"Titanic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unwinking glory, while the great fires of the sun seemed reaching out into space like mighty arms seeking to draw back to the parent body the masses of the wheeling planets. About it, in far flung streamers of cold fire shone the mighty zodiacal light, an Aurora on a titanic scale. For a moment they hung there, while they ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... settlement of Kwandang, with a gold fabrik occupying a wooded islet, completes the circuit of the western coast, for the North-Eastern Cape comprises a distinctive province, requiring a separate chapter. Intervening mountains, with jagged cliffs and towering summits, rise like Titanic fortresses from the creaming surf which washes the yellow bastions, leaving no space for the wicker campongs, impermanent as a child's house of cards, but perpetually rebuilt in identical fashion, and never developing into substantial dwellings, or adjusted on the new lines required by varieties ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... man becomes the Creator of Circumstance. We forget that man can rise to be master of his destiny, fighting, unmaking, re-creating, not only his own environment, but the environment of multitudinous lesser men. There is something titanic in such lives. They are the hero myths of every nation's legends. We {4} somehow feel that the man who flings off the handicaps of birth and station lifts the whole human race to a higher plane and has a bit of the God ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... filled the place. The twilight was coming fast in that far, lonely spot shaded by the close ranks of the Titanic forms. He walked Bess slowly down the shadowy corridor along the line of those straight giants, whose tapering spires ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... spite of his prowess Titanic, His marvellous physical gift, The soul of the athlete Germanic Still clamours for moral uplift; So we learn without any emotion That, his ultimate aim to secure, He must bathe in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... foot of the forty-eight-inch skin of the vessel melted away, like snow before an oxy-acetylene flame: melting and flying away in molten globes and sparkling gases—the refrigerating coils lining the hull were of no avail against the concentrated energy of that titanic thrust. As Seaton shut off his power, intense darkness and utter silence closed in, and he snapped on ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... lawyer of high reputation. Although sixty years old, he was believed never to have made an enemy either in politics or at the Bar. Those who knew the two gentlemen wondered whether the somewhat leisurely and conservative Secretary could leash in his restless young First Assistant, with his Titanic energy and his head full of projects. No one believed that even Roosevelt could startle Governor Long out of his habitual urbanity, but every one could foresee that they might so clash in policy that either the head or the assistant ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... parts of our coasts we find very striking and enormously large boulder-stones lying on the beach, perfectly isolated, and their edges rounded away like pebbles, as if they had been rolled on some antediluvian beach strewn with Titanic stones. These boulders are frequently found upon the loose sands of the sea-shore, far removed from any rocks or mountains from which they might be supposed to have been broken; and, more than that, totally different in their nature from the geological formations of the ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the burning sunshine of the south, the walls and pillars of these great buildings have been calcined to a glorious shade of tawny yellow, fit to delight the soul of every artist, whether he views their Titanic but graceful forms outlined against the deep blue of sky and sea on the western horizon, or against the equally lovely background of grey and violet mountains to the east. But it was not always thus. The porous local travertine that gave their building material to the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... as Marlowe presents him is a titanic, almost superhuman, figure who by sheer courage and pitiless unbending will raises himself from shepherd to general and then emperor of countless peoples, and sweeps like a whirlwind over the stage of the world, carrying everywhere ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... fled before the inrolling flood of light, unveiling green and yellow fields, flocks and herds, dark woodlands, dwellings yet asleep in peace and plenty, here and there the silver thread of a winding stream with lakes that mirrored the sky, and yonder the long stretches of those titanic fortifications encompassing all. We were reminded of ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... against the inexorable steel which separated him from his foe. Bong hesitated for a second, then, reaching over the fence once more, clutched Last Bull maliciously around the base of his horns and tried to twist his neck. This enterprise, however, was too much even for the elephant's titanic powers, for Last Bull's greatest strength lay in the muscles of his ponderous and corded neck. Raving and bellowing, he plunged this way and that, striving in vain to wrench himself free from that incomprehensible, snake-like thing which had fastened upon him. Bong, trumpeting savagely, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... world. It is full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage scenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocks and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... moment looking about him—first up at the vast audience and then about the arena. He did not seem to see me at all, but his eyes fell presently upon the girl. A hideous roar broke from his titanic lungs—a roar which ended in a long-drawn scream that is more human than the death-cry of a tortured woman—more human but more awesome. I ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... forth dense volumes of smoke, which, wreathing upwards, formed a dark canopy over the scene. Then there were large uncouth buildings, above which huge beams appeared, lifting alternately their ends with ceaseless motion, now up, now down, engaged evidently in some Titanic operation, while all the time proceeding from that direction were heard groans, and shrieks, and whistlings, and wailings, and the sound of rushing water, and the rattling and rumbling of tram or railway waggons rushing at rapid speed across the country, some loaded with huge lumps of glittering ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Desiree and me up and over boulders and rocks as though we had been feathers; the Lord knows how he got there himself! Half of the time he carried Desiree; the other half he supported me. His energy and exertions were titanic; even in the desperate excitement of our retreat I found time to marvel ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... rise the walls Of the Titanic city,—brazen gates, Towers, temples, palaces enormous piled,— Imperial Nineveh, the earthly queen! In all her golden pomp I see her now, Her swarming streets, ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... To one of these the Cock public-house gave its name. Tradition says that the Abbey workmen received their wages at the Cock in the reign of Henry III. At the eastern corner, where Tothill and Victoria Streets meet, is the Palace Hotel, a very large building, with two Titanic male figures supporting the portico in an attitude of eternal strain. This is on part of the site of the Almonry. This Almonry is thus described by Stow: "Now corruptly the Ambry, for that the alms of the Abbey were ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... points, and is written in a sort of lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by storm, and finishes by being soothed into happy intoxication by the odors of a lily. This is better treatment than The Lily and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... serves for a reminder that this ancient seat of civilisation has not lost the tradition of the mercy and the glory of the vine. But in outline such a mountain looks much like the mountain of Purgatory that Dante saw in his vision, lifted in terraces, like titanic steps up to God. And indeed this shape also is symbolic; as symbolic as the pointed profile of the Holy City. For a creed is like a ladder, while an evolution is only like a slope. A spiritual and social evolution is generally a pretty slippery slope; a miry slope where it is very ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... summit of his chariot of lightning, pointed them out with a sovereign finger, had he now reached that state of sinister amazement when he could lead his tumultuous legions harnessed to it, to the precipice? Was he seized at the age of forty-six with a supreme madness? Was that titanic charioteer of destiny no longer anything more than ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the whole breathless situation, realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and sensed the smallness and daintiness of her despite her gladiatorial struggles. She reminded him of some Dresden china figure set absurdly small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast. So dwarfed was she by the bulk of the stallion that she was a midget, or a tiny fairy from ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... blamed. It is rugged, gnarled, disjointed, full of irregular force— shot across by sudden lurid lights of imagination— full of the most striking and indeed astonishing epithets, and inspired by a certain grim Titanic force. His sentences are often clumsily built. He himself said of them: "Perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes; a few even ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... mountains—last trace of a giant geology which once dealt in continental terms, rivers once seas, valleys a thousand miles in length. Thus, at first sight, one set down in the valley might have felt that it had neither inlet nor outlet, but had been created, panoplied and peopled by some Titanic power, and owned by those who neither knew nor desired any other world. As a matter of fact, the road up through the lower Ozarks from the great Mississippi, which entered along the bed of the little stream, ended at Tallwoods farm. ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... [42] the romantic morsels of architecture, which lend to the entire scene I know not what expression of reposeful antiquity, arrange themselves here as for set purpose of pictorial effect, and have gone with little change into his painted backgrounds. In the midst of it, on titanic old Roman and Etruscan foundations, the later Gothic town had piled itself along the lines of a gigantic land of rock, stretched out from the last slope of the Apennines into the plain. Between its fingers steep dark lanes wind down into the olive gardens; on the finger-tips military and ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... in the justness of its proportions; and therefore it is that in recalling the surpassing excellence of our guest as an artistical performer, one is really at a loss to say in what line of character he has excelled the most. The Titanic grandeur of Lear, the human debasement of Werner, the frank vivacity of Henry V, the gloomy and timorous guilt of King John, or that—his last—personation of Macbeth, in which it seemed to me that he conveyed a more correct notion of what Shakespeare designed than I can ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... books illustrate the range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a generation. Manassas is the work of a man filled with epic memories and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... thundering, hulking; overgrown; puffy &c (swollen) 194. huge, immense, enormous, mighty; vast, vasty; amplitudinous, stupendous; monster, monstrous, humongous, monumental; elephantine, jumbo, mammoth; gigantic, gigantean, giant, giant like, titanic; prodigious, colossal, Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan; infinite &c 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; fat as a pig, fat as a quail, fat as butter, fat as brawn, fat as bacon. immeasurable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... great state-bell that the founder lavished his more daring skill. In vain did some of the less elated magistrates here caution him; saying that though truly the tower was Titanic, yet limit should be set to the dependent weight of its swaying masses. But undeterred, he prepared his mammoth mould, dented with mythological devices; kindled his fires of balsamic firs; melted his tin and copper, and, throwing in much plate, contributed by the public spirit of the nobles, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... steadfastly enthroned In German hearts, and all men's reverence, Suddenly, softly thou art summoned hence, To the great muster, full of years and fame! How thinks he, lord of a co-equal name, Thine ancient comrade in war's iron lists, Just left, and lone, of the Titanic Three Who led the Eagles on to victory? Calmest of Captains, first of Strategists. BISMARCK must bend o'er thy belaurelled bier With more than common grief in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... beginner; it abounded in trivial witticisms. But above all, there shone out clearly and unmistakably the dramatic and poetic fire, the humorous outlook on life, the insight into human feeling, which were to inspire Titanic achievements in the future. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... an alley Titanic Of Ten-pins, I roamed with my soul,— Of Ten-pins, with Mary, my soul; They were days when my heart was volcanic, And impelled me to frequently roll, And made me resistlessly roll, Till my ten-strikes created a panic In the ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... attack of insanity, for the German, thorough even in forming his opinions, is the last person in the world to harbor delusions, and there is a perfect realization of the titanic task that still confronts Germany. Nor is this confidence in ultimate victory due to lack of information or to being kept in the dark by the "iron censorship," for the "iron censorship" is itself a myth. It is liberal, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... softly, mistily blue. All that forenoon Hazel prowled restlessly out of doors without cap or coat. There was a new feel in the air. The deep winter snow had suddenly lost its harshness. A tentative stillness wrapped the North as if the land rested a moment, gathering its force for some titanic effort. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and iron buckets on a chain; a spacious yard with a tiled roof on posts; abundant stores of oats in the cellar; a warm outer room with a very huge Russian stove with long horizontal flues attached that looked like titanic shoulders, and lastly two fairly clean rooms with the walls covered with reddish lilac paper somewhat frayed at the lower edge with a painted wooden sofa, chairs to match and two pots of geraniums in the windows, which were, however, never cleaned—and ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... She had never suffered compulsion in a young lifetime of following her own sweet way, this dollar princess. As they gazed upon each other, I could see a titanic battle of wills in progress beneath the outward calm ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... stones, but the Titanic Alcmaeonid had torn a mattress from a bunk, and held it as effective shield. By main force the others dragged the chest across to the hatchway, making the entrance doubly narrow. Vainly Hasdrubal ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... now be compared to the descent from cloud-land in a balloon. Meantime, the stupendous panorama of dark, superbly-outlined mountain-wall closes in. We seem to have reached the limit of the world. Before us, a Titanic rampart, rises the grand Causse Mejean, now seen for the first time; around, fold upon fold, are the curved heights of Sauveterre, the nearer slopes bright green with sunny patches, the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... through the borderland of her kingdom, toward that dark, chill, central realm where, transformed as a gnome, she clutches her votaries, plunges into the primeval abyss-the matrix of time—and sets them the Egyptian task of weighing, analyzing the Titanic "potential" energy, the infinitesimal atomic engines, the "kinetic" force, the chemical motors, the subtle intangible magnetic currents, whereby in the thundering, hissing, whirling laboratory of Nature, nebulae grow into astral and solar systems; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... few troublesome youngsters; it is the natural way of capturing the modern world for Jesus Christ. It lays hold of life in the making, it creates the masters of tomorrow; and may pre-empt for the Kingdom of God the varied activities and startling conquests of our titanic age. Think of the great relay of untamed and unharnessed vigor, a new nation exultant in hope, undaunted as yet by the experiences that have halted the passing generation: what may they not accomplish? As significant as the awakening of China should the awakening ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... France, and no words could pay the debt of appreciation which civilization owes to this heroic nation; but has there been due recognition of the equal valor and the like spirit of self-sacrifice which has characterized Great Britain in this titanic struggle? ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... special interests, native and foreign, in Mexico, but of the fifteen million Mexican people, groping blindly, through blood and confusion, after some form of self-government, and who in a few years was to appear as the champion of small nations and the masses throughout the world in a titanic struggle against the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of art. If he does not paint ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... His Titanic hurling of blocks against critics did no harm to an enemy skilled in the use of trimmer weapons, notably the fine one of letting big missiles rebound. He wrote from India, with Indian heat—"curry and capsicums," it was remarked. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... well authenticated and established. Interesting and instructive historical cases recorded and explained. Testimony of the Society for Psychical Research concerning this phase of Clairvoyance. The interesting case of W.T. Stead, the celebrated English writer, who went down on the "Titanic." The important testimony of Swedenborg, the eminent religious teacher. Other well-authenticated cases happening to well-known persons. The evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research. Interesting German case. Why so many cases of this kind happen when the ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... trip on this river of Stygian darkness. With oil lanterns that emit but a feeble flickering flame you see ghostlike figures, goblins and grim cave monsters that loom before you; your imagination peoples these subterranean halls and their titanic masonry with fantastic forms of its own creation. At this place these lines from Poe will perhaps flash ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... of our system, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and Mars combined, would form only an insignificant mass in comparison with this colossus. A hundred and twenty-six Earths joined into one group would present a surface whose extent would still not be quite as vast as the superficies of this titanic world. This immense globe weighs 310 times more than that which we inhabit. Its density is only the quarter of our own; but weight is twice and a half times as great there as here. The constituents of things and beings are thus composed of materials lighter than those upon the Earth; ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... bowing towards us—away from us—making obeisance to the path in front as though in greeting, to the path behind as though in farewell; instinct with a horrible life, with a hideous and gigantic grace, that titanic Terror whirled onwards to the mark ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... to what might happen next, became too much for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata; or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that this is all another chapter of Heine's "Gods in Exile"; that the upright old man with the eyebrows was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... unwarlike procedure from him, and with one accord, suspecting treachery, made straight at the intended reformer, who, of course, took to his heels. The fiends pressed him hard as he sped over the plains of The Dalles, and as he neared the defile he struck a Titanic blow with his tail on the pavement—and a chasm opened up through the valley, and down rushed the waters of the inland sea. But a battalion of the fiends still pursued him, and again he smote with his tail and more strongly, and ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... formally shut up and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over. It is quite true that ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a serious consideration of their position and their destiny only by earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets' tails, Titanic shipwrecks, and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs cannot make themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath the doorposts of their hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... hillsides, in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the Titanic masses of snow-white clouds which floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas of icebergs upon Arctic seas. Like Lazzaroni we basked in ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... relation became; what kind deeds went across it; what delights it yielded; what a deep and pure blessing of encouragement, joy, and peace it was to them both—appears in the few letters given to the public. When they first met, the titanic toiler, outworn with his cares and battles, was at the edge of death. "Do not," said the expiring athlete, "do not say what you feel for me; it makes me too unhappy to leave you." During those lingering days of transition from the earthly state to the heavenly, he dared not trust himself ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... rest and | delivered the following address... | (III, 559; Farrington's translation). | | Bacon's portrait doubtless resembles | Galileo or Einstein more than it does | the turbulent Paracelsus or the | unquiet and skittish Cornelius | Agrippa. The titanic bearing of the | Renaissance magus is now supplanted | by a classical composure similar to | that of the "conversations" of the | earliest Humanists. Also in Galileo's | DIALOGO and in Descartes's RECHERCHE | DE LA VERIT we find the same | familiar tone and style of ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... that one evening in the following August Mrs. Bethune found herself slowly strolling down the principal street in Denver. It was a splendid sunset, and in its glory the Rocky Mountains rose like Titanic palaces built of amethyst, gold and silver. Suddenly the look of intense pleasure on her face was changed for one of wonder and annoyance. It had become her duty in a moment to do a very disagreeable thing; but duty was a kind of religion to ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... on producing plays, and despite the physical hardships under which he labored he attended and conducted rehearsals. With the pain settling in him more and more, he believed himself incurable. Yet less than four people knew that he felt that the old titanic power ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the time these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when the late Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost Titanic energy," mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics of his personages (I should say that they had as much life as violently-moved marionettes), and discovers "amiable and admirable characters" among them, I am compelled not, of course, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural. In short, his passion is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing mark is a kind of Titanic power with strange dissonances of puerility in its magnificence. Where he is weakest is, in measure, taste, and sense of humor: he fails in esprit, in the subtlest sense of the word. Victor Hugo is a gallicized ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Titanic leaders of these turbulent parties, the conflict between hot-headed Danton on the one side and cold-blooded Robespierre on the other, had only just begun; the great, all-devouring monsters had dug their claws into one another, but the ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the unknown first draft, are the characters of Richard II and Richard III, the former a portrait of vanity and vacillation mingled with more agreeable traits, lovable gentleness and traces at least of kingliness, the latter a Titanic figure possessed by an ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... which I had stood? Awe sank coldly through me at memory of that colossal land where I was pygmy indeed, an insolent human intruder upon the unhuman. What other shapes of dread stalked and watched beyond that titanic wall? By what swollen conceit could I hope ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... Huldricksson manipulating our small sail, and Larry at the rudder, we rounded the titanic wall that swept down into the depths, and turned at last into the canal that Throckmartin, on his map, had marked as that which, running between frowning Nan-Tauach and its satellite islet, Tau, led straight to the gate of the place of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... stupendous battle of the elements. Above them, and on all sides of them, the lightning leaped and darted, like a live thing seeking its prey. It was as if the sombre heavens were bringing forth brood upon brood of fiery serpents, and greeting the birth of each with ear-splitting peals of Titanic laughter. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... a mile beyond Rhinecliff we pass "Ferncliff," the beautiful country-place of Vincent Astor, son of the late John Jacob Astor III, who lost his life in the "Titanic" disaster. The large white building on a hill nearby ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... arrows shot from an unseen bow. And close to the sky, high on the rocky sides of the Yosemite treasure-chest, were curiously traced bas-reliefs, which might have been carved by a dead race of giants: heads of elephants, profiles of Indians and Titanic tortoises, most of them appropriately and ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... very imposing, and rather out of place; but that is not the architect's fault. It cost thirty thousand pounds, and had he been permitted to carry out his original design, no doubt it would have introduced us to some classic fane in character with the lofty Titanic columns: for instance, a temple to Mercury the winged messenger and god of Mammon. But, as is very common in this country,—for familiar examples see the London University, the National Gallery, and the Nelson Column,—the spirit of the proprietors evaporated with the outworks; and the gateway leads ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Henry," he said, "'the trouble is with those last two miles. They're water... straight down. The level plain is the bed of the Atlantic ocean and that gold is in the hold of the Titanic." ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... confronted with a great barrier of fallen rocks; as though, at some period of its existence, the north end of the island had tapered to a gigantic peak which, in the fulness of its time, had come down with a crash, and now lay like a titanic wall from summit to sea-board. Huge and forbidding, of all shapes and sizes, the mighty fragments barred his course like a menace, and he attacked them warily, drawing himself with infinite caution from one to another; over ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... privilege—the power of transmutation into its own shape. Some idea of its appearance may perhaps be gathered from the following description of it given me by a Mr. K——, whose name I see in the list of passengers reported "missing" in the deplorable disaster to the "Titanic." ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... such works as these of Michel Angelo, we feel the need of a genius scarcely inferior to his own, which should invent some word, or some music, adequate to express our feelings, and relieve us from the Titanic oppression. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... had been needed for the task of escaping from the valley by this road. Their way lay through a narrow pass which ran through a deep cleft of the mountains, a cleft which seemed as though it had been carved out by a blow of a Titanic axe. There was scarcely a yard of the narrow path upon which a step could be taken smoothly and easily. For ages upon ages the forces of nature had been tearing huge boulders and slices of rock from the frowning heights ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... deck the sky presented a really magnificent spectacle, the vast masses of heavy, electrically-charged cloud being piled one above the other in a fashion that resembled, to me, nothing so much as a chaos of titanic rocks of every conceivable shape and colour, the forms and hues of the clouds being rendered distinctly visible by the incessant play of the sheet-lightning among their masses. Not only the whole sky, but the entire atmosphere seemed to be a-quiver with the silent electric discharges, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... rest of them knew, for, after all, it was the outcast and the desperate who first pushed grimly on into the wilderness, up tremendous defiles and over passes choked with snow, and afterward played a leading part in the Titanic struggle with nature in the strongholds where she had ruled supreme. The wilderness is merciless; the beaten men died, but the rest held on, indomitable; and now those who from the security of a railroad observation-car gaze upon orchard and oat-field, awful ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... anything; the age of reverence is gone, and the age of irreverence and licentiousness has succeeded. 'Most true.' And with this freedom comes disobedience to rulers, parents, elders,—in the latter days to the law also; the end returns to the beginning, and the old Titanic nature reappears—men have no regard for the Gods or for oaths; and the evils of the human race seem as if they would never cease. Whither are we running away? Once more we must pull up the argument with ...
— Laws • Plato
... abode of my patient, joyfully threading the now familiar passages of Gough Square and Wine Office Court, and meditating pleasantly on the curious literary flavour that pervades these little-known regions. For the shade of the author of Rasselas still seems to haunt the scenes of his Titanic labours and his ponderous but homely and temperate rejoicings. Every court and alley whispers of books and of the making of books; forms of type, trundled noisily on trollies by ink-smeared boys, salute the wayfarer at odd corners; piles of ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... though we no longer think as it thought or feel as it felt. The eighteenth century, as represented by the characteristic passage from Voltaire, cited by Mr. Longfellow, failed utterly to understand Dante. To the minds of Voltaire and his contemporaries the great mediaeval poet was little else than a Titanic monstrosity,—a maniac, whose ravings found rhythmical expression; his poem a grotesque medley, wherein a few beautiful verses were buried under the weight of whole cantos of nonsensical scholastic quibbling. This view, somewhat softened, we find also in Leigh Hunt, whose whole ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... is wise of you to snatch me Thus from freedom! since my rage 'Gainst you had become Titanic, Since to break the glass and crystal Gold-gates of the sun, my anger On the firm-fixed rocks' foundations Would have ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... mountain acres came by inheritance to the financiers, those tracts too were never sold. They never thought of them, Page told her, except grumblingly to pay the taxes on them; they considered them of ridiculously minute proportions compared to their own titanic manipulations, but they had never sold them. Sylvia saw them vividly, those self-made exiles from the mountains, and felt in them some unacknowledged loyalty to the soil, the barren soil which had borne them, some ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow on the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to the earth to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse reared up to his full height—the titanic and terrifying height of a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel, who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... heaped up into pyramids, as if they had been rent from the sky. Cubical masses, each covering an acre of surface, and reaching to a perpendicular height of thirty or forty feet, suggest the buttresses of some gigantic palace, whose superstructure has crumbled away with the race of its Titanic builders. It is these regions especially which have given the mighty range the appropriate ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... continue "digging in." The only thing to do was to squeeze one's self into the ground, and pray. It seemed as if the titanic thunderbolts, that had hitherto been hurled aimlessly about, were suddenly concentrated on that one spot. It seemed as if all the gods in Olympus were hurling their rage upon it, determined to obliterate it from the face of the earth. The most gigantic guns that had ever been used in war were ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... northwestern Europe were nurtured under stormy skies, were girt in by stern, avalanche-swept mountains, and struggled strenuously against the hardships of rigorous and lengthy winters. What wonder that they filled their heaven with Sturm und Drang—with titanic conflicts of the gods—and heard it echoing with the whirl of hunting, the riot of feasting, and the clang of battle? Their religion was strenuous as their lives—free and fierce—yet tinged with a melancholy that ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... characteristic is monotony. Their attraction is their sadness. Yet there is one hour when all is changed. Just before the sun sets towards the western cliffs a delicious flush brightens and enlivens the landscape. It is as though some Titanic artist in an hour of inspiration were retouching the picture, painting in dark purple shadows among the rocks, strengthening the lights on the sands, gilding and beautifying everything, and making the whole scene live. The river, whose ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Jehu Baker. Wentworth had been in the House as a Democrat prior to the war, having represented the Chicago District continuously from March 4, 1843 to March 4, 1851; and again from March 4, 1853 to March 4, 1855. He was endowed by nature with a mind as strong as his body, and that was of Titanic proportions. He was an ardent partisan in behalf of any cause he espoused; was willful, aggressive, and dominating. He was, at the same time, genial and kindly in many relations of life, not without gifts of both wit and humor, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... might have been napping as he walked, like an old soldier. The field sloped up to a low unpainted house that faced the east. Behind it were long, frost-whitened ledges that made the hill, with strips of green turf and bushes between. It was the wildest, most Titanic sort of pasture country up there; there was a sort of daring in putting a frail wooden house before it, though it might have the homely field and honest woods to front against. You thought of the elements and even of possible volcanoes as you looked up the stony heights. Suddenly ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... off as his toes. He had felt, in a dim, unacknowledged way, that he must be a pretty great painter. Of course his prices were notorious. And he had guessed, though vaguely, that he was the object of widespread curiosity. But he had never compared himself with Titanic figures on the planet. It had always seemed to him that his renown was different from other renowns, less—somehow unreal and make-believe. He had never imaginatively grasped, despite prices and public inquisitiveness, that he too was one of the Titanic ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... comprehension, energy, and tenderness are all extreme, and all inspired by actualities. And, as for poetic genius, those who, without being ready to concede that faculty to Whitman, confess his iconoclastic boldness and his Titanic power of temperament, working in the sphere of poetry, do in effect confess his ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... my way, I shall proceed to the sources, from whence the Grecians drew. I shall give an account of the Titans, and Titanic war, with the history of the Cuthites and antient Babylonians. This will be accompanied with the Gentile history of the Deluge, the migration of mankind from Shinar, and the dispersion from Babel. The whole will be crowned with an account of antient Egypt; wherein many circumstances of high consequence ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... quickly thereafter. The blow had gone straight home, and the last flicker of waning life fled from the titanic form. He went down sprawling; Ben stood waiting to see if another blow was needed. Then the axe ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... or scarcely a more pathetic figure in the world than that of Beau Brummell. He seems to belong to ancient history, he and his titanic foppishness and his smart clothes and his smart sayings. Yet is it but a little while since the last of his adorers, the most devoted of his disciples passed away from the earth. Over in Paris there lingered till the past year a certain man of letters who was very ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... rising temperature and some wind, the comb above would gradually settle lower and lower, at last break off, plunge down the precipitous slope, bringing thousands of tons of rock and snow with it, and, perhaps, bury them in a Titanic grave of ice. There had been a good deal of timber cut from the shoulder of the mountain during the past summer, and this very greatly increased the danger. That there was a real peril the man looking at it did not attempt to ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... me with a message of relief, yet it justified my worse fears. She was here, and the place was about to be blasted by some titanic explosive of the Croen science creation! Her words were indistinct, but the tone was almost mocking, and I ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... of tragic proportions. The very rainbow was titanic; it seemed primeval as the land over which it stretched and the people to whom it ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... man who has written this book knows those who lead the warring nations in this titanic conflict very much better than ordinary ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... crushed us under foot. But, with the trodden worm's endeavor to turn, we made a last appeal. "And with the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do something, something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have lost our sky-line! What shall we not have of grandeur, of titanic loveliness, when we have ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... shoulders thrown back, and with a more buoyant step than he had taken in many a day. His blood tingled and his eyes glowed with a new-found light. He felt much of the old thrill that had animated him at the beginning of the Great War, and had sent him overseas to take his part in the titanic struggle. An overmastering urge had then swept upon him, compelling him to abandon all on behalf of the mighty cause. It was his nature, and the leopard could no more change its spots than could Tom Reynolds overcome the influence of a gripping desire. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... away up high, and set all hearts to thumping and all pulses to leaping; then, before anybody rightly knew how the change was made, he was leading us a sublime march through the ancient glories of France, and in fancy we saw the titanic forms of the twelve paladins rise out of the mists of the past and face their fate; we heard the tread of the innumerable hosts sweeping down to shut them in; we saw this human tide flow and ebb, ebb and flow, and waste away before that little band of heroes; ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... The titanic Elements slumber on the balustrade, one on either hand of the stairways leading down on north and south into the sunken area. (p. 64.) On one side, on the north, the Elemental Power holds in check the Dragon of Fire. The whole ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... this sound can never forget it. It requires but little imagination to fancy that the fiend which was sending forth such loud defiance just now, has grappled with his adversary and is hissing out his horrid rage in the midst of Titanic strugglings. A little experience will enable you to determine from the sound what a gun is firing; shot, shell, or grape. The artillery-men usually have little fear of shell, but dread a volley from infantry. ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... the back furrow; a region where, at Christmas time, I have seen old strawberries still on the vines, by the side of vines in full blossom for the next crop, and grapes in the same stages, and open windows, and yet a grateful wood fire on the hearth in early morning; nor for the titanic operations of hydraulic surface mining, where large mountain streams are diverted from their ancient beds, and made to do the work, beyond the reach of all other agents, of washing out valleys and carrying away hills, and changing the whole surface of the country, to expose the stores ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... prodigal of its wealth, infinite in its desires. In its capacity boundless, in its courage indomitable; subduing the wilderness in a single generation, defying calamity, and through the flame and the debris of a commonwealth in ashes, rising suddenly renewed, formidable, and Titanic. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... damned imposition that he had to put up with. Well, he'd make them do since they were the best to be had. Adjusting the Crown of Charlemagne upon his brow, he stood on tiptoe to wriggle his way back into the embrace of the titanic crystal that was the Diamond Throne. There, he relaxed and gave himself over to the contemplation of the ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... were reared the Titanic stone-works on the White Caterthun, and the formidable stone and earth forts and walls on the Brown Caterthun, on Dunsinane, on Barra, on the Barmekyn of Echt, on Dunnichen, on Dunpender, and on the tops of hundreds ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... hind paws far up beneath his belly sank his talons deep into Taglat's chest, then, ripping downward with all his strength, Numa accomplished his design, and the disemboweled anthropoid, with a last spasmodic struggle, relaxed in limp and bloody dissolution beneath his titanic adversary. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to see all their beauty, all their grandeur and awesomeness in a single lifetime. From the crest of the Divide, north, west, and south, stretches a world of rugged peaks. Range on range, tier on tier, like the waves of a solidified ocean in a Titanic storm they roll away to ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... above and learn that a room on the higher level extends off in that direction and gets larger and higher. The walls are stalagmitic columns in cream color and decked in places with blood-red spots or blotches of Titanic size. The ceiling you cannot see. It is too high for the lights you have to reach. On the left you are suddenly confronted by a stalagmitic formation so large and so grand that all others are dwarfed into insignificance. You think of the ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... inner significance. Judged by the canons of formal beauty, the sky-line of New York city, seen from the North River, is ugly and distressing. But the responsive spirit, reaching ever outward into new forms of feeling, can thrill at sight of those Titanic structures out-topping the Palisades themselves, thrusting their squareness adventurously into the smoke-grayed air, and telling the triumph of man's mind over the forces of nature in this fulfillment ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... and hung, a dark blue transparent veil, over the village. In between the huts and beyond the church there were blue glimpses of a river, and beyond the river a misty distance. But nothing was so different from yesterday as the road. Something extraordinarily broad, spread out and titanic, stretched over the steppe by way of a road. It was a grey streak well trodden down and covered with dust, like all roads. Its width puzzled Yegorushka and brought thoughts of fairy tales to his ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... unattainable in a page of really scurrilous items about those in authority. Try it yourselves, my beamish lads. Think of something really bad about somebody. Write it down and gloat over it. Sometimes, indeed, it is of the utmost use in determining your future career. You will probably remember those Titanic articles that appeared at the beginning of the war in The Weekly Luggage-Train, dealing with all the crimes of the War Office—the generals, the soldiers, the enemy—of everybody, in fact, except the editor, staff and office-boy of The W.L.T. Well, the writer of those epoch-making ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the following generation could look back with satisfaction. Of how great consequence this evidence of national military character was, to the men who had no other experience, is difficult to be appreciated by us, in whose memories are the successes of the Mexican contest and the fierce titanic strife of the Civil War. In truth, Chippewa, Lundy's Lane, and New Orleans, are the only names of 1812 preserved to popular memory,[330] ever impatient of disagreeable reminiscence. Hull's surrender was indeed an exception; the iron there burned too deep to leave ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology, among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, Psyche, "Die Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... glacier in shadow, varying from dark indigo to a clouded white in exquisite gradations. The sky behind, so far as I could see, was all of a blue already enriched and darkened by the night, for the hill had what lingered of the sunset. But the top of my Titanic cloud flamed in broad sunlight, with the most excellent softness and brightness of fire and jewels, enlightening all the world. It must have been far higher than Mount Everest, and its glory, as I gazed up at it out of the night, was beyond wonder. Close ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... how it was talked about, written about, prayed about; and when Jules died, what a subject for talk for articles; it all went into pot. Hugo's vanity was Titanic, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... you were dead. There were all sorts of stories. When a year went by—the Titanic had gone down, and nobody knew but what you were on it—we gave up. I—in June we put up a tablet for you at the college. I went down for ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... desperately to understand the elusive impulse which urged him to go forth running, head up, pulses flaming; on, on, out of the reeking city to the cool, clean woods; on, on, to the heart of the world where all brutes and mankind strove in one titanic fight for supremacy. Conventions held him fast. He must go somewhere, however. Where? Was there in Old or New World an unbeaten track his feet had not trodden, a chance for adventure—man-strife? Manchuria! It would not do. His was not the mood for the porcelain, ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... flash had crimson streamers, and it swamped the road with violet waves. The fury and the splendor of the thing was overwhelming. Was it brought about by Nature's forces or God's machinery? Titanic—like a struggle between the divine and the evil power—some fresh rebellion of Satan just reported up there, and God, rightly indignant, giving the devil what for—or God angry with man! Very magnificent, whatever way you ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Wash the sun went down—the sea looked black and grim, For stormy clouds with murky fleece were mustering at the brim; Titanic shades! enormous gloom!—as if the solid night Of Erebus rose suddenly to seize upon the light! It was a time for mariners to bear a wary eye, With such a dark conspiracy ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... its abominable deficiency of merit, the exhibition was concluded, the German bade little Joe put his head into the box. Viewed through the magnifying glasses, the boy's round, rosy visage assumed the strangest imaginable aspect of an immense Titanic[5] child, the mouth grinning broadly, and the eyes and every other feature overflowing with fun at the joke. Suddenly, however, that merry face turned pale, and its expression changed to horror, for this easily ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... reported to have said that she thought they had built the canon too near the hotel. The enormous cleavage which the canon shows, the abrupt drop from the brink of thousands of feet, the sheer faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at first the impression that it is all the work of some titanic quarryman, who must have removed cubic miles of strata as we remove cubic yards of earth. Go out to Hopi Point or O'Neil's Point, and, as you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a blue or rose-purple gulf opening before you. The solid ground ceases suddenly, and an aerial perspective, vast ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Latin, and perhaps we also understand which side our bread is buttered. Beauty has its drawbacks: we know that. Wherefore beauty then? Why not rather aim at size, at the sublime, the gigantic, that which moves the masses?—And to repeat, it is easier to be titanic than to be beautiful; we ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... let the ruby light glint through his port. "Why do we struggle, Jimmy? Why, in Heaven's name, does anybody ever do anything but drift? Look at that damned foolishness over the water. . . . The most titanic struggle of the world. And look at the result. . . . Anarchy, rebellion, strife. What's the use; tell me that, my friend, what's the use? And the little struggles—the personal human struggles—are just ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... reason why the steersman should keep his hand strong and ready on the wheel, with an eye quick for each new drift in the hurricane, and each new set in the raging currents. This is ever the figure under which one conceives Danton—a Titanic shape doing battle with the fury of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood sweeps wildly over him, and then with unshaken foothold and undaunted front once more surveying the waste of waters, and striving ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... never forget that singular chase, which is probably unparalleled in the history of the universe. A prey to anxiety and the most distressing emotions, we did not properly observe the marvellous, the Titanic, I had almost said the diabolical aspect of the country beneath us, and still we could not altogether blind ourselves to it. Colossal jungles, resembling brakes of moss and canes five hundred or a thousand feet in height—creeks as black as porter, gliding under their dank ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... nationality? Certainly there is already a type of purely humanitarian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinctively thinks in terms of "us men" rather than of "I myself." It appeared long ago in that rebellious "Titanic" verse which took the side of oppressed mortals as against the unjust gods. Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" is a modern echo of this defiant or despairing cry of the "ill-used race of men." The songs of Burns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy,—pure personal egoism, then songs ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... glare, which seems presageful, and casts shadows as dark as they are mysterious and terrible. The dense blue of the sky is dim, sad, and ominous. But the most ominous and impressive element of the picture is a grim figure, the tall woman on the palace roof before us, who looks Titanic in her stateliness, and huge beyond humanity in the voluminous white drapery that wraps her limbs and bosom. Her hands are clenched and her arms thrust down straight and rigidly, each finger locked as in a ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... upon me as he talked, pacing the floor, thundering his paean of triumph, his Titanic gestures bruising the harmless air. Only one explanation, incredible, but possible, sufficed. Anything was possible, I thought—anything was probable—with this dreamer whom the trump of Fame, executing a whimsical fantasia, proclaimed ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... to a fancy unhampered by the need of definitions. This purely verbal pleasure was supplemented later by the excitement of gathering up crumbs of meaning from the rhetorical board. What could have been more stimulating than to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this Titanic cosmogony? Before Paulina's opinions had reached the stage when ossification sets in their form was ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... limbs; my muscles were quivering, and before it could stop me I had fled! The wildest of chases then ensued. I ran with a speed that would have shamed a record-beater on earth. With extraordinary nimbleness I vaulted over titanic boulders of rocks; jumped across dykes of infinite depth, scurried like lightning over tracts of rough, lacerating ground, and never for one ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... added to the mass Of perished states he mourned in their decline, And I in desolation: all that WAS Of then destruction IS; and now, alas! Rome—Rome imperial, bows her to the storm, In the same dust and blackness, and we pass The skeleton of her Titanic form, Wrecks of another world, whose ashes ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... yielded rapidly as the sun rose higher, the rays shooting through and through, making clear roads which flashed with light, and, as the clouds rolled away like the grey smoke of the sun's fire, the distant cliffs, which towered up steep and straight, like some titanic wall, came peering out now in patches bright with green and ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... rumble of the thunder became continuous, as did the blaze of the sheet-lightning, which was now flickering among the clouds in half a dozen places at once, bringing out into powerful relief their titanic masses, weirdly changing shapes, and varied hues, and converting the erstwhile Cimmerian darkness into a quivering, supernatural light, that caused the ocean to glow like molten steel, and revealed every object belonging to the ship as distinctly ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... which burst upon us as, just at sunrise, we drew rein at the summit of the Moengal Pass. Never, not in the Rockies, nor the Himalayas, nor the Alps, have I seen anything more sublime. At our feet yawned a vast valley, or rather a depression, like an excavation for some titanic building, hemmed in by perpendicular cliffs a thousand feet in height. Wafted by the morning breeze a mighty river of clouds poured slowly down the valley, filling it with gray-white fleece from brim to brim. Slowly the clouds dissolved before the mounting ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... engineering had been employed for a whole year in strengthening them, and in blocking up the openings which seemed the most accessible. Here redoubts were erected; here the whole face of a mountain was scarped and hewn into the appearance of the facet of some Titanic fortress; here the threads of mountain-rivulets—which would be something more than rivulets at the end of October and in November—were collected and brought together into one bed; and here rivers, tributaries of the great Tagus, were dammed up, or were provided with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... A titanic upheaval of water; volcanic fires leaping out of the heart of the deep; a roar so absolutely appalling that it reduced the ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... accomplished this thing. For his part Duchemin was unable to accept any possible scientific explanation, and will go to his grave believing that some half-witted cyclops, back beyond the dimmest dawn of Time, created Montpellier-le-Vieux in an hour of idleness, building him a play city of titanic monoliths, then wandered ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... Threading my way through the narrow winding street of La Tour, and skirting the base of the giant Castelluzzo, I emerged upon the open valley. I was enchanted by its mingled loveliness and grandeur. Its bottom, which might be from one to two miles in breadth, though looking narrower, from the titanic character of its mountain-boundary, was, up to a certain point, one continuous vineyard. The vine there attains a noble stature, and stretches its arms from side to side of the valley in rich and lovely festoons, veiling ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... dividing the front from the stage still remained, and the iron pass-doors stood ajar in an impossible and inaccessible frame. The arches that supported the stage were there, and the arches that supported the pit; and in the centre of the latter lay something like a Titanic grape-vine that a hurricane had pulled up by the roots, twisted, and flung down there; this was the great chandelier. Gye had kept the men's wardrobe at the top of the house over the great entrance staircase; when the roof fell in it came ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... In five minutes the heavens were a sea of flame. The thunder rolled over the ravine, the hills, the plains in deafening peals. Flash after flash, roar after roar, an endless throb of earth and air from the titanic bombardment from the skies. The flaming sky was sublime—a changing, ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... that the rain would cease and that the clouds would go away so that he might see, and his prayers were answered. A titanic hand dragged all the clouds off to the eastward, and dim grayish light came once more over the dripping forest. He saw forty or fifty yards ahead, and he advanced much faster. The ground continued to drop down, and his belief came true. At a point four or five miles north of the Indian camp he ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cloud banks of the rain-wet sky there indeed now was flung the bow of promise. But this titanic land did all things gigantically. This was no mere prismatic arch bridging the clouds. The colors all were there, yes, and of an unspeakable brilliance and individual distinctness in the scale; but they lay like a vast painted mist, a mural of some celestial ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough |
