapes. Every now and then, a couplet, or a stanza, came sweeping up. It was evident the lady, whoever she might be, was not singing merely to amuse the child. The notes were sometimes lively, but, in general, sad and plaintive. I listened long after the last quaver had died away; and was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... chamber by himself,) where he entered upon, debated, and resolved all the states' affairs of Christendom; and he verily believed that he was the wisest man of them all; and so he well might be, of the company." The fantastical imagination of this Triumpho furnishes a good illustration of the reality of companionship which one who possesses Plutarch may have in his own chamber with the greatest and most interesting men of ancient times. If he be worthy, he may ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... which they were brought into requisition. Evelyn alludes to the change in his Diary, but he puts the date down as the 21st instead of the 14th. "Instead of the antient, grave and solemn wind musiq accompanying the organ, was introduc'd a concert of 24 violins between every pause after the French fantastical light way, better suiting a tavern or playhouse than a church. This was the first time of change, and now we no more heard the cornet which gave life to the organ, that instrument quite left off in which the English were so skilful." A list of the twenty-four fiddlers in 1674, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to place some of the latest fiction before our chatty alien, but pays dearly for his rash act. In these words did the Italian let him have it:—"Ai du not laich nov-els et ol, bico-S e nov-el is bat e fichtiscios tel stof-T ov so menE fantastical dids end nonsensical worDs, huicc opset maind end haRt. An-heppe tho-S an-uerE jongh persons, hu spend theaR pre-scios taim in ridin nov-els! The du not no thet nov-ellists, gennerallE spichin, aR thi laitest end thi most huim-sical raittaRs, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... to an ignorant bailiff, and sought to maintain an absentee guardianship over the affairs of serfs whom I have never met, and of whose capabilities and characters I am yet ignorant! To think that I should have deemed true estate-management inferior to a documentary, fantastical management of provinces which lie a thousand versts away, and which my foot has never trod, and where I could never have effected aught but blunders ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... him. You will meet him, I doubt not, like a man of sense,' added Lord Monmouth, looking at Coningsby with a glance such as he had never before encountered, 'who is not prepared to sacrifice all the objects of life for the pursuit of some fantastical puerilities.' ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... their overhanging edges. Eolides of extraordinary beauty haunt the same spots. The great Eolis papillosa, of a delicate French grey; Eolis pellucida (?) (Plate X. fig. 4), in which each papilla on the back is beautifully coloured with a streak of pink, and tipped with iron blue; and a most fantastical yellow little creature, so covered with plumes and tentacles that the body is invisible, which I believe to be the Idalia aspersa ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... your flocks, those fantastical themes, Perhaps may amuse, yet they never can move: Arcadia displays but a region of dreams; What are visions like these to the first ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... these sainted personages. They had gained, by visiting the capitals of all Europe, only a due acquaintance with the follies of each; and the only difference that could be observed in their conduct on their return was, that their affectation was rather more fantastical, and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the Tempest's most fanciful scene.[3] Granger, who had not much time to study the manners of the age whose personages he was so well acquainted with, in a note on Milton's Masque, said that "these compositions were trifling and perplexed allegories, the persons of which are fantastical to the last degree. Ben Jonson, in his 'Masque of Christmas,' has introduced 'Minced Pie,' and 'Baby Cake,' who act their parts in the drama.[4] But the most wretched performances of this kind could please by the help of music, machinery, and dancing." Granger blunders, describing by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Marquis: I am not mistress of the house. I do not tell you," continued she, "that he is a man whose acquaintance any one would very impatiently covet for his conversation: on the contrary, I agree that his humour is fantastical, and his manners not of the pleasing cast; but there is nothing so savage and inhuman, which a little care, attention, and complaisance may not tame into docility. I must repeat to you some verses ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... strong arm, and who stickle for a closely buttoned jacket, a stiff stock, and the due allowance of pipe-clay, would have been somewhat scandalised, could they have beheld the equipment of Wellington's army in the Peninsula. Mr Grattan gives a comical account of the various fantastical fashions and conceits prevalent amongst the officers. "Provided," he says, "we brought our men into the field well-appointed, and with sixty rounds of good ammunition each, he (the Duke) never looked to see whether their trousers were black, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... the tenor of a humorous, satirical old romance, in which the writer implores the justice of Apollo on the heads of the swarm of traitor poets, who have deserted the ancient themes of song, the Cids, the Laras, the Gonzalez, to celebrate the Ganzuls and Abderrahmans and the fantastical ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... or sweeping the circle of the horizon, now held straight, now curved like a hook. At times the company, acting in concert, would shift their base of support from the right hand to the left hand, or vice versa. The whole action, though fantastical, was conducted with modesty. There was no instrumental accompaniment; but while performing the gymnastics above described the actors chanted the words of a mele to some Old World tune, the melody and rhythm of which ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... like it; she always talks of myself or herself, and I am not (except in soliloquy, as now,) much enamoured of either subject—especially one's works. What the devil shall I say about 'De l'Allemagne?' I like it prodigiously; but unless I can twist my admiration into some fantastical expression, she won't believe me; and I know, by experience, I shall be overwhelmed with fine things about rhyme, &c. &c. The lover, Mr. * *, was there to-night, and C * * said 'it was the only proof he had seen of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... his story on this occasion with a most fantastical and exaggerated account of the celebrated Santissima Casa of Loretto, which he imagined was still endowed with all the treasures it possessed anterior to its losses during the pontificate of Pius VI. He asserted that it was the richest tabernacle in Europe, and that the adornments of the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... which did not reach her ears, and tied under her chin, her venerable white hairs in full view. The dress of old women and young girls in this country is detestable, to speak in the French style; the latter at the age of seven being clothed exactly like a woman of twenty, and the former have such a fantastical appearance that I cannot endure it. The old lady has all the vivacity of a young one. She is the most learned woman in France; her house is the resort of all men of literature, with whom she converses upon ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... allow, by any means, that this should be called Pride, {130c} but rather neatness, handsomness, comeliness, cleanliness, &c. neither would he allow that following of fashions was any thing else, but because he would not be proud, singular, and esteemed fantastical by his neighbours. ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... the strange working of dull melancholy! Whose drossy thoughts, drying the feeble brain, Corrupts the sense, deludes the intellect, And in the soul's fair table falsely graves Whole squadrons of fantastical chimeras And thousand vain imaginations, Making some think their heads as big as horses, Some that th'are dead[188], some that th'are turn'd to wolves[189], As now it makes him think himself all glass. Tactus, dissuade thyself; ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... was Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. "The thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle," as Elia describes her. She was the youngest daughter of Sir Charles Lucas, and was born at Colchester towards the end of the reign of James I. Her mother appears to have been remarkably careful of her education in all such lighter ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... Belding with dull insistency that whatever attraction he had hoped to have for the girl had been merged in the fact that, for the present at any rate, he was nothing more than a means of satisfying her sudden and, to him, fantastical interest in the man under whose dominant bidding the color of so many lives ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... They knew by a hundred hints that their non-miraculous world was no longer watertight; that floods were coming in from somewhere in which they were already out of their depth, and down among very fantastical deep-sea fishes. They could hardly feel certain even about the fish that swallowed Jonah, when they had no test except the very true one that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it. Logically they would find it quite as hard ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... entirely agree with you, as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceits of others. I am even so far gone of late in this way of thinking, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it you on my word; since this revolt from metaphysical notions ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley |
