"Colossal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if possible,—and as quickly as possible. This was his duty, not only as a lawyer employed in a particular case, but as a man who would be bound to prevent any great evil which he saw looming in the future. In his view of the case the marriage of Lady Anna Lovel, with a colossal fortune, to Daniel Thwaite the tailor, would be a grievous injury to the social world of his country,—and it was one of those evils which may probably be intercepted by due and discreet precautions. ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... beside remains! Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... beautiful and reverend Doria garden and left the old palace some scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of freight-cars. But there had remained up to my last visit that grot on the gardened hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules helplessly overlooked the offence offered by the railroad; and now suddenly here was the lofty wall of some new edifice stretching across in front of the Hercules and wholly shutting him from view; for all I know ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... them in the basket, and a visitor materially added to the already uneasy weight. But then they were used to it. The rungs of what did for ladder were so far apart as to necessitate making very long legs of it in places, which must have been colossal strides for the owners. The higher I clambered, the flimsier the structure got. However, I arrived, not without unnecessary trepidation, wormed my way into the basket and crouched down in some uneasiness ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... looked in truth as if he were well able to take care of himself in most circumstances, being of colossal bulk although ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... bound for Antwerp, had been driven into Plymouth and neighboring ports by Huguenot privateers. This money was urgently needed by Alva, the very capable but ruthless governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who, having just drowned the rebellious Dutch in blood, was now erecting a colossal statue to himself for having 'extinguished sedition, chastised rebellion, restored religion, secured justice, and established peace.' The Spanish ambassador therefore obtained leave to bring it ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... formidable devastation. But the plain is bounded by verdant mountains, looking down on a lovely extent of orange and olive groves, vineyards, and cornfields. But the grand feature of the landscape, and the world has nothing nobler, is the colossal Etna; its lower circle covered with vegetation—its centre belted with forests—its summit covered with snow—and, above all, a crown of cloud, which so often turns into a cloud of flame. The travellers were fortunate in seeing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... ago he remembered going up to Fauchery's rooms to thank him for a notice of a ball at the Tuileries, in which the journalist had mentioned him. The flat was between the ground floor and the first story and had a row of small square windows which were half hidden by the colossal signboard belonging to a shop. The last window on the left was bisected by a brilliant band of lamplight coming from between the half-closed curtains. And he remained absorbed and expectant, with his gaze fixed on this ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... belongings about the room and felt more at home. After I had dressed and stood ready to go down for my first dinner in my new home I felt happier. To be living, to be young and enthusiastic, to possess the colossal courage of youth, was enough to bring happiness into my heart again. I'm going to like this place. I'm going to work and play and live in this ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming in. It would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten in action. Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to supply a great variety of attractions. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... on a large, low table, with plates and jam and cakes and muffins—a nice, comfortable, substantial meal. A fire of whole logs burned in the colossal, open chimney. The huge, heavily shaded lamps concentrated all the light beneath ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... obelisk, and two nude statues in the centre. The obelisk was, as the inscription indicated, a relic of Egypt; the basin of the fountain was an immense bowl of Oriental granite, into which poured a copious flood of water, discolored by the rain; the statues were colossal,—two beautiful young men, each holding a fiery steed. On the pedestal of one was the inscription, OPUS PHIDIAE; on the other, OPUS PRAXITELIS. What a city is this, when one may stumble, by mere chance,—at ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Peachey, artiste to her Majesty, has now on private view at her rooms, 35, Rathbone Place, a superb collection of works intended for the Great Exhibition. They consist principally of an enormous bouquet of flowers and a colossal vase of fruit, both of which have been executed upon a scale never previously attempted in this country. The flowers are so arranged, that they appear to stand in a basket suspended over the surface of a pool of limpid water, in which the Victoria Regia and ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... unnatural gratification of the sexual instinct manifests itself in the violation of children, a practice that has increased greatly during the last thirty years. In France, during 1851-1875, 17,656 cases of this nature were tried. The colossal number of these crimes in France is intimately connected with the two-child system, and with the abstinence of husbands towards their wives. To the German population also we find people recommending Malthusianism, without stopping to think what the sequels will be. The so-called ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... structure of the Tuilleries. To the left, on looking at it—or rather behind the left wing is a large, well-trimmed flower-garden, terminating in walks, and a carriage way. Just in front of this garden, before a large bason of water, and fixed upon a sort of parapet wall—is a very pleasing, colossal group of two female statues—Pomona and Flora, as I conceive—sculptured by Dannecker. Their forms are made to intertwine very gracefully; and they are cut in a coarse, but hard and pleasingly-tinted, stone. For out-of-door figures, they are much superior to the generality of unmeaning allegorical ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to myself for several hours in the morning; but I found ample and pleasant employment in surveying the comforts and beauties of my habitation. For I was not forced to perform the part of an insignificant pigmy in the vast abodes of the colossal race of man: I possessed a beautiful little house proportioned to my size, pleasantly situated on a table in the furthest corner of the schoolroom, and commanding an extensive view of ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... another voice, and Hugh came forward laughing, and took his sister in his arms. "Well, little girl,—big, enormous, colossal little girl, how are you? Shut your eyes, Peg of Limavaddy, or they will drop out, and then ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... old city is marked by mounds and remains of walls, and on an isolated rock in the middle of the valley are considerable ruins of what appears to have been the acropolis, now known to the people as Ghulgulah. But the most famous remains at Bamian are two colossal standing idols, carved in the cliffs on the north side of the valley. They are 173 ft. and 120 ft. high respectively. These images, which have been much injured, apparently by cannon-shot, are cut in niches in the rock, and both images and niches have been coated with stucco. There ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... his tread could have saved the lives of the two unsuspecting persons before him. Startled, however, by the noise of his footsteps, Lamh Laudher turned round to observe who it was that followed them, and immediately the massy and colossal black now stripped of his cloak—for he had thrown it aside—stood in their presence. The female instinctively drew the cloak round her face, and Lamh Laudher was about to ask why he followed them, when the Boxer approached him in ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... with all possible speed, he was come a day too late, and he heard with inexpressible alarm and chagrin of the imprudent manifesto issued by the Duke but the day before. Surely no other great general of the world ever made so colossal, so fatal a blunder. In that arrogant and sanguinary manifesto could be heard the death-knell of the unhappy King of France, or so it seemed to Calvert, who was so deeply impressed with the rashness and danger of his Grace's diplomacy that he made no attempt to ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... because of that colossal egotism which insists upon personal ownership. One would expect this tendency to own each other to have died with the death of the institution of slavery, but it still exists, and as we have already observed, among those who sit in the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... of the colossal war has been achieved in these seven months. It has been demonstrated that no single nation in any part of the world can dominate the other nations, or, indeed, any other nation, unless the other principal powers consent to that domination; and, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... asserted that in whales that were killed on the coast of that country he had found Dutch harpoons. The Dutch then carried on whale-fishing only in the north part of the Atlantic. The find thus shows that whales can swim from one ocean to the other. As we know that these colossal inhabitants of the Polar Sea do not swim from one ice-ocean to the other across the equator, this observation must be considered very important, especially at a time when the question whether Asia and America are ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... "Colossal" does not seem to me to be the right epithet for Darwin's intellect. He had a clear rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination, and what made his greatness was the strict subordination of all these ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... This colossal bronze statue to the memory of George Canning, has lately been placed in Old Palace Yard, Westminster; the cost being defrayed by public subscription. The artist is Mr. Westmacott. The figure is to be admired for its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... fair-sized graveyard. Captain Jim's mere look was almost enough to still the heart-beat and paralyze the pistol hand of any but the wildest of them all. His great burning black eyes, glowering deadly menace from cavernous sockets of extraordinary depth, were set in a colossal grim face; his straight, thin-lipped mouth never showed teeth; his heavy, tight-curling black moustache and stiff black imperial always had the appearance of holding the under lip closely glued to the upper. In years of intimacy, I never once saw on ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... In rock-like phalanx stand, Cowards no more. Rise in colossal might, Rise till the storm of fight Wrap us in lurid light ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of about two miles rose a colossal mass, in shape somewhat like a monumental mound or tumulus, and apparently of the brightest silver. As I came in view of it, the sun was just covered by a passing cloud, from the lower edge of which the bright rays shot down obliquely upon this extraordinary phenomenon, lighting it up ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... native, died. The leading industries are linen-weaving, tanning, brewing, horse-dealing and the quarrying of marble and gypsum. About 3 m. to the south-west of the town is the Grotenburg, with Ernst von Bandel's colossal statue of Hermann or Arminius, the leader of the Cherusci. Detmold (Thiatmelli) was in 783 the scene of a conflict between the Saxons and the troops ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... chase of the receding boats, but a great fish pushed them on, despite the wind, which was against them, while another friendly monster of the sea swam around and around the little fleet, breaking the force of the waves. Lonopele then sent a colossal bird to vomit over the canoes and sink them, but mats were put up in tent-form as protections, and this ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... condemned in a prison of fire. Far better than any such doctrine is a calm confronting of the mystery of the future in its confessed secrecy as it is, and a peaceful resignation to the will of God in conscious ignorance and trust. And yet the believer in this scheme of colossal and ghastly necromancy, when confronted with the unanswerable arguments against it, is sometimes found clinging to it with willful tenacity, and bitterly complaining of those who refute it, that they would rob him of his faith and give him nothing in exchange. Suppose ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Jacques sprang towards the Indian, his face livid, his eyeballs almost bursting from their sockets, and his muscles rigid with passion. For an instant he regarded the savage intently as he shrank appalled before him; then his colossal fist fell like lightning, with the weight of a sledge-hammer, on Misconna's forehead, and drove him against the outer door, which, giving way before the violent shock, burst from its fastenings and hinges, and fell, along with the ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... of reward for you if you serve me faithfully throughout. Follow the habits of a lifetime by playing me false and there's an end to you. You shall have for constant bodyguard these two lilies of the desert," and he pointed to the colossal Nubians who stood there invisible almost in the shadow but for the flash of teeth and eyeballs. "They shall watch over you, and see that no harm befalls you so long as you are honest with me, and they shall strangle you at the first sign of treachery. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... not more than 1,500,000,000, and the effectual indexing of this number of people, the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of various material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal convictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and the elimination of the dead, colossal task though it would be, is still not so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with the work of the post-offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing of such libraries as that of the British Museum, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... maintained the castle, both through her own credit in the town, and through the fear inspired in the village by her rough extortion. The all-powerful green gown floated to and fro, ever newer and more beautiful. Her own beauty grew, as it were, colossal with success and pride. Frightened at a result so natural, everyone said, "At her time of life how ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... decadence which has lost even the historical remembrance of the gigantic societies which have disappeared. We are stupidly proud of a few ingenious pieces of mechanism which we have recently invented, and we forget the colossal splendours and the vast works impossible to any other nation, which are found in the ancient land of the Pharaohs. We have steam, but steam is less powerful than the force which built the Pyramids, dug out hypogea, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... and walked rapidly. No window, however beautiful, lured him to pause. He did not waste a single minute. And soon he was gazing up at a really imposing and colossal structure which, big as it looked (for it seemed to occupy a whole block), was plainly not in use. At one corner the building mounted to a peak. On going all the way around it, he discovered smaller peaks at each of the other corners. There were any number of entrances, too; ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the eighth century, though within the radius of Assyrian influence, it was still an independent kingdom. It is to this period that we must assign the earliest of the inscribed monuments discovered at Zenjirli and its neighbourhood. At Gerjin, not far to the north-west, was found the colossal statue of Hadad, chief god of the Aramaeans, which was fashioned and set up in his honour by Panammu I, son of Qaral and king of Ya'di.(1) In the long Aramaic inscription engraved upon the statue Panammu records the prosperity ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... to build, for the Northern barbarians always kept cunningly slipping round the uncompleted ends, and the Mings, the last purely Chinese sovereigns to reign in Peking, actually added three hundred miles to this colossal structure in the year 1547, or nearly two thousand years after the first bricks had been cemented. That shows you what people they were, and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... quite impossible for them to ignore? Their theory of eclipses is well known, foreign ears being periodically stunned by the gonging of an excited crowd of natives, who are endeavouring with hideous noises to prevent some imaginary dog of colossal proportions from banqueting, as the case may be, upon the sun or moon. At such laughable exhibitions of native ignorance it will be observed that there is always a fair sprinkling of well-to-do, educated persons, who not only ought to know better themselves, but should be making some ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... excessively comical as he stalked in and around, trying vainly to appear at ease. And yet the thought occurred to her, "If he only knew what to do with his colossal proportions—knew how to manage them—he would make an imposing-looking man." And when De Forrest posed beside him just before they went out to tea, even this thought flashed across her, "Julian, seems like an elegant manikin beside a man." If De Forrest had only known ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... and squadrons of Indian cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after all is a ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... Baths of Caracalla, where the picture is not set in a frame of hideous houses, awakened her native enthusiasm. "A grandiose ruin," she exclaims, "of colossal proportions; it is shut away, isolated, silent and respected. There you feel the terrific power of the Caesars, and the opulence of a nation intoxicated with ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Then those colossal piers, forty feet broad some of them, and nearly one hundred feet high,—they easily eclipsed what I had recently seen in a mine, and which I at the time imagined shamed all the architecture of the world,—where the mountain was upheld over a vast space by massive piers left by the miners, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... those who were immediately around him, and the ministers sitting on the other side of the green table, and listening with that interest, and respectful attention which became the occasion. It was a strange and touching spectacle, to those who remembered the form of colossal energy, and the clear and thrilling tones, that had once startled, disturbed, and controlled senates. Mr. O'Connell was on his legs for nearly two hours, assisted occasionally, in the management of his documents, by some devoted aide-de-camp. To the house generally, it was a performance ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... implements, posts, supports, and every sort of floating lumber with it; and cutting under the flour mill, tipped it cleverly over on its side and went crashing on its way down-river. At Edgewood it pushed colossal blocks of ice up the banks into the roadway, piling them end upon end ten feet in air. Then, tearing and rumbling and booming through the narrows, it covered the intervale at Pleasant Point and made a huge ice bridge below Union Falls, a bridge so solid that it stood there ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... loyalty and chivalry in the pair to furnish out a hundred marriages. Yet one sees Carlyle stamping and cursing through life, and never seeing what lay close to his hand. I admire his life not because it was a triumph, but because it was such a colossal failure, and so finely atoned for by the noble and great-minded repentance of a man who recognised at last that it was of no use to begin by trying to be ruler over ten cities, unless he was first ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "It's a ghastly position for a man to be placed in. Fancy—just a poor, ordinary, human being like myself having the power of losing or saving the world in his hands! And then, of course, there's a woman in the question—the Eternal Feminine—even in such a colossal ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... The father, colossal egotist that he was, heard Phil's protests with mild amusement and quiet pride in his independence, for he loved ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... author of the Tatler" contemporary with all these editors. The truth is, Addison was well aware of Shakspeare's hold on the popular mind; too well aware of it. The feeble constitution of the poetic faculty, as existing in himself, forbade his sympathizing with Shakspeare; the proportions were too colossal for his delicate vision; and yet, as one who sought popularity himself, he durst not shock what perhaps he viewed as a national prejudice. Those who have happened, like ourselves, to see the effect of passionate music and "deep-inwoven harmonics" upon the feeling of an idiot, we ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... rosy illusions, whose smiling hopes were revealed in his admirable letters to his brother. Already he meditated a conchology of Corsica, a colossal history of all the molluscs which live upon its soil or in its waters. (3/3.) He collected all the shells he could procure. He analysed, described, classed, and co-ordinated not only the marine species, but the terrestrial and freshwater shells also, extant or fossil. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the history of our efforts, the colored men stopped suddenly, and with their hands thrust deep in their breeches-pockets, and their mouths gaping open, stood gazing with astonishment, wonder, and surprise, at the stupendous moral colossal statues of our Anti-Slavery friends and brethren, who in the heat and zeal of honest hearts, from a desire to make atonement for the many wrongs inflicted, promised a great deal more than they have ever been ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... a century, was a coffee house, much frequented by sea-faring men, known as the "Old Neptune" Inn. The effigy of the sea-god, armed with his formidable trident, placed over the main entrance, seemed to threaten the passers-by. We can remember, as yesterday, his colossal proportions. "Old Neptune" [90] has disappeared about ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... gate is a fine bronze colossal bust of Alexander Von Humboldt, the work of Professor Blaiser of Berlin, which was presented to the park by the German citizens of New York, and inaugurated on the 14th of September, 1869, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... This was true. Grim's colossal proportions were increased so much by his hairy dress that he seemed to have spread out into the dimensions of two large men rolled into one. But O'Riley was not to be overturned with impunity. Skulking round behind the crew, who were laughing at Grim's joke, he came upon the giant in ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... higher up the Nile, and watched at the uncovering of those wonderful colossal figures which stand, or sit, before the temple of Abou-Simbel. I tried to imagine what manner of things such large statues could be; I longed for one sight of the faces, said to be so superb, which showed what the great Rameses looked like. Mamma and papa could see them, that was ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... regarded him with feelings of undisguised awe, astonishment and delight, and was often sorely perplexed within himself as to whether he or Captain Wopper was the greater man. Both were colossal in size and energetic in body, and both were free and easy in manners, as well as good-humoured. No doubt, as Gillie argued with himself (and sometimes with Susan), the Professor was uncommon larned an' deep, but then the Captain had a humorous ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... colossal ass," he growled. "You forget how strong I am, how much I can still hurt you. I have offered you a chance to get Peace. ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... a German soldier on leave came up and spat in his face. The Frenchman felled the German with a resounding box on the ear. Alarums! Excursions! A German officer rushed up to enquire while the Frenchman was struggling with two colossal German military policemen and the Englishman was striving to free him. Vivie explained to the officer what had occurred. He bowed and saluted: seized the soldier-spitter by the collar and kicked him so frightfully that Vivie had to implore ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... fresh paint and whitewash. Some little soldiers in dingy uniforms, ill-cut and ill-fitting, stood about gates and doors. On the first floor were the apartments occupied by his Excellency. Don Silverio was kept waiting for some time in a vestibule of fine proportions painted by Diotisalvi, with a colossal marble group in its centre of the ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... monument, but Leo X. refused to allow the sacred dust to be removed. Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight years after the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly built in Santa Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even the usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built originally in 1483, by Cardinal Bembo, was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692, and finally rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal Gonzaga, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... however, that with the colossal growth of the Social Democratic party in Germany in numbers and the introduction into it of elements from various quarters, a certain deterioration, one may hope and believe only temporary, has become apparent in its ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... of Blackwood only can afford, misrepresentation remains without excuse on the question of that fostering protection to which, in a larger degree, if not exclusively, the cotton manufacture of Great Britain is indebted for its growth to its present colossal, mammoth-like, and almost unwieldy grandeur. We do not, however, whilst re-establishing facts in their purity, dream the practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of men unfortunately ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... organism is always called the ovum (or ovulum, egg, or egg-cell); the male cells are known as the sperm or seed-cells, or the spermatozoa (also spermium and zoospermium). The ripe ovum is, on the whole, one of the largest cells we know. It attains colossal dimensions when it absorbs great quantities of nutritive yelk, as is the case with birds and reptiles and many of the fishes. In the great majority of the animals the ripe ovum is rich in yelk and much larger than the other cells. On the other hand, the next cell which we have to consider in ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... star in Infinitude, but for us a colossal and portentous luminary. Hail, divine Benefactor! How should we not adore, when we owe him the glow of the warm and cheery days of summer, the gentle caresses by which his rays touch the undulating ears, and gild them with the touch? The Sun sustains our ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... consists of nine large arches; and three in the centre open, forming the principal entrance; and three at each end, filled with windows of the Doric order, are adorned with pilasters, entablatures, and pediments. On the key-stones of the nine arches are carved, in alto relievo, nine colossal masks, representing the Ocean, and the eight main Rivers of England, viz. Thames, Humber, Mersey, Dee, Medway, Tweed, Tyne, and Severn, with appropriate emblems to denote ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... majestic, diabolical, beautiful, absurd—anything you wished to call it. Look away from the near-by guns where the faces of the gunners were illumined and you could not conceive of the scene as being of human origin; but mixing awed humility with colossal egoism in varying compounds of imagination and fact, you might think of your little group of observers as occupying a point of view in space where one planet hidden in darkness was throwing aerolites at another hidden in darkness striking it with mighty explosions, and the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... illustrates his capacities for the highest range of historical portraiture and characterization, and will occasion regrets wherever similar subjects have in recent years been confided to other artists. We have heard that it is in contemplation to place in the park of our own city a colossal figure of Mr. Webster, by the same great sculptor. It is fit that while Charleston glories in the possession of this counterfeit of her dead Aristides (for in the indefectable purity of his public and private life Mr. Calhoun was surpassed by no character in the temples of Grecian ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... may at some distant epoch enable the curious antiquary to determine the scite of our British Daphne; but I could not avoid feeling, that if the pile of Ranelagh and its glories have so totally disappeared, in so short a season, no human work, even yonder colossal specimens of Gothic and Grecian art, or the great Metropolis itself, can be deemed a standard of locality for the guide of distant ages! I moved pensively from a spot which exciting such solemn and affecting emotions, had diminished ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... field for the intermission. He had forgotten about his story of the game. The old spectre of failure obsessed him. It was already haunting the pathway of his boy. Was he also to be beaten by one colossal blunder? Henry Seeley felt that Ernest's whole career hung upon his behavior in the second half. How would the lad "take his medicine"? Would it break his heart or rouse him to fight more valiantly? As if the father ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... eighteenth century, the Turguts, a branch of the Kalmuck Tartars, unable to endure the oppressive tyranny of their rulers, trekked into Russia, and settled on the banks of the Volga. Some seventy years later, once more finding the burden of taxation too heavy, they again organized a trek upon a colossal scale. Turning their faces eastward, they spent a whole year of fearful suffering and privation in reaching the confines of Ili, a terribly diminished host. There they received a district, and were placed under the jurisdiction of ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... to the question were left, creating two very distinct groups of supporters: on one side, those favoring a monster of colossal strength; on the other, those favoring an "underwater boat" of tremendous ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... is the sod, and thunder dies away. But Captain Turret, "Old Hemlock" tall, (A leaning tower when his tank brimmed all,) Manoeuvre out alive from the war did he? Or, too old for that, drift under the lee? Kentuckian colossal, who, touching at Madeira, The huge puncheon shipped o' prime Santa-Clara; Then rocked along the deck so solemnly! No whit the less though judicious was enough In dealing with the Finn who made the great huff; Our three-decker's giant, a grand boatswain's mate, Manliest of ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... of the war, the country was exhausted by its long and protracted struggle with the colossal power of England. The Eastern States, which furnished most of the shipping, had made great sacrifices, and had contributed more than their share in men, money, and ships to the common defence. They were creditor States, and their means were locked up in "final settlements." Their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... returned the singer proudly, as he took a colossal pinch of snuff. He seemed to say that he in his profession was constantly thrown with people like that, whereas I—oh, I, of course, was always occupied with students and poor devils who had no ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... a concept! And what colossal gall! In a human being, such a statement would be regarded as proof positive that he was off the beam. In a robot, it was simply the logical extension of what he had ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the magnitude, the novelty and the large remuneration of his enterprise. It was a question of nothing more nor less than the production of an entire library. Balzac's imagination awoke to the possibilities of this scheme which seemed to him a colossal one, capable of laying the foundations of numerous fortunes. He calculated what he might make out of it personally, and decided that at last destiny had deigned to smile upon him. Canel was far richer in hopes for the success of his project than in money to carry it out, ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... the trees and the bridge, I observed them halt suddenly, and while I was wondering for what, forth, from amid the leaves and branches of the palms, rode a figure that loomed up in the moonlight in colossal proportions. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... publicly known that enormous frauds have been perpetrated on the Treasury and that colossal fortunes have been made at the public expense. This species of corruption has increased, is increasing, and if not diminished will soon bring us into total ruin and disgrace. The public creditors and the taxpayers are alike interested in an honest administration of the finances, and neither ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... off the finger. Hence the sculptor of granite is forced to confine himself to, and to seek for, certain types of form capable of expression in his material; he is naturally driven to make his figures simple in surface, and colossal in size, that they may bear his blows; and this simplicity and magnitude are exactly the characters necessary to show the granitic or porphyritic color to the best advantage. And thus we are guided, almost forced, by the laws of nature, to ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... that the dunces pose a colossal threat, a threat which warrants Pope's numerous echoes of Paradise Lost. Harte's Essay, in fact, contains several echoes of the same poem. Though, like most of Pope's, these Miltonic echoes are given a comic turn which indicates a wide gap between the real satanic host and its London ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Pacific, indeed, had been slowly building from San Francisco Bay up through Marin and Sonoma counties to Willits in Mendocino County. But there it had stuck to await that indefinite day when its finances and the courage of its board of directors should prove equal to the colossal task of continuing the road two hundred miles through the mountains to Sequoia on Humboldt Bay. For twenty years the Humboldt pioneers had lived in hope of this; but eventually they had died in despair or were in ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... Zouave et la Nounou," not to mention splendid rough sketches by John Leech, Charles Keene, Tenniel, Sambourne, Furniss, Caldecott, etc.; not to mention, also, endless little sketches in silver point of a most impossibly colossal, blackavised, shaggy-coated St. Bernard—signed with the familiar French name of some gay troubadour of the pencil, some stray half-breed like myself, and who seems to have loved his dog as much as I ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Sallust. The villa is now the property of Prince Piombini, a ticket from whom procured us admission. A little within the gateway, to the right, is a casino, containing two large rooms filled with sculpture, much of which is very valuable. A colossal head of Juno, I believe, is considered the greatest treasure of the collection, but I did not myself feel it to be so, nor indeed did I receive any strong impression of its excellence. I admired nothing so much, I think, as the face of Penelope (if it be her face) in the group supposed also ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... led to fairy land and worlds of marvel—the one to Florac, so majestically placed under the colossal shadow of the Causse Mejean and above the lovely valley of the Jonte; the other across the steppe of Sauveterre and by the strange dwellings of the Caussenards to the picturesque little town of St. Eminie, the rapids of the Tarn, and ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... capitalists are about the cleverest and slipperiest financiers in the world. We could have financed it twenty times over in Naples in a day, but neither Moliterno nor I was willing to trust them. The thing is enormous, you see—a really colossal fortune—and Italian law is full of ins and outs, and the first man we talked to confidentially would have given us his word to play straight, and, the instant we left him, would have flown post-haste for Basilicata and grabbed for himself the two thirds ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... of an aqueduct by means of which the town on the opposite hill was supplied; it was at this point scarcely two feet in altitude, but, as we descended, it became higher and higher, and its proportions more colossal. Near the bottom of the valley it took a turn to the left, bestriding the road with one of its arches. I looked up, after passing under it; the water must have been flowing near a hundred feet above my head, and I was filled with wonder at the immensity of the structure which conveyed ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... been questioned, its verity and worth, the Game itself, the biggest thing in the world—or what had been the biggest thing in the world until that chance afternoon and that chance purchase in Silverstein's candy store, when Genevieve loomed suddenly colossal in his life, overshadowing all other things. He was beginning to see, though vaguely, the sharp conflict between woman and career, between a man's work in the world and woman's need of the man. But he was not capable of generalization. He ...
— The Game • Jack London
... straight from the unbreathed air of the ocean to bathe New York, to put life and hope and health into its people. Rod and Susan turned their faces southward toward this breeze, drank in great draughts of it. They saw a colossal statue, vivid as life in the dusk, in the hand at the end of the high-flung arm a torch which sent a blaze of light streaming ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... fairy bower. Of this palace Beethoven was an early inmate; and in order adequately to express his own peculiar forms of style, he had no other means but to surmount the edifice with that defying and colossal tower which no one will probably presume to carry higher ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... in person to her court was Falconet, of whose controversy with the philosopher we shall have a few words to say in a later chapter. This introduction to her was due to Diderot. She had entreated him to find for her a sculptor who would undertake a colossal statue of Peter the Great. Falconet was at the height of his reputation in his own country; in leaving it he seems to have been actuated by no other motive than the desire of an opportunity of erecting an immense monument of his art, though Diderot's eloquence ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... minutes to three the next afternoon the fur-trappers walked warily towards the selected corner. In the near distance rose the colossal pile of Messrs. Goliath and Mastodon's famed establishment. The afternoon was brilliantly fine, exactly the sort of weather to tempt a gentleman of advancing years into the discreet exercise ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... the web of its external circumstances, as well as directly. Nay, often this is the only way by which we can get at it at all. And well may we rejoice over the rescue from specific vices, and commend the zeal and patience which fasten upon some colossal evil to batter and drive it from the world. But notwithstanding such noble achievement, how many have remained among the tombs, or gone back to the wilderness—demoniacs still! It is an old truth, but I say it as though it were in the conviction of a fresh fact forced upon me by these great ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... which exerts such a compelling spell upon us he will want to probe to the bottom. He will not be content with the outward prettiness of butterfly and orchid, or with the mere profusion and variety of life, or with the colossal size of animals and trees. He will want to burrow down and get at the very root and mainspring of this forest life. He will want to reach the very Heart of Nature here manifested in such manifold variety. He will want to arrive at the inner significance of all this variety of life. Then ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Keilschrifttexte Asurbanipals gave some seventy more. Professor Delitzsch also published a number in his Zur assyrisch-babylonischen Briefliteratur,(807) and in his translations and comments laid the real foundation for their interpretation. In 1892 Professor R. F. Harper began the colossal task of publishing the text of all the letters from Nineveh, in his Assyrian and Babylonian Letters belonging to the K Collections of the British Museum, of which eight volumes are ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... tiny woman, with the general physiognomy of a Dutch doll, looking, in comparison with Bob's mother, who filled up the passage in the rear, very much like one of those human figures which the artist finds conveniently standing near a colossal statue to show the proportions. The tiny woman curtsied and looked up at Maggie with some awe as soon as she had opened the door; but the words, "Is my brother at home?" which Maggie uttered smilingly, made her turn round with sudden excitement, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... in which this colossal head had rested was about four feet in depth, and narrowed towards the bottom. I put down my hand and drew out—a human thigh-bone. The touch of this would have turned me sick again, had not the statue's face already surfeited me with horror. As it was, I was ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of Bristol, although essentially a manufacturing and commercial centre, is not deficient in names which have enjoyed a widespread literary reputation. All through the first half of the present century Bristol was associated with the colossal fame of Hannah More, but the idol is long since forgotten, and now, a little more than forty years after her death, many might ask, Who was Hannah More? She was the daughter of the schoolmaster at Stapleton, near Bristol, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... first sent news of it down the line, reached over and shook Oliver's hand gravely, while he wiped a theatrical tear from his eye; while my Lord Cockburn, with feet and hands still busy, returned word to Oliver by Tomlins, "not to make a colossal ass of himself." Oliver bore their ridicule good-naturedly, but without receding from his opinion in any way, a fact which ultimately raised him in the estimation of the group. Only when the villain was thrown over the pasteboard ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... secret sources; while her pretentious ignorance was enough to alarm any student not under the glamor of her audacity. She made the most grotesque mistakes in science, while pompously setting right in their own province such colossal authorities as Darwin and Haeckel. She had certainly read very widely (or got others to read very widely for her) in "occult" literature; but wherever one's own knowledge enabled one to test, she was a poor smatterer; and the same ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... of Regulus were seen, and his colossal form towering above the ambassadors who had returned with him from Rome; when the news passed from lip to lip that the dreaded warrior, so far from advising the Roman senate to consent to an exchange of prisoners, had urged them to pursue, with exterminating ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... ages. In all that stretch of time the Sargasso must have received strange prey, triremes, caravels, galleons, schooners, men o' war, derelicts ancient and modern, but certainly never before had the art of man placed such a colossal and ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... improvements notwithstanding the illusions which were dispersed by the Krach. One of the most conspicuous and charming municipal displays in the Paris Exposition is the group of charts and plans sent from Pesth. The patriot Deak is to have a colossal monument; the quays are to be rendered more substantial against inundations than they are at present; and many massive public edifices are to be erected. The Danube is often unruly, and once nearly destroyed the city of Pesth, also doing much damage along the slopes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... he, as he saw all were waiting for something further, "there can be no doubt that Tintoretto was a great painter and a notable man. To read the story of his life,—his struggles to learn the art,—his assurance of the worth of his own work, and his colossal ambitions, is as interesting as ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... two great heroes who are commemorated in modern London are Wellington and Nelson. Trafalgar Square commemorates Nelson's death and greatest victory, the Nelson Column standing in the centre, with Landseer's colossal lions reposing at its base. Passing eastward along the Strand, beyond Charing Cross and Somerset House, we come to Wellington Street, which leads to Waterloo Bridge across the Thames. This admirable structure, the masterpiece of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... after another down the hill. They both squealed. Men of that kind almost always squeal when they're hit. The impudence of that fellow Rawdon! Pon't forget Miss Du Plessis' letter; that's our card now. Never in all my life have I met with such colossal cheek!" ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... them—money, material, labour; only space was restricted. To begin, therefore, they built high perforce. But to do so was to discover a whole new world of architectural beauty, of exquisite ascendant lines, and long after the central congestion had been relieved by tunnels under the sea, four colossal bridges over the east river, and a dozen mono-rail cables east and west, the upward growth went on. In many ways New York and her gorgeous plutocracy repeated Venice in the magnificence of her architecture, painting, metal-work and sculpture, for example, in the grim intensity ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... between two of the great buttresses, must have been given by some vicar long ago, who was desirous of attaching to himself the ancestors of this line of embroiderers, as master chasuble-makers and furnishers for the Cathedral clergy. On the southern side, the narrow garden was barred by the colossal building; first, the circumference of the side chapels, whose windows overlooked the flower-beds, and then the slender, long nave, that the flying buttresses supported, and afterwards the high roof covered with ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... every Monte Carlo season the newspapers used to tell of the colossal winnings of purely imaginary players. Sometimes the favored child of chance was a Russian, sometimes an Englishman, sometimes an American. He was usually a myth, of course. As Mrs. Prig observed to Mrs. Camp, "there ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the Newcastle oration, and for some months subsequently, the work of expansion on a colossal scale which the Master-General of the Ordnance had undertaken was still, speaking generally, rather on the footing of the building of which the foundations are only beginning to be laid even if the excavations ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... discovered by somebody, and by somebody who has an interest in discovering it. Yet the Germans who first gained the full transcendental insight were romantic people; they were more or less frankly poets; they were colossal egotists, and wished to make not only their own knowledge but the whole universe centre about themselves. And full as they were of their romantic isolation and romantic liberty, it occurred to them to imagine that all reality might be ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... me only to complete the conquest of Persia; ... and to impose tribute on Lydia; ... and erect a colossal monument to myself, ... and inscribe thereon the military achievements of my life. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... blunders of his negotiations and the alliances he has endeavoured to form, has placed this country on a mine far more dangerous and destructive than that upon which he thinks Europe was placed by the colossal power of Russia. There is another point I have to touch upon. To me it was really frightful to hear the noble Lord the Member for London (Lord John Russell) tell the House that we are not lighting for ourselves, but ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... counter are four-and-twenty young men, in white cravats, making the boxes. At the bottom of the shop are three elderly accountants, posting the vast financial transactions accruing from the Pill in three enormous ledgers. Over the door are my name, portrait, and autograph, expanded to colossal proportions, and surrounded in flowing letters, by the motto of the establishment, 'Down with the Doctors!' Even Mrs. Wragge contributes her quota to this prodigious enterprise. She is the celebrated woman whom I have cured of indescribable agonies from every ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... said. "What wealth and power a monarch must have had to raise such a colossal pile! I thought you said, Chebron, that your kings were bound by laws as well as other people. If so, how could this king have exacted such terrible toil and labor from his subjects as this must ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Rosse, of Washington, refers to "New England prudishness," and "the colossal modesty of some New York policemen, who in certain cases want to give written, rather than oral testimony." He adds: "I have known this sentiment carried to such an extent in a Massachusetts small town, that a shop-keeper was obliged to drape a small, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... four panels executed for the Bartolini family. One of the others is in the Louvre, and a third in the Uffizi. Another—or indeed almost the only other—work of Uccello which is now to be seen is the colossal painting in monochrome (terra-verde) on the wall of the cathedral at Florence. Strangely enough, this equestrian portrait commemorates an Englishman, Sir John Hawkwood, whose name is Italianized in the inscription into ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... sons, the eldest of whom is now a grizzled man. Besides our host, four of the brothers are here to-night; the handsome melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon, with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and my friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist was ever more convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them, below the salt, were ranged the knechts ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... extremity of the Sierra, and maintains a far more impressive and commanding individuality than any other mountain within the limits of California. Go where you may, within a radius of from fifty to a hundred miles or more, there stands before you the colossal cone of Shasta, clad in ice and snow, the one grand unmistakable landmark—the pole star of the landscape. Far to the southward Mount Whitney lifts its granite summit four or five hundred feet higher ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... would permit me to have a free prospect to the south-west; when I observed, at a very great distance, towards the Auchtermaunshohe, a human figure, of a monstrous size. A violent gust of wind having almost carried away my hat, I clapped my hand to it by moving my arm towards my head, and the colossal figure did the same. The pleasure which I felt on this discovery can hardly be described; for I had already walked many a weary step in the hope of seeing this shadowy image, without being able to satisfy my curiosity. I immediately made another movement by bending my body, ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... that there should be no biography written of him, a position that might indicate extreme modesty, colossal conceit, or distinct cowardice. Whatever the reason, it has not been entirely obeyed, and rightly. A man of the power of Thackeray cannot live without the world being in some way better; it is only good that those who never knew him ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Hellas under Alexander the Great and his successors, and the instability of social and political conditions consequent thereon, the Tyche-religion received a fresh impetus. With one stroke Hellas was flung into world politics. Everything grew to colossal proportions in comparison with earlier conditions. The small Hellenic city-states that had hitherto been each for itself a world shrank into nothing. It is as if the old gods could not keep pace with this violent process of expansion. Men felt a craving for a wider and more comprehensive religious ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... mind a vague and awful idea of some mysterious revelation, anterior to all recorded history, of which the dispersed fragments might have been retained amidst the impostures and superstitions of later religions. Indeed the mythology of the Divine Comedy is of the elder and more colossal mould. It breathes the spirit of Homer and Aeschylus, not ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... manifestation of a love deeper than our plummets can fathom. But probably we do not sufficiently realise what gigantic strength went to the completion of that sacrifice. We know the solemn imagining of a great artist who has painted a colossal Death overbearing the weak resistance of a puny Love; but here love is the giant, and his sovereign command brings Death obedient to it, to do his work. Yes, that weak man hanging on the Cross is therein revealed as 'the power of God.' Strange clothing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Gethsemane in St. Matthew in the Gospel which she brought, together with a large supply of chocolate and the Fioretti di S. Francesco), the ugliness of the women, &c. &c. And meanwhile the fat pink profile perdu, the toupe of grey hair like powder of a colossal soprano sways to and fro fatuously over the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... in their leisurely way talked of literature and music, of sculpture and painting and travel abroad, as their fathers and even grandfathers had done—in times when the rest of the country, like one colossal harbor, changing, heaving, seething, had had time for only the crudest things, for railroads, mining camps, belching mills, vast herds of cattle and droves of sheep, for the frontier towns my mother had loathed, for a Civil War, for ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... than colossal; it's abnormal and—" A moment's pause, then with ironic pauses—"and quite unnecessary save as a matter of display, unless you think you need it to sustain you through the ordeal you are courting. You wish to help me finish and ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... deserved to be cured. They did not measure the drugs with precision in preparing their medicines, as do our chemists nowadays, nor were their prescriptions written in Latin nor with cabalistic marks—the asbestos stomachs and colossal minds of our forefathers were much above such petty minuteness; nor did they administer the doses with exactness. "The bigth of a walnut," "enough to lie on a pen knifes point," "the weight of a shilling," "enough to cover a French crown," "as bigg as a haslenut," "as great ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... men who wait to welcome you to the blessings of our society. There they stand, like the majestic statues that line the entrance to an eternal pyramid. And when I look upon one statue, and another, and another, and contemplate the colossal greatness of their proportions, as Canova gazed with rapture upon the sun-god of the Vatican, I envy not the man whose heart expands not with the sense of a new nobility, and whose eye kindles not with the heart's ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... your Highness; the past has disturbed you. We can stand war, and it is possible that we might win, even against Jugendheit; but war at this late day would be a colossal blunder. Victory would leave us where we began thirty years ago. One does not go to war for a cause that has been practically dead these sixteen years. And an insult to Jugendheit might precipitate war. It would be far wiser to let me answer the prince regent, saying that ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... fostering care; and he began his career of builder and restorer by repairs and restorations, which much improved and beautified that edifice. Before the southern propylaea he re-erected, in the first year of his independent reign, colossal statues of his father, Thothmes I., and his grandfather, Amenhotep, which had been thrown down in the troublous time succeeding Thothmes the First's death. He then proceeded to rebuild the central sanctuary, the work of Usurtasen ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... of dons, tradesmen, bargees, and cricket-field or river-side cads. Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances of years ago, in University novels. The mildest of men suddenly pose as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who "screw up" timid dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with wet towels bound round their fevered brows. These sketches are all nonsense. Men who do these things do not write about them; and men who write about ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... amuse all cricketers, and while from the male point of view it may serve as a good illustration of the fickleness of woman and the impossibility of forecasting what course she will take, the fair sex will find in it an equally shining proof of the colossal vanity of man. ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune—his nerves were sadly jangled. A horror of the human face obsessed his waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced. As his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world—else would his art suffer. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... others upon the white or colored. Most unquestionably, so far as this went, it furnished a negative circumstance in favor of the negro, for the footsteps were very different in outline from his, and smaller, for Aaron was a man of colossal build. And as to his knowledge of the state in which the premises had been found, and his having so familiarly relied upon the fact of no robbery having taken place as an argument on his own behalf, he contended that he had himself ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... this is a colossal epic, not of a man or a hero, but of the whole race of men; and that Milton's characters are such as no human hand could adequately portray. But the scenes, the splendors of heaven, the horrors of hell, the serene ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... this liberty even into history; they wanted to see in it only the general march, and broad movements of peoples and nations; and on these great movements, brought to view in courses very distinct and very clear, they placed a few colossal figures—symbols of noble character and of ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... scene of great activity. Men bearing strange instruments came and took extensive measurements; large bodies of gentlemen in corduroys, armed with powerful implements indicative of toil, arrived and smoked clay pipes; a special light railway was rapidly constructed, and bore colossal cranes and more gentlemen with clay pipes to the scene of action. And Mr. McTurk went in person ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... to 1880, we produced over seven hundred millions of dollars of precious metals, and the last year the valuation is estimated at seventy-five millions in gold and silver; and rising above these colossal and phenomenal figures, our great manufacturing people during the past year have produced not less than five thousand millions of dollars in valuation. The mind staggers in the presence of these ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... bones he flung to the ground at Bar Harbor, where they are still to be seen, turned to stone, while across the bay he threw the entrails, and they, too, are visible as rocks, dented with his arrow-points. Mount Kineo was anciently a cow moose of colossal size that he slew and turned into a height of land, and the Indians trace the outline of the creature in the uplift to this day. Little Kineo was a calf moose that he slew at the same time, and Kettle Mountain is his ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... nothing." Yet he was no less capable of discerning excellence than the Medici himself, and his spirit strove incessantly after the accomplishment of vast designs. Between Julius and Michael Angelo there existed a strong bond of sympathy due to community of temperament. Both aimed at colossal achievements in their respective fields of action. The imagination of both was fired by large and simple, rather than luxurious and subtle thoughts. Both were uomini terribili, to use a phrase denoting vigour of character made formidable ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... not discovered the girl's departure till the sun was well up, when she heard of her absence from the frantic Tita. The old woman's force of character was colossal; pettinesses, small passions, were unknown to her. Had her sphere been larger her promptitude of resource, keenness of perception, resolute look onwards and upwards, solidity of purpose, and incisive action might have graven her name on the tables of history. Stagnating in the shallow pools of ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... furious blue bulls, charged, frothing with anger, against the rock, wearing deep caverns, which were prolonged upward in the form of vertical cracks. This age-long battle was destroying the coast, shattering its stony armor, scale by scale. Colossal wall-like fragments loosened. They first separated by forming an imperceptible crevice which grew and grew with the passing of centuries. The natural wall leaned for years and years above the waves, which beat furiously at its base, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... would flow from the general adoption of the principles which he professes, ought to decide whether or not he really desires to overthrow the polity under which he lives, ought to ask if he and his fellows are able to face with any serious hope of success the colossal task of constructing a new society on the ruins of the old. Now the historic rebels to whom I have referred above by way of example—the Greek Nationalists, the French Revolutionists, the English Puritans and Whigs—did ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... back to the original circle. He saw the colossal selfishness of his act; but he could not beg off on the plea of abnormality. He had been ill; no matter about that: he recollected every thought that had led up to it and every act that ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... swept away from us, the whole ruin was nevertheless brightly illuminated. On looking up I saw the topmost branches of a solitary stone-pine one dazzle of flames. Rising straight on high from a gap in the wall which its roots had shattered, it looked a colossal chandelier on which the lightning had kindled a thousand tapers. There was not a breath of air, not a drop of rain, so that the flames burned clear and steady as under ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... my eyes that absolutely rooted me to the spot. At about twenty or thirty yards distant, where but the moment before the long line of horizon terminated the view, there now stood a huge figure of some ten or twelve feet in height,—two heads, which surmounted this colossal personage, moved alternately from side to side, while several arms waved loosely to and fro in the most strange and uncouth manner. My first impression was that a dream had conjured up this distorted image; but when I had assured myself by repeated pinchings and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever |
