"Stupendous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though something was clutching at the boy's throat, making his breath come hot and fast; and he glanced back to see where the gunboat was, but looked in vain, for a side of the valley rose like a towering wall between, and on glancing in the other direction there was another stupendous wall running up to mountain height, ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... enough. I did not sleep an hour that night; and the next morning we were early at the task of searching for the treasure. And a stupendous undertaking it proved to be. All day we labored at one tree. The roots were massive and wide-spread, and the work of cutting and removing them required the utmost exertion. Finally, just before sunset, we completed the task, and began to dig ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... irresistible attraction which had drawn him on, till he felt he must die if he could not marry the girl with the fair hair, looped so neatly back, the fair arms emerging from a skin-tight bodice, the fair form decorously shielded by a cage of really stupendous circumference. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hopeless from a military standpoint, but Grant would not abandon the task. Finding traces of an abandoned canal, he attempted to complete it in the hope of changing the course of the river, or at least of diverting some of the water from the overflowed land, but the effort was a stupendous failure almost from the start. Then he ordered the levees of the Mississippi protecting two great lakes to be cut, with the idea of flooding the adjacent streams and providing a waterway for his ships. This gigantic enterprise was actually put into operation, the ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... is tottering. A few more days like that of the immediate past, and the Confederacy will have a name and a place only in history. And what a history it will be! A most stupendous crime. A conspiracy unparalleled, crushed out by a free people, and the best government of all times saved to the world! How it sends one's blood through his veins to think of it! Who would not live in such an age as this? Before this reaches you, the telegraph, I hope, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... the right, a side path, called the Via Antonina, leads up to the stupendous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, a mile in circumference, and covering a space of 2,625,000 square yards. The walls, arches, and domes of massive brickwork hanging up in the sky,—the fragments of sculpture and splendid ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of the universe, there does not need to be any stupendous breaking in of God into his own world after any miraculous fashion. We do not need an infallible guide in religion any more than anywhere else, unless we are in danger of eternal loss because of an intellectual mistake. We do not need any stupendous ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... higher animals, is inexplicable on any of the principles that regulate our philosophy, and can only be referred to the contrivance and disposition of infinite wisdom: yet the vehicle in which these stupendous operations are conducted owns a material basis: even the confused mass that composes the earth we tread on possesses certain intrinsic properties. Every atom is subjected to definite regulation, and without exaggeration, ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... Siam is an inclined plane falling off to the sea, beginning from the Khoa Don Reke, or highlands of Korat, which constitutes the first platform of the terraces that gradually ascend to the mountain chain of Laos, and thence to the stupendous Himalayas. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the motor craft, so far out from port, lurking with silent engine in the path of the steamship, could have but one significance. It represented one of the carefully thought-out details in a stupendous, far-reaching plot. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... it had passed. It was the most ruinous blunder of the Confederate Government during the war. If such a law was necessary, it showed that the Confederacy had fallen to pieces. If it was not necessary, its enactment was a stupendous piece of folly; and such it turned out to be. Under the last call for troops for Confederate service, Governor Brown had no difficulty in furnishing eighteen regiments. He could have gone on furnish ing troops as long as there was any fighting material left in the State; but as soon as the Conscript ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... prophesying. I was quite a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we should see men flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many years to come it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring and skill. We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeply impressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridge mathematician produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitch fearfully, that as it flew on its pitching must increase until up went its nose, down went ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... circumstances attendant upon the persecution of Jonah Brown, Robert Randal, Hugh Christopher Thompson, and a round score of minor victims, would be to extend this work to an interminable length. The materials for a work written on such a plan are abundant, as they include all the facts arising out of the stupendous iniquity sought to be perpetrated under the guise of the Alien Bill. The particulars connected with the attempt to force this infamous measure upon the people of Upper Canada cannot be inquired into in these ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Even at this present day when the marvellous has become commonplace, that property of right-angled triangles... already discussed... comes to the mind as a remarkable and notable fact: it must have seemed a stupendous marvel to its discoverer, to whom, it appears, the regular alternation of the odd and even numbers, a fact so obvious to us that we are inclined to attach no importance to it, seemed, itself, to be something wonderful. Here in Geometry and Arithmetic, ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... in determining a common procedure. There is probably no subject upon which either father or mother finds it so hard to yield to the other's way as upon this. Each feels, and rightly, that the material to be trained is so precious, and that failure, if it comes, will be so stupendous, that neither dares do what seems wrong to his own mind. Nothing but common knowledge and a predetermined policy can solve this problem so near to the root of success ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... advanced. An eye-witness truly observes, that 'nothing could have been more awful than this midnight contest. The desperate charges of the enemy were succeeded by a dead silence, interrupted only by the groans of the dying, and the dull sounds of the stupendous Falls of Niagara, while the adverse lines were now and then dimly discerned through the moonlight, by the dismal gleam of their arms. These anxious pauses were succeeded by a blaze of musketry along the lines, and by a repetition of the most desperate charges from the enemy, which the British received ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... vote—O fair estate! Of the great tree electorate A living leaf, of this great sea A motive wave of empire I, On this stupendous wheel—a fly. O maiden vote, how pure must be The party that is worthy thee! And thereupon my mind began That perfect government to plan, The ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... garret, where I was waited on by the widow of a court plate-washer, who at every meal served up the familiar thin Saxon coffee as almost my sole nourishment. In this attic I did little else but write verses. Here, too, I formed the first outlines of that stupendous tragedy which afterwards filled my family with such consternation. The irregular habits I acquired through this premature domestic independence induced my anxious mother to consent very readily to my removal to Leipzig, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Far as the bound Of sight was one stupendous round Of flat and sluggish crawling water! As, from a slowly drowning rise, She looked abroad with startled eyes, The engineer's intrepid daughter. Far as her straining eyes could see, The seething, swoolen Tombigbee Outspread his ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... this simple question on Mr. Burrowes was stupendous. He dropped away from Fillmore's coat-button like an exhausted bivalve, and his small mouth opened feebly. It was as if a child had suddenly propounded to an eminent mathematician some abstruse problem in the higher algebra. Females who took an interest in boxing ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... the cataract almost joined at the top, yet separated by an abyss of immense depth, presenting that appearance which so often astonishes and appals travellers who frequent the Grampian Mountains, and indicates that these stupendous chasms were not the silent work of time, but the sudden effect of some violent convulsion of the earth. Down one of these rugged and almost perpendicular descents, the dog began, without hesitation, to make his way, and at last disappeared ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... and death of Lazarus draws Jesus back to a suburb of Jerusalem, Bethany. Then the stupendous incident of the raising of Lazarus leads to the official decision to put Jesus to death.[40] And a connecting link of verses tells of Jesus' cautious withdrawal, of the inquiring crowds coming to the approaching Passover, and of the public notice given that Jesus ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... epical poem the unity of ocean? Does it consist of separate seas, or is it really one, as the wastes which wash from Arctic to Antarctic, through zones temperate and equatorial, are yet one and indivisible? If it have not this unity it is still a stupendous accomplishment, but it is not a work of art. And though art is but the handmaiden of genius, what student of Comparative Literature will deny that nothing has survived the ruining breath of Time—not any intellectual greatness nor any spiritual beauty, that is not clad in perfection, be ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... King Solomon's Temple there was not heard the sound of axe, hammer or any tool of iron. The question naturally arises, How could so stupendous an edifice be erected without the aid of those implements? The stones were hewn, squared and numbered in the quarries where they were raised; the timbers were felled and prepared in the forests of Lebanon, conveyed in floats ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... valleys. It is stated that every Indian requires fifty thousand acres to live upon. If this be true this country in which we find these vast mounds could not have provided food enough for the vast number of laborers required for such stupendous works. It is estimated that the white men found only two or three thousand Indians in the whole ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... tell "old Fritz" that such places existed. Like most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening optimism. He had always got the enemy "nearly beat," and he arranged attacks during the Somme fighting with the jovial sense of striking another blow which would lead this time to stupendous results. In the early days, in command of the 7th Division, he had done well, and he was a gallant soldier, with initiative and courage of decision and a quick intelligence in open warfare. His trouble on the Somme ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the River Ennerie, and were issuing from between its narrow ridge of hills, when Wallace, pointing to a stupendous rock which rose in solitary magnificence in the midst of a vast plain, exclaimed, "There is Dumbarton Castle!-that citadel holds the fetters of Scotland; and if we break them there, every minor link ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... whom, to his astonishment, he found Barto Rizzo. She had picked him up, weak from a paroxysm, on the high-road to Milan. "And she tamed the brute," said Carlo, in admiration of her ability; "she saw that he was plot-mad, and she set him at work on a stupendous plot; agents running nowhere, and scribblings concentring in her work-basket. You smile at me, as if I were a similar patient, signora. But I am my own agent. I have personally seen all my men in Turin and elsewhere. Violetta has not one grain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of this intellectual and artistic movement was stupendous. While the Recollets and Capuchins, Carmelites, Brigittines, Ursulines and Clarisses worked among the poor, the Jesuits succeeded in capturing the upper classes. All the children of the rich bourgeoisie and the nobility attended their schools and colleges, ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... insisting on the distinction, which Spinoza failed to see, between a miracle simply as a wonder for its own sake, and as a means, deriving its use and its value simply from the end which it was to serve. He observes that all the stupendous "marvels of nature do not speak to us in that way in which one miracle does, because they do not tell us that we are not like themselves"; and he remarks on the "perverse determination of Spinoza to look at miracles in that aspect ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... River, just above the great fall, with an iron suspension-bridge. This would shorten the road, they said, by some two or three hundred yards of divergence from the old wooden bridge higher up. They built their bridge, which looked like a spider's web spanning the verge of the stupendous cataract, when seen from the St. Lawrence below. It was opened to the public in April, 1856, but was little used for some days, as the conservative habitans, who had gone the crooked road over the wooden bridge all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... with it the same throat-gripping vertigo as comes from gazing downward from some great height—then a blur of white faces—intolerable shinings of hundreds upon thousands of eyes. Huge, incredibly huge, a colossal amphitheatre of jet, a stupendous semi-circle, held within its mighty arc the ivory platform on which ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... spirit"—clearly not the portrait of a friend. Lord Campbell thought the St. Paul sermon contemptible, and General Stanhope, in the debate, called it nonsensical and incoherent. It seems to me the very reverse, even if we abstract it from its stupendous effect. Sacheverell, no doubt, was a more than usually narrow-minded priest; but in judging of the preacher we must think also of the look and the voice and the gestures, and these probably fully made up, as they so often do, for anything ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... but undaunted, where they led him, Came to the place; and what was set before him, Which without help of eye might be essayed, To heave, pull, draw, or break, he still performed All with incredible, stupendous force, None daring to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... he succeeded in the stupendous task to which he set himself while yet groping in the black night of bondage, with no human power outside of his own indomitable will to help him, his life work attests in language more enduring than "storied urn" or written history. A roll call of the world's great moral heroes would be incomplete ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... by the outward tranquillity which their diabolical hardness of heart enabled them to preserve, they calmed the confusion in a great degree, and then did their utmost to prevent the people from looking upon these stupendous events as testimonies of the innocence of Jesus. The Roman garrison belonging to the fortress of Antonia likewise made great efforts to maintain order; consequently, the disturbance of the festival was not ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... quiescence. The state itself was inimical neither to my safety nor to my sanity. I was conscious of it as a transposition into another register of the scale of life. And, as in this life we move in ignorance and safety only by accepting the hair-balance of stupendous forces, so now I felt that my safety depended on my observation of the conditions that governed that region of ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... The details of this stupendous enterprise are of sufficient interest to justify the introduction here of the "General Statistics of the Works" as reported ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... materialization is a grander and nobler science than we have dreamed of. We have little imagined what a solemn and stupendous thing we have done. The whole secret is perfectly clear to me, now, clear as day. Every man is made up of heredities, long-descended atoms and particles of his ancestors. This present materialization is incomplete. We have only brought it down to perhaps ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sham The rose of red sweet Wil-li-am. To those who on the hills around Beheld the flames from Drury's mound, As from a lofty altar rise, It seemed that nations did conspire To offer to the god of fire Some vast stupendous sacrifice! The summoned firemen woke at call, And hied them to their stations all: Starting from short and broken snooze, Each sought his pond'rous hobnailed shoes, But first his worsted hosen ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... sinks within itself, and gladly relinquishes the herculean task of endeavoring to comprehend, for a single moment, a fractional part of the stupendous whole. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon!"—like other poets, called on the Sun and Moon to stand and look on Joshua's deeds; but he could not anticipate that his words would be hardened into fact by a prosaic interpreter, and appealed to in proof of a stupendous miracle. The commentator could not tell what the Moon had to do with it; yet he has quoted honestly.—This presently led me to observe other marks that the narrative has been made up, at least in part, out of old poetry. Of these the ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... of Broadway, before the windows of Williams & Stevens, gazing with eager interest upon the statuettes and groups of John Rogers, the sculptor. These works appeal to a deep popular sentiment. They are not pretentious displays of gods, goddesses, ideal characters, or stupendous, world-compelling heroes. They are illustrations of American domestic and especially of American military life—not of our great generals or our bold admirals, or the men whose praises fill all the newspapers, but of the common soldier of the Union; not of the common ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene, Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast— Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low In adoration, upward from thy base Slow traveling with dim eyes suffused with tears, Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud, To rise before me—Rise, O ever rise! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... that the author's strongest impression of the Eternal City was one of disillusion. Her hero, a Berrichon artist on his travels, confesses to a feeling of uneasiness and regret rather than of surprise and admiration. The ancient ruins, stupendous in themselves, seemed to her spoilt for effect by their situation in the center of a modern town. "Of the Rome of the past not enough exists to overwhelm me with its majesty; of the Rome of the present not enough to make me forget the first, and much too much ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... important, simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The Empire of Rome is the most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time can be compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying that the nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection of the stream's current. Absolutely, comparing the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... with their servant girl's cousin in the Life Guards, "with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else." Finally, closing the whole of this ingenious epitome of the original narrative, came that grand and wonderfully realistic description of the stupendous storm upon the beach at Yarmouth, upon the extraordinary power of which as a piece of declamation we have already at some length commented. There, in the midst of the dying horrors of that storm—there, on those familiar sands, where Mas'r Davy and Little Em'ly had so ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... as you can. From the saluting battery you may look up the harbour, and see much of what I have described at Plymouth; the scenery is different, but similar arsenals and dockyards, and an equal portion of our stupendous navy are to be found there; and you will see Gosport on the other side of the harbour, and Sallyport close to you; besides a great many other places, which, from the saluting battery, you cannot see. And then there is Southsea Beach to your left. Before you, Spithead, ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of this would have been droll to a listener, the note of the prospectus mingling with the question of his more intimate hope. But it was not droll to Francie; she only thought it, or supposed it, a proof of the way Mr. Flack saw everything on a stupendous scale. "There are ten thousand things to do that haven't been done, and I'm going to do them. The society-news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves—oh THEY can be fixed, you'll see!—from day to day and from hour to hour ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... directions, and the myriads of impulsive forces, there comes but a single combination that will secure the perpetuity of your complex scheme. In vain does the bewildered finite spirit attempt to fathom this mighty depth. In vain does it seek to resolve the stupendous problem. It turns away, and while endued with omnipotent power, exclaims, 'Give to me infinite wisdom, or relieve me from the impossible task!'"-0. M. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... time was elaborated the stupendous system of rites, which are already traditional in the Br[a]hmanas, can never be known. Some of these rites have to do with special ceremonies, such as the royal inauguration, some are stated soma-sacrifices.[2] Opposed to these soma-feasts ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... contraction of such a nebula, under the influence of the enormous mutual gravitation of its particles, carries with it the explanation of both the more general and the more particular features of the present system. So that we may fairly regard this stupendous process as veritable matter of history, while we proceed to study it under some further aspects and to consider what ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... nine o'clock we arrived at the Guildhall Tavern in the celebrated and ancient city of Canterbury. Early in the morning, as soon as we had breakfasted, we visited the superb cathedral. This stupendous pile is one of the most distinguished Gothic structures in the world. It is not only interesting from its imposing style of architecture, but from its numerous historical associations. The first glimpse ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... John Craig, he holds his breath at the stupendous nature of the disclosure, for little as he has dreamed of the fact, he sees before him the ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... early stage, we could but look at each other in silence; which scarce served to relieve the tension of the situation. Indeed, the cloud never really lifted during his stay. In talking it over later, some one put forward the suggestion that he must at some time or other have committed a stupendous crime; but I could not bring myself to believe that the man, though evidently unhappy, was really guilty of anything; and I caught him once or twice looking at us with evident kindliness, though seeing himself observed, he blushed and turned ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... balls of green fire were gone. In a moment they appeared again, a little farther away. Then a second time they were gone, and a third time they flashed back at him—so distant they appeared like needle-points in the darkness. Something stupendous rose up in Peter. It was the soul of his Airedale father, telling him the other thing was running away! And in the joy of triumph Peter let out a yelp. In that night-infested place, alive with hiding things, the yelp set loose weird rustlings in the tangled treetops, strange murmurings ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the knowledge I have wrung from pain: We, yea, all lovers, are not one, but twain, Each by strange wisps to strange abysses drawn; But through the black immensity of night Love's little lantern, like a glowworm's, bright, May lead our steps to some stupendous dawn. ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... think so, I must tell you in the first place that we are not responsible for having named these places; and in the second, that the names are really appropriate. The stupendous height and dark iron-gray hue of the rocks that overshadow and darken the valley and the river, and also the situation of the village at the entrance of the dark valley, justify these names. And even if they did not, still we are not so irreverent as to interfere with the arrangements ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... In less time than it takes to tell the pine began to burn and flame like a candle blown by the wind. Pinocchio, seeing that the flames were mounting higher every instant, and not wishing to end his life like a roasted pigeon, made a stupendous leap from the top of the tree and started afresh across the fields and vineyards. The assassins followed him, and kept behind him without ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... The first glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr Pontifex into a conventional ecstasy. "My feelings I cannot express. I gasped, yet hardly dared to breathe, as I viewed for the first time the monarch of the mountains. I seemed to fancy the genius seated on his stupendous throne far above his aspiring brethren and in his solitary might defying the universe. I was so overcome by my feelings that I was almost bereft of my faculties, and would not for worlds have spoken after my first exclamation ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... just as active in a proportionate degree in their action upon the other. It was said by Aristotle that the laws of the universe are best observed in the most insignificant objects; for the same physical causes which hold together the stupendous frame of the universe may be recognized even in a drop of rain. The same observation may be applied to the laws of heat in all their ramifications; for, after all, our experiments are, in many instances but defective copies of what is continually ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... first time, was overwhelmed with terror. He gave vent to a shrill, bleating bellow—an absurdly inadequate utterance to issue from this mountainous frame—writhed his neck in snaky folds, and lashed out convulsively with the stupendous coils of his tail. But he could not loosen that deep grip, or the clutch of those ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... worth while to make a trip to Nepaul, not only for the delight of viewing the romantic beauty of its scenery, of wondering at the stupendous height of its mountains, of roaming amidst its ancient cities, ruined palaces, and glittering pagodas, but in order to take a lesson in human nature, for we are not at liberty to suppose that the princes ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... beautiful, succeed each other without order; and that the whole performance is not so much a regular fabric, as a heap of shining materials thrown together by accident, which strikes rather with the solemn magnificence of a stupendous ruin than the elegant grandeur of a finished pile. This criticism is universal, and therefore it is reasonable to believe it at least in a degree just; but Mr. Savage was always of a contrary opinion, and thought ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... always in the midst of its deserts, seems to have had for mission, during nearly two thousand years, the maintenance on its banks of a kind of immobility and desuetude, which was in a way a homage of respect for these stupendous relics. While the sand was burying the ruins of the temples and the battered faces of the colossi, nothing changed under this sky of changeless blue. The same cultivation proceeded on the banks as in the oldest ages; the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... work of one pushful, shoving creature, a man named Harman. Imagine him! Imagine what he must be! Don't you feel his soul defiling us?—this summit of a stupendous pile of—dough, thinking of nothing but his miserable monstrous profits, seeing nothing in the delight of life, the beauty of the world but something that attracts attention, draws eyes, something that gives him his horrible opportunity of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the pro-socialist desires and actions of the Proletariat. No one disputes that the Capitalist system is breaking down. With the great mass of the producers receiving bare subsistence wages the impossibility of disposing of the almost miraculously stupendous product of modern machines and processes is mathematically demonstrable. The former paradox of the Socialist agitator, that the Utopian is the man who believes in the possibility of the continuance of the present system, has become a platitude. Nor can many be found to dispute ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... on whose stupendous altar he was to be an innocent victim, affected him strangely. The horror, the tragedy, the wantonness of it all touched him mightily. Indeed, it seemed to be an obsession with him, and he talked about it constantly, unmindful of the fact that the cruel destiny that was shaping its ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... clothes-men, likewise, dwelt hard by, and hung out ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There were butchers' shops, too, of a class adapted to the neighborhood, presenting no such generously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze at in the market, no stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs or muttons ornamented with carved bas-reliefs of fat on their ribs and shoulders, in a peculiarly British style of art,—not these, but bits and gobbets of lean meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... authorities that it would be possible, after conquering Egypt, to march an army through Syria, Persia, and the wild countries of the northern borders of India, and to drive the British altogether from that country. The march, even if unopposed, would have been a stupendous one, and the warlike chiefs of Northern India, who, as yet, were not even threatened by a British advance, would have united against an invading army from the north, and would, had it not been ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... freely stated that an Englishman was placed in command because an Egyptian could not be relied upon to succeed, but that the greed of new territory was the actual and sole object of the expedition, and that the slave-trade would reappear in stupendous activity when the English personal influence should be withdrawn. Such unsympathetic expressions must have been a poor reward to the Khedive for his efforts to win the esteem of the civilized world by the destruction of the slave-trade in ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... German girl the dead volcano, with its green base and frozen rivers and dark, glimmering lines of carbon, seemed like a fairy tale, a celestial vision, an ascent to some city of crystal and pearl in the sky. To her foster mother the stupendous scene was merely a worthless waste, as to Wordsworth's ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... so stupendous, the future it looked forward to so great, Crawford never doubted Colin's proud, acquiescence. That much he owed to a long line of glorious ancestors; it was one of the obligations of noble birth; he would not dare ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... he would have resisted. It never occurred to Caw to doubt his master's sanity, but now he began to wonder what had possessed Mr. Craig in regard to the Green Box. Six hundred thousand pounds! He seemed to see his master seated at the table, calmly naming the stupendous sum—and in the same instant he realised that he himself was sitting in his master's place. He sprang up, and almost fell over the open drawer. He stooped to close it, straightened up with an exclamation, only to drop to his knees, staring, ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... almost trackless up to the cliff, which seems as one advances to hang over one's head. The mind in this passage is prepared with all the suspended feelings of awe and reverence, and as one approaches this particular rock, standing with its stupendous bulk poised, seemingly in a miraculous manner and point, one is struck with amazement. The recess in which it stands hath, behind this rock, and the rocks which surround it, a withdrawn and recluse passage which ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... within sound of the sea! All round the steep walls that shut in the dark glossy water there hung rank festoons and bosses of brilliant green, and the clear reflections of the weeds and flowers hung so far down in the mysterious deeps that the height of the rocky wall seemed stupendous. Far over in one tremendously deep pool the lazy great fish wallowed and lunged; they would not show their speckled sides very much until the evening; but they kept sleepily moving all day, and sometimes a mighty ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... profoundly conscious that the problems of war are not the last and most important to be solved in our national affairs. It is clear enough that this great convulsion must end; and end, too, in the total extinction of that stupendous system of iniquity in the interests of which it was projected. President Lincoln's Proclamation of emancipation throughout rebeldom, and the recent order to enlist the slaves throughout the Border States in military service to the Government, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... although only a prelude, only an overture to the transcendent oratorios of landscape which were to follow, was in itself a horribly sublime creation. Not twenty minutes after the snapping of the towline the boat had entered one of those stupendous canons which form the distinguishing characteristic of the great American table-land, and make it a region unlike any other in ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the old days of Egypt great ideas possessed the minds of men, and apart from the vastness of their other monuments, had ever kings before or since such impressive resting-places as the royal tombs cut deep into the bowels of the Theban hills, or the stupendous pyramids of Ghizeh! ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... invite you once again to come hither. The "Festival-Play" is of the very most serious historical significance...So do come at the latest from the 27th till the 30th August for the third series of these stupendous performances of the "Nibelung's Ring." The Montecuculi-an matters will be gladly arranged for you here [i.e. the ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... not my first night vigil since I had become in a sense the custodian of the relic, but it was quite the most dreary. Amid the tomb-like objects about us we seemed two puny mortals toying with stupendous things. We could not smoke and must converse only in whispers; and so the night wore on until I began to think that our ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... of the Government whose general operations during all these vicissitudes have been the subject of just pride to the American people. In the midst of great difficulties, sufficient to appal and disconcert any ordinary mind, our stupendous fiscal affairs have been conducted with unrivalled firmness, ability, and success. All our military and naval operations, and indeed our whole national strength at home and abroad, have necessarily been in a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... continually rolling and shifting before your eyes, that one's head grows giddy looking at them; and the imagination is quite confounded with splendour and variety. Nor is the prospect by water less grand and astonishing than that by land: you see three stupendous bridges, joining the opposite banks of a broad, deep, and rapid river; so vast, so stately, so elegant, that they seem to be the work of the giants; betwixt them, the whole surface of the Thames is covered with small vessels, barges, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... no sooner asked than granted; for there, sure enough, was Dame Lisa. She was no longer restricted to quiet speech by any stupendous necromancy: and uncommonly plain she looked, after the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... recorded history, and have survived into our own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the power to construct and to do—underneath all that is the foundation on which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that stem is far, far older than any ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... around them, our travellers found themselves in the midst of a sort of forest of monstrous stone columns, which towered to a vast height above their heads, and there were lost in vaults and arches of the most stupendous magnificence and grandeur. The floor was of stone, being formed of square flags, all cracked and corroded by time. Along the sides of the church were various chapels, all adorned with great paintings, and containing altars richly furnished ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... from a narrow gorge, carrying round, in wild and fantastic gyrations, large masses of the apparently solid mist, giving thus to the scene such an appearance as would lead the spectator to suppose that some invisible being or beings, of stupendous power, were engaged in ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Russell, in his work The Parousia, has contended for the belief that the fall of Jerusalem and Judaism in 70 A.D. marked a stupendous epoch in the unseen world, a personal—although unrecorded—return of the Saviour to the earth then taking place (cp. Ac 7:55; 9:7; 1Co 9:1), accompanied by a spiritual judgement of bygone generations, a resurrection from Hades to ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... of long-winded ceremonial nothingnesses, and intricate Belleisle cobwebberies, we seize this one poor speck of human foolery in the native state, as almost the memorablest in that stupendous business. Stupendous indeed; with which all Germany has been in travail these sixteen months, on such terms! And in verity has got the thing called "German Kaiser" constituted, better or worse. Heavens, was a Nation ever so bespun by gossamer; enchanted into paralysis, by mountains of extinct ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... far from being insufficient to satisfy a true woman's ambition, is well fitted, by its tremendous responsibilities, to excite her fears. There is not one, perhaps, which a human being can occupy, on which hang more stupendous issues. Though less public, it is still more potential ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... before and called it Gorham's Post, after the colonel whose regiment held it. Fourteen years later there was another and more famous Gorham's Post, on the south shore of the St Lawrence near Quebec, opposite Wolfe's Cove. The arming of this battery was a stupendous piece of work. The guns had to be taken round by sea, out of range of the Island Battery, hauled up low but very dangerous cliffs, and then dragged back overland another mile and a quarter. The ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... go. Scarcely had he called to the men to stand clear, when all the three masts fell aft, one after the other, covering the deck with masts, yards, sails, and rigging, and in their fall killing some and dreadfully mangling others. Within a few feet of the ship rose a stupendous black rock, against which the surf was raging violently. The rock was so perpendicular, that both the fore and main yardarms were (before they fell) scraping against the granite cliff. The hull, however, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... The island of Elba is the spot he has selected for his ignominious retreat. France is holding forth repentant arms to her banished sovereign. The Poissardes who dragged Louis XVI. to the scaffold are presenting flowers to the Emperor of Russia, the restorer of their legitimate king! What a stupendous field for philosophy to expatiate in! What an endless material for thought! What humiliation to the pride of mere human greatness! How are the mighty fallen! Of all that was great in Napoleon, what remains? Despoiled of his usurped power, he sinks to insignificance. There was no moral ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... all the products of California is its water supply, either visible as in springs and streams, or underground as in artesian water. Of its use in irrigation, we have already spoken. In the production of electricity it is coming to be of the greatest importance, making possible the most stupendous works of modern times. Such is the undertaking of the Edison Electric Company in bringing down to Los Angeles, over many miles of the roughest country, power from the Kern River, tapping the tumultuous stream far up in the Sierras. The taking of the necessary machinery to those heights was in itself ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created an interest on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are laid in New York, and deal with conditions among ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by each child that is born into the world, when it first conquers its eyesight and compels it to obey its brain. An equal miracle is performed with each sense certainly, but this ordering of sight is perhaps the most stupendous effort. Yet the child does it almost unconsciously, by force of the powerful heredity of habit. No one now is aware that he has ever done it at all; just as we cannot recollect the individual movements which enabled us to walk up a hill a year ago. This arises from the ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... when God formed her under the primal waters, fashioned her in the marshes teeming in His fervent heat, caused His fire to fuse the metal in her rocks, and His ice to scourge the coasts, thereafter to be subjected to yet more stupendous changes, and raised and made fit for the last and highest of His works. (Loud applause.) But Dr. Dawson's great knowledge and wide learning have not led him, as they might lead many, to live apart ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... that stupendous Third Act the good are seen growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary... The only real thing in the world is the soul with its courage, patience, devotion. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... height, its exquisitely mullioned windows, and its elegantly foliaged columns, soon received the glittering throng. Hence, after due religious ceremonies, and an English sermon from Master Knewstubs, Leicester's chaplain, was a solemn march back again to the palace, where a stupendous banquet was already ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... his dread abode, To crush Earth's rebel sons beneath the load. Oft too with hideous yawn the cavern wide Presents an orifice on either side. A dismal orifice, from sea to sea Extended, pervious to the God of Day: Uncouthly join'd, the rocks stupendous form An arch, the ruin of a future storm: High on the cliff their nests the woodquests make, And sea-calves stable in the oozy lake. But when bleak Winter with his sullen train Awakes the winds to vex the watery plain; When o'er the craggy ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... no!" replied Poirot frankly. "This time it is an idea gigantic! Stupendous! And you—you, my friend, have given ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... champion presidents of rival states, above whose lesser heads be it your destiny to raise this state, of which you are the patron and supreme head, to some unprecedented height of fortune, which if you shall achieve, be certain you will be approved victorious in a contest the noblest and the most stupendous ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... to the east of the Rocky Mountains, while he was on the west of the stupendous range. It was necessary, therefore, to make his way through and over the backbone of the continent, in order to rejoin his friends. Inasmuch as the land of the Assiniboines was not only farther east, but many leagues to the northward, it will be understood that the party that had tried to run off ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... touch a few out of many points, and merely allude to some of the difficulties which the unheeding pass by, but which, when brought before the mind, are seen to be stupendous. ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... out of the white whirl of thickness, often so close aboard that the recoil of the surge striking against the mass would flood our decks. At all moments of the day and night we were prepared to feel the shock of the vessel crushing her bows against one of these stupendous hills. The cabin resounded with Salves and Aves, with invocations to the saints, promises, curses, and litanies. The cold does not make men of the Spaniards, who are but indifferent seamen in temperate ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... gazed at him, no observer would have said that this immature-looking boy was rated in the highest group of local businessmen. To a stranger, the offer might have seemed insignificant, even humorously insignificant; but to Henry it was stupendous, and for ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... what follows. The words "unprecedented," "incalculable," "very," and "stupendous" are often used in ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... step, Lad, by a stupendous effort, wrenched free from the Mistress's clasp; and flung himself between her and the charging mass of pork. But, as he did so, he found breath for a trumpet-bark that sounded more ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... brought into daily contact with him. The Czarevitch, as he then was, had a very high standard of duty, though his intellectual equipment was but moderate. He had a perfect craze about railway development, and it must not be forgotten that that stupendous undertaking, the Trans-Siberian Railway, was entirely due to his initiative. At the time of his visit to India, Nicholas II. was obsessed with the idea that the relations between Great Britain and Russia would never really improve until the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... shore, And vast Atlantic, not untry'd before: Thy life impair'd commands thee to arise, Leave these bleak regions and inclement skies, Where chilling winds return the winter past, And nature shudders at the furious blast. O thou stupendous, earth-enclosing main Exert thy wonders to the world again! If ere thy pow'r prolong'd the fleeting breath, Turn'd back the shafts, and mock'd the gates of death, If ere thine air dispens'd an healing pow'r, Or snatch'd the victim from the fatal hour, This equal case demands thine equal care, And ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... says: "Our brains are seventy year clocks. The angel of life winds them up once for all, closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the resurrection angel." And when I read it I thought, what a stupendous task awaits the angel of the resurrection, when all the countless millions of old rickety, rusty, worm-eaten clocks are to be resurrected, and wiped, and dusted, and repaired, for mansions in the skies! There will be every kind and character of clock and clockwork resurrected on that day. There will ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... campaign were so stupendous to history that the historians of the day, in their bewilderment, sought rather to preserve these than the details of the war. Thus the student of to-day, in piecing together an impression of bygone times, will inevitably find portions of ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... numbers of statues, many of which still remain entire. At Chandi Sewa, or the "Thousand Temples," are many fine colossal figures. Captain Baker, who surveyed these ruins, said he had never in his life seen "such stupendous and finished specimens of human labour, and of the science and taste of ages long since forgot, crowded together in so small a compass as in this spot." They cover a space of nearly six hundred feet square, and consist of an outer row of eighty-four small temples, a second ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... sentences in his diary wherein he refers to the appearance of the De Witt range are striking evidence of his revulsion. "The mountains which presented themselves to our view in this situation, both close to the shore and inland, were amongst the most stupendous works of nature I ever beheld, and it seemed to me are the most dismal and barren that can be imagined. The eye ranges over these peaks, and curiously formed lumps of adamantine rock, with astonishment and horror." ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... fragments of the great Roman roads scattered over Europe, bear evidence of their primitive grandeur, and have drawn forth eulogium from the discriminating traveller; for Humboldt, usually not profuse in his panegyrics, says, 'The roads of the Incas were among the most useful and stupendous works ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... temple to Amicitia. The difference in their natures served for each as a stimulant. To Ivan, her sympathetic comments, frequent praise, rare criticism, lacked absolutely nothing. Nathalie early perceived that she was beholding a genius at work: a giant engaged upon labor too stupendous for irreverent contemplation. And from him and his music she gained the medicine her bruised heart and broken nerves most needed. For Ivan, in the growth of his great love for her, unconsciously brewed an elixir of power from which each ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... I am but a cool searcher of the stupendous monuments of the mighty races that are no more, but have left the history of their passage on earth written on the stones of the palaces of their rulers, upon the temples of their gods. The glowing fires of enthusiasm do not overheat my imagination, even if the handiwork of the ancient artists ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... many-sided, shining surfaces, where emerald green mingled with the golden hues of the rising sun where floated a glimmer of ever-varying colours, like those on a pigeon's neck, were miniature mirrors or enormous beryls. Everywhere was magnificence, at once refined and stupendous; if it was not the most diminutive of palaces, it was the most gigantic of jewel-cases. A house for Mab or ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, allowed might be possible, but held not to be worth the cost of the process,—possibly, in those attempts, some scanty grains of this substance were found by the alchemists, in the crucible, with grains of the metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature's stupendous laboratory; and from such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps, have been drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to some feeble graybeard,—granting, what rests on no proofs, that some ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... outline, which every reader can complete for himself, will serve to show what sort of a world, especially what sort of an American world, confronted Roosevelt when he took the reins of government. His task was stupendous, the problems he had to solve were baffling. Other public men of the time saw its portents, but he alone seems to have felt that it was his duty to strain every nerve to avert the impending disaster. And he alone, as it seems to me, understood the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... features of the vicinity which "knock" the susceptible Saxon. The Shannon, the classic Shannon, sweeps grandly through the town, winding romantically under the five great bridges, washing the walls of the stupendous Castle erected by King John, the only British sovereign who ever visited Limerick—serpentining through meadows backed by mountains robed in purple haze, reflecting in its broad mirror many a romantic and historic ruin, its banks dotted with salmon-fishers ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Jungfrau and the Oberland Alps which lie around that mountain, and to the beautiful lakes of Zurich and of Lucerne. All these lie in the eastern part of the Alpine region. By the way of Geneva we go to the valley of Chamouni and Mont Blanc, and visit the vast glaciers and the stupendous mountain scenery that lie around this ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... compact fabric! It's the light of our night-time, and the civilizer of our world. It explodes mines, and heals sickness. It creeps as silent as death through a thousand miles of sea, and yet it's the very tongue of our world! It prints and carves and beautifies; it rises to the most stupendous tasks, and then it stoops to ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... I can recall a petition that was circulated at the garrison about this period, for "building a brigg over Michigan City." By altering the orthography, it was found to mean, not the stupendous undertaking it would seem to imply, but simply "building a bridge" over at Michigan City,—an accommodation much needed by travellers at ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... Liszt works according to the difficulty they present to the piano player, it must first be noted that such has been the advance during the fifty years since the early ones were produced, that compositions which at their first appearance seemed stupendous to ordinary pianists have now, thanks to education and the general advance of art, become practicable to players of little beyond ordinary capacity. In fact, there is a whole world of pieces by Liszt which are more practicable to young players ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... degree after seven years at Cambridge, in 1587, he followed the other 'university wits' to London. There, probably the same year and the next, he astonished the public with the two parts of 'Tamburlaine the Great,' a dramatization of the stupendous career of the bloodthirsty Mongol fourteenth-century conqueror. These plays, in spite of faults now conspicuous enough, are splendidly imaginative and poetic, and were by far the most powerful that had yet been written in England. Marlowe followed them with 'The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,' ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... determined President Barbicane, assisted by Murchison the engineer, to choose a spot situated in Florida, in 27@ 7' North latitude, and 77@ 3' West (Greenwich) longitude. It was on this spot, after stupendous labor, that the Columbiad was cast with full success. Things stood thus, when an incident took place which increased the interest attached to this ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... and beautiful. It compels one's reverence and respect—no, has it freely, and without compulsion. We see how the custom, once started, could continue, for the soul of it is that stupendous power, Faith; faith brought to the pitch of effectiveness by the cumulative force of example and long use and custom; but we cannot understand how the first widows came to take to it. That is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakspeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakspeare to us differently from his representation ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of two millions of American people in the Southern States, the tyranny of this nation assumes a gigantic form. The magnitude of the crime elevates the indignation of the soul. Such august villainy and stupendous iniquity soar above disgust, and mount up to astonishment. A conflagration like that of Moscow, is full of sublimity, though dreadful in its effects; but the burning of a solitary hut makes the incendiary despicable by the meanness of ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... half the cartridges in my bandolier when a Kurd's lance struck me a glancing blow on the back of the head. His horse collapsed on top of me, as some thundering warrior I did not see gave the stupendous finishing stroke to rider and ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... of Peru with a mere handful of men was not unlike that of Cortes' expedition to Mexico. Both coveted the rich empire of unknown monarchs and dared all—to possess. Between Pizarro and his goal lay the stupendous mountain range of the Andes or South American Cordilleras, rock piled upon rock, their crests of everlasting snow glittering high in the heavens. Across these and over narrow mountain passes the troops had now to pass. So ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... possible outlook, and with the aid of the habits of thought which the study of evolution fosters, we are enabled distinctly to observe this tendency. As this is the most wonderful of all the phases of that stupendous revolution in nature which was inaugurated in the Creation of Man, it deserves especial attention here; and we shall find it leading us quite directly to our conclusion. From the Origin of Man, when thoroughly comprehended in its general outlines, we shall at ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... rule, that the possessive case belongs, like an adjective, to a noun. What shall be said of the following? 'Since the days of Samson, there has been no instance of a man's accomplishing a task so stupendous.' The entire clause following man's, is taken as a noun. 'Of a man's success in a task so stupendous.' would present no difficulty. A part of a sentence, or even a single participle, thus often stands for a noun. 'My going will ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... instance of the application of vast labour without use, immense expense incurred without hope of return, and, if we except the asserted reason of the late projector that these works were carried on for the sole purpose of employing men in times of great need and depression, we have here stupendous works without perceptible motive, reason, or form. Like the catacombs at Paris, Williamson's vaults might have been made receptacles for the dried bones of legions of our forefathers. Again, they might ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of the dome. At first they were dazed by a brilliant light from above, and looking up they beheld a marvel of kaleidoscopic colors formed by a myriad of electric-lighted prisms sloping gradually from the floor to the apex of the dome. Thorndyke could compare it to nothing but a stupendous diamond, the very heart of which ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... attract the eye and fill it with wonder, yet I boldly say that there is no monument of man's labour and skill, pertaining either to ancient or modern Rome, for whatever purpose designed, which can rival the water-works of Lisbon; I mean the stupendous aqueduct whose principal arches cross the valley to the north-east of Lisbon, and which discharges its little runnel of cool and delicious water into the rocky cistern within that beautiful edifice called the Mother ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... order are by no means handsome; but the general race, the women of the second and other orders, the wives of the merchants, and proprietors, and untitled gentry, are mostly bel' sangue, and it is with these that the more amatory connections are usually formed. There are also instances of stupendous constancy. I know a woman of fifty who never had but one lover, who dying early, she became devout, renouncing all but her husband. She piques herself, as may be presumed, upon this miraculous fidelity, talking of it occasionally with a species of misplaced morality, which is rather amusing. There ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... history of the times at the beginning of the great terrestrial and astronomical change, wrote as follows: "This period—A.D. 2000—is by far the most wonderful the world has as yet seen. The advance in scientific knowledge and attainment within the memory, of the present generation has been so stupendous that it completely overshadows all that has preceded. All times in history and all periods of the world have been remarkable for some distinctive or characteristic trait. The feature of the period of Louis XIV was the splendour of the court ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... cool, and light and pure, gushes from the middle of a rock by a hole which leads to a subterranean aqueduct carried through the middle of the mountain. This is a Roman work, and the more I considered it, appeared the more stupendous. A peasant who lives upon the spot told us, he had entered by this hole at eight in the morning, and advanced so far, that it was four in the afternoon before he came out. He said he walked in the water, through a regular canal formed of a hard stone, lined with a kind of cement, and vaulted ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett |
