"Titanic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... themselves as abridged editions of their forefathers. Added to which, as a separate cause of error, there can be little doubt, that intermingled with the human race there has at most periods of the world been a separate and Titanic race, such as the Anakim amongst the peoples of Palestine, the Cyclopean race diffused over the Mediterranean in the elder ages of Greece, and certain tribes amongst the Alps, known to Evelyn in his youth (about Cromwell's time) by an unpleasant travelling experience. These gigantic ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul— Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul. There were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriac rivers that roll— As the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek, In the ultimate climes of the Pole— That groan as they ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 Bee ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... once upon the ground, with a crash like thunder. In other places, little playful whirlwinds seemed to descend from the sky in the very midst of the dense brushwood, where they cleared circular patches, strewn thick under foot with trunks and branches in their titanic sport, and yet left unhurt all about the surrounding forest. Then again a special cyclone of gigantic proportions would advance, as it were, in a single column against one stem of a clump, whirl round it spirally like a lightning ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... wished, when the Beaver went on for a few yards to where the shelf of rock seemed to end, and there was nothing but a sheer fall of a thousand feet down to the stones and herbage at the bottom of the canyon, while above towered up the mountain which seemed like a Titanic bastion round which ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... 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 our ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Hornby, like a mighty fallen star, Burns through the darkness with a splendid ring Of tenfold light, and where the awful face Of Sydney's northern headland stares all night O'er dark, determined waters from the east, From year to year a wild, Titanic voice Of fierce aggressive sea shoots up and makes,— When storm sails high through drifts of driving sleet, And in the days when limpid waters glass December's sunny hair and forest face,— A roaring down by immemorial caves, A thunder in the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... beams snapped out through the dark, star-flecked space, to meet tremendous screens that threw them back and checked them. Then all the awful power of annihilating matter was thrown against them, and titanic flaming screens reeled back under the force of the beams, and the screens of the ships from Outside flamed gradually violet, then blue, orange—red—the interference was getting broader, and ever less effective. Their own beams were held back by the very screens that ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... came the entomb-ed tree a light-bearer, Though sunk in lightless lair? Friend of the forgers of earth, Mate of the earthquake and thunders volcanic, Clasped in the arms of the forces Titanic Which rock like a cradle the girth Of the ether-hung world; Swart son of the swarthy mine, When flame on the breath of his nostrils feeds How is his countenance half-divine, Like thee in thy sanguine weeds? Thou gavest him his light, Though sepultured in ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... primordial, titanic conflict which haunted her dreams for many nights to come. They were no longer men, but animals; the tiger giving combat to the gorilla, one striking the quick, terrible blows of the tiger, the other seeking always ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... of the same upheaval of nature as the Palisades; but the Hudson rocks seem to have preserved their entirety—to have come up in a body, as it were—while the Giant's Causeway owes its celebrity to the ruined state in which the Titanic forces of nature have left it. The third wonder is at Staffa, in Scotland, where the rocks have been thrown into such a position as to justify the name of Fingal's Cave, which they bear, and which was bestowed ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... first between walls and the vineyards which produce the celebrated Lachryma Christi. After a half hour we reached and began to cross the lava of 1858, and the wild desolation and gloom of the mountain began to strike us. One is here conscious of the titanic forces at work. Sometimes it is as if a giant had ploughed the ground, and left the furrows without harrowing them to harden into black and brown stone. We could see again how the broad stream, flowing down, squeezed and squashed like mud, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... again, like a gaping mouth that shuts. And all about the building, through the trees, and down again in a titanic, slashing rain fell the wreckage of things that had been stone, and earth, and root, and tree, and living creatures—that had been—that now were but one indistinguishable mass of ruin ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... I.W.W. was born in the West, where it had ravaged and wrecked communities. His article was guardedly respectful, but he ventured to remind his readers that Mr. Antonelli had been a leader in some of these titanic struggles between crude labour and capital—catastrophes that hitherto had seemed to the citizens of Hampton as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which had greeted the words of the previous speakers was as nothing to the titanic bellow which burst forth ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... matter and that it is the ideal which is the ultimate reality. It may seem a ludicrous exaggeration to assert that a mere abstract scientific theory, apparently so innocuous as is the German race theory, could be held responsible for so titanic a catastrophe. Surely there seems to be here no relation and no proportion between cause and effect. Yet it does not take a prolonged effort of profound thinking to understand the portentous political significance of the German race heresy. It is not difficult to understand that according as ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... magnificent. Someone has said that when a tourist sees the Grand Canon for the first time he gasps "Indescribable" and then immediately begins to describe it. Thus it was with us, but no words can picture the grandeur of this titanic chasm. In places the rocks were painted in delicate tints of blue and purple; in others, the sides fell away in sheer drops of hundreds of feet to the green torrent below rushing on to the sea two ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... and his hands and feet were chained with heavy iron.... The dark, immovable clouds were piled upon one another in giant masses—so distinct and sharply cut, so rounded, that one almost saw the impressure of the fingers of some Titanic sculptor; and they hung low down, overwhelming, so that James could scarcely breathe. The sombre elms were too well-ordered, the meadows too carefully tended. All round, the hills were dark and drear; and that very fertility, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... and ragged clouds showed every conceivable tone of umber and grey, from purest pearl-white to darkest depths of indigo. Only low down, where a blue-black mass ended with level abruptness, a flaming strip of day was splashed along the west—one broad brush-stroke, as it were, by some Titanic artist whose palette held liquid fire. Snows and mist alike caught and flung back the radiance in a maze of rainbow hues; while beyond the bank of cloud a vast pale fan of light shot outward and upward to the very zenith of heaven. Each passing minute wrought some imperceptible ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... "camouflage" was brought into general use by a titanic war the art of concealment and illusion was practiced universally by the natives of the North American wilderness. It was in truth their favorite stratagem in their unending wars, and there was high praise for those ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... arches of Titanic strength and power, adorned the portals, the pass-ways, the temples of this metropolis of ocean, guarded as were these last by the effigies of griffin and dragon, and winged elephant and lion, and stately mastodon and monstrous ichthyosaurus, all ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... 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; the prophetic floral ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... weird, precipitous, and grand. In every direction huge cliffs towered perpendicularly about you; bottomless abysses yawned at your feet; and every scarped pinnacle and beetling crag scowled menacingly at your littleness and scowled defiance at your approach. One wondered by what titanic forces the country had been so ruthlessly crushed and crumbled and torn to shreds. Did any startled eye witness this volcanic frolic? What a sight it must have been to have watched these towering ranges split and scattered; to have seen the placid snowclad ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... for the snow to lodge on; then their rocky faces shone harsh and stern; and sometimes the springs that gushed from them in summer were frozen in long streams of ice, like the tears bursting from the source of some Titanic grief. These monstrous icicles, blearing the visage of the rock, which he figured as nothing but icicles, affected Northwick with an awe that he nowhere felt except when his driver slowed his carriole in front of the great Capes Trinity and Eternity, and silently pointed ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... of the Music in the Air at your Father's Death—Oh, how Frederic Tennyson would open all his Eyes at this! For he lives in a World of Spirits—Swedenborg's World, which you would not approve; which I cannot sympathize with: but yet I admire the Titanic old Soul so resolutely blind to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... ecstasy at the beauty of all things around, the glowing hills, the flowers that are everywhere, the sea beyond, the tenderness, the color, the native poetry of it all. There are seasons, too, of strife and hurricane, of titanic forces battling in the air, when vehement and irresistible winds burst forth to make howling havoc on the bleakest heights—so they seem then—that man's foot ever trod. There are times when not one harebell nods its head in the calm air, not one seed falls from the feathered grass, in ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... Like the prose version, it has five acts, but these are not subdivided into scenes. It is briefer, more concentrated both in spirit and in form, and may be said to display a greater unity of purpose. It is more human, too, and less titanic. The change shows itself strikingly in a figure like that of Marten, who in the metrical version has become softened into an unconscionable but rather lovable rapscallion. The last remark but one made by Marten when driven from Dame Christine's deathbed by Olof is: "Talk to your mother, son—the ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... sank abruptly to the left, opening for the first time an outlook to the eastward. Deep—it seemed almost vertically—beneath us we could see the blue waters of Owen's Lake, 10,000 feet below. The summit peaks to the north were piled up in titanic confusion, their ridges overhanging the eastern slope with terrible abruptness. Clustered upon the shelves and plateaus below were several frozen lakes, and in all directions swept magnificent fields of snow. The summit was now not over five hundred feet distant, and we ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... shallowness or inconsistency escaped his rebuke. This flattening treatment was hard to endure, but my resolve was to allow Sri Yukteswar to iron out each of my psychological kinks. As he labored at this titanic transformation, I shook many times under the weight ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... which, since 1914, have been in arms against the Imperial German Government and have borne not only the full force of the attack of its great military machine, but also the continuing drain upon their economic resources and their capacity for production which so titanic and long-continued a struggle ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... you go up 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 dome of the Capitol at Washington. ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... running man. Never once did he glance behind him, so that he evidently had occasion to fear pursuit. The dusty road rang beneath my flying footsteps. That sense of fantasy, which claimed me often enough in those days of our struggle with the titanic genius whose victory meant the victory of the yellow races over the white, now had me fast in its grip again. I was an actor in one of those dream-scenes of the ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... speaking to distinguish between the theatrical and the genuine in oratory. Here was no tub-thumping soothsayer, but an inspired zealot. He lived his impassioned creed in every fibre of his frame and faculties. He was Titanic, this rough miner, in his unconquerable hope, divine in his yearning ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... 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 sun until ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... time being, civil life and economic conditions were disorganised. All England was in a turmoil of preparation for the Titanic struggle on the fields of France. People were becoming alive to the fact that even a democracy has its obligations to the State which guarantees it freedom; for freedom can only depend upon victory over autocracy and militarism. Private property ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... for the fruition of the mind that yearns for truth and thirsts for certitude, of the parched heart that wearies and cracks for want of love, of the will that longs to be rightly and lovingly commanded? Oh, dear brethren, not only the Titanic presumption of proposing oneself as enough for a single soul, but the inconceivable madness of proposing oneself as enough for all the race in all generations to the end of time, except on one hypothesis, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe was first broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothic cathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century the German mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary, titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers (love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century, poetry and ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... of the titanic proportions of the cave, there was something quite homelike about it. It almost suggested a prosperous farm-yard. There were chickens walking about, with little chickens trotting alongside. There were wickerwork graneries standing ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... forward, all three of them, seeing and bearing nothing of the shooter of the arrow. As they approached the titanic wall they saw that it enclosed a mound, on the top of which mound grew a cedar-like tree with branches so wide that they seemed to overshadow half of the enclosure. There were no gates to this wall, but while they wondered how it could be entered, Nya led them to a kind of cleft in its stones, not ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... indeed the basis of every ideal attainment, so that prematurely to recoil from hardship, or to be habitually conscious of hardship at all, amounts to renouncing beforehand all earthly goods and all chance of spiritual greatness. Yet a chance is no certainty. When glory requires Titanic labours it often finds itself in the end buried under a pyramid rather than raised upon a pedestal. Energies which are not from the beginning self-justifying and flooded with light seldom lead ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... to smaller proportions in each successive stage of this titanic duel between the titular representatives of State and Church; and from first to last the Papacy depended largely upon allies who were pursuing their own objects in the Church's name. The German princes, the Normans of Lower Italy and Sicily, the Lombard communes, all contributed in varying degrees ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... a great natural bridge, under which the ocean rushed in swirling currents, foam, and spray. Turning a shoulder of the cliff, we entered the Bay of Virgins and were confronted with the titanic architecture of Hanavave, Alps in ruins, once coral reefs and now thrust up ten thousand feet above the sea. Fantastic headlands, massive towers, obelisks, pyramids, and needles were an extravaganza in rock, monstrous and portentous. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... of gigantic Sinai! From the sharpness and thinness of the air, we know that we are at an excessive height, and yet we seem to be at the bottom of a well. On every side the extreme peaks of Sinai enclose us, as they mount and scale the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite without stain or shadow, are so vertical and so high that they dizzy and appal. Only a fragment of the sky is visible, but its blueness is of a profound transparency, and the sun is magnificent. And still ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... activities. Indeed, even in ancient days, as a Celtic proverb and as the picture of life in the Homeric epics prove, the poet was already a man apart—not foremost among statesmen and rather backward among warriors. If we agree with a not unpopular opinion, the poet ought to be a kind of "Titanic" force, wrecking himself on his own passions and on the nature of things, as did Byron, Burns, Marlowe, and Musset. But Tennyson's career followed lines really more normal, the lines of the life of Wordsworth, wisdom and self-control directing the course of a long, sane, sound, and fortunate ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... talk, that evening, was a defence of mere force,—success the test of right;—if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks;—find a hero, and let them be his slaves, &c. It was very Titanic, and anti-celestial. I wish the last evening had been more melodious. However, I bid Carlyle farewell with feelings of the warmest friendship and admiration. We cannot feel otherwise to a great and noble nature, whether it harmonise with our own or not. I never appreciated ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... most interesting and suggestive relate to the re-appearance of Mr. Stead, says the Daily Chronicle. On the Sunday following the sinking of the Titanic, Sir Alfred was visiting a medium when she told him that on the glass of the picture behind his back the head of a man and afterwards 'its' whole form appeared. She described him minutely, and said he was holding a child by the hand. He had no ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... he sat down and began "The Bible in Spain." He proceeds to make a picture of himself amidst a landscape by some raving Titanic ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... two poets during these brief weeks, when, with spirits often attuned to high thought and feeling, they roamed together among the pines or sat beneath the stars. "We would rest on the hillsides," says Hayne, "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 the quiet noons, sunk in the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet more ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... the Douvres held fast between them, like an architrave between two pillars, the wreck of the Durande. The spectacle thus presented was a vast portal in the midst of the sea. It might have been a titanic cromlech planted there in mid-ocean by hands accustomed to proportion their labours to the great deep. Its wild outline stood well defined against the clear sky when Gilliatt approached in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... out to see the sun set from Lady Judith's grounds. The wind had dropped. The clouds had rolled from the zenith, and ranged in amphitheatre with distant flushed bodies over sea and land: Titanic crimson head and chest rising from the wave faced Hyperion falling. There hung Briareus with deep-indented trunk and ravined brows, stretching all his hands up to unattainable blue summits. North-west the range had a rich white glow, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for Russia. And thus for Russians the "Doss-house" came as a gospel, although Gorki has not yet wrought his materials into the supreme conflict that must result in a really great tragedy. "The Doss-house" is not that tragedy. It presents no titanic action, no mighty fate, no clashing shock to reveal the battle of the great natural tendencies in Man, and give an immeasurable lift to our conceptions of existence. There is still something that oppresses us—there ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... had fallen in a Titanic tragedy of color beyond Prince's Bay. The fierce bird, leisurely occupied in tearing to pieces the little twitterer, was a suitable accompaniment to the bloody drama in the clouds. Watching keenly, I gradually began to picture to myself the sensation of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... pebbles, they are found equal in number, and the accused, therefore, by the decision of Pallas, is acquitted. He breaks out into joyful thanksgiving, while the Furies on the other hand declaim against the overbearing arrogance of these younger gods, who take such liberties with those of Titanic race. Pallas bears their rage with equanimity, addresses them in the language of kindness, and even of veneration; and these so indomitable beings are unable to withstand the charms of her mild eloquence. They promise to bless the land which is under her tutelary protection, while on her ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... latter years (Fatal years!) To the dropping of my tears Danced the mad and mystic spheres In a rounded, reeling rune, 'Neath the moon, To the dripping and the dropping of my tears. Ah, my soul is swathed in gloom, (Ulalume!) In a dim Titanic tomb, For my gaunt and gloomy soul Ponders o'er the penal scroll, O'er the parchment (not a rhyme), Out of place,—out of time,— I am shredded, shorn, unshifty, (Oh, the fifty!) And the days have passed, the three, Over me! And ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Streben, as the Germans say, between the palpable and limited human form, and the floating essence it is to contain. On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid world, of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat formless theogony of Hesiod; a world, the Titanic vastness of which is congruous with a certain sublimity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance, of motion or space; as the Greek language itself has a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind, fire, water, cold, sound—attesting a ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the crew was strained, and big Dan Cullen, master, was likewise strained. Perhaps he was strained most of all, for upon him rested the responsibility of that titanic struggle. He slept most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept. He haunted the deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the sunburn of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-outang. He, in turn, was haunted by one thought of action, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... their own heads the structure which she had builded. Nay, more, when it became necessary for her to dethrone him and rule in his name, banishing his friends and pacifying his enemies, keeping him a prisoner in his palace, it required a courage that was titanic to do so. But she never flinched, though we may suppose that many of her poorest subjects, who could sleep from dark till daylight with nothing but a brick for a pillow, might have rested more ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... then read to them. One of these comrades has left it on record that in the excitement of composition Schiller would often stamp and snort and roar.—And thus it was, in the stolen hours of the night and driven by the demon that possessed him, that he bodied forth his titanic drama of revolt. It was virtually finished during the year 1780. In after-time Schiller reasoned himself into the conviction that art must be 'cheerful',[15] but very little of cheerfulness went to the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the Great Pyramid, and over its apex hung the moon. Like a wreck cast ashore by some titanic storm, the Sphinx, reposing amid the undulating waves of grayish sand surrounding it, seemed for once to drowse. Its solemn visage that had impassively watched ages come and go, empires rise and fall, and generations ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... of the little lakes of Longuemer and Retournemer, twin gems of superlative loveliness in the wildest environment. Deep down they lie, the two silvery sheets of water with their verdant holms, making a little world of peace and beauty, a toy dropped amid Titanic awfulness and splendour. The vantage ground is on the edge of a dizzy precipice, but the picture thus sternly framed is too exquisite to be easily abandoned. We gaze and gaze in spite of the vast height from which we ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... continuous, but had to be approached by repeated climbs up to the road level and a descent at some point farther on. The rocks hereabouts, too, were wonderfully sharp-edged as compared with others which had been fashioned and polished by the action of water, and there was a general idea of Titanic splintering up that ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... 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 ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... was given on the evening of January 3, 19066, and the picture of it still remains clear to me. The guests, assembled around a single table in the private dining-room, did not exceed twenty-five in number. Brander Matthews presided, and the knightly Frank Millet, who would one day go down on the "Titanic," was there, and Gilder and Munro and David Bispham and Robert Reid, and others of their kind. It so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who by a custom of the Players is placed at the side and not ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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
... 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
... "Titanic pamphleteer" is more recognisable in Browning's most vivid portrait than the "lyric poet of aerial delicacy" who in some strange fashion, beyond his own wildest metamorphoses, distracted and idealised the otherwise congruous ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... almost frightened, even as if Mary St. John had said she loved him, Robert sprung from the stool, and, without knowing why, moved only by the chastity of delight, flung the door to the post. It banged and clicked. Almost mad with the joy of the titanic instrument, he seated himself again at the keys, and plunged into a tempest of clanging harmony. One hundred bells hang in that tower of wonder, an instrument for a city, nay, for a kingdom. Often had Robert dreamed ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... already running in the same direction as those of his successors are now), I listened to the thrilling eloquence of Chalmers, and the calm, thoughtful utterances of Cook, and witnessed the first of those titanic encounters between Cunningham and Robertson, which the pen of Hugh Miller and the histories of the period have made classical. My next glimpse of the Assembly was in 1843, when, from the students' gallery of St ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... 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 overwhelming slaughter ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... think Dame Nature must, in the early days of her housekeeping—or, rather, house-building—have intended to give her little child, man, a rudimentary lesson in self-protection. It is just a natural bastion such as a titanic Vauban might have designed in primeval times. So far as the Castle is concerned, it is alone visible from the sea. Any enemy approaching could see only that frowning wall of black rock, of vast height and ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Titanic was held responsible by public opinion for the sinking of the great ship and was harshly criticised by the press. His forty years of faithful, careful service on the sea was erased by the one mistake. It was a tremendous one, but let it be said to his credit ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... the world's young prime, Reared it, a wonder of that simple time, 490 An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house Made sacred to his sister and his spouse. It scarce seems now a wreck of human art, But, as it were Titanic; in the heart Of Earth having assumed its form, then grown 495 Out of the mountains, from the living stone, Lifting itself in caverns light and high: For all the antique and learned imagery Has been ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... position in the firm of one Redgrave. Those who knew her then speak of her as a tall, handsome girl, hard and intensely ambitious. From contemporary accounts she seems to have out-Nietzsched Nietzsche. Nietzsche's vision stopped short at the superman. Jane Scobell was a superwoman. She had all the titanic selfishness and indifference to the comfort of others which marks the superman, and, in addition, undeniable good looks and a knowledge of the weaknesses of men. Poor Mr. Redgrave had not had a chance from the start. She married ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... attractions: excellent water in two deep wells with creaking wheels 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 ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... The light of the sky above was a soft radiance, as of a happy Arcadian land; the fire of the toil beneath was the output of human striving, an intricate interweaving of vital forces which, like some Titanic machine, wrought ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... established in England; the story may be read in the pages of Marx, Cunningham, Cooke Taylor, or any of the economic historians. But, for all the blood and tears, it was established. Insulated from the continental turmoil, served by her Titanic bondsmen coal and iron, England was able to defeat the Titan, Napoleon. Now it is idle to deny that this period would under any government have strained Ireland, as the phrase goes, to the pin of ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... intelligent or natural than this mistake. Any one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy that they were indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere waving agitated the air around them for miles. Nothing, I say, could be more human and excusable than the belief that it is the trees which make the wind. Indeed, the belief is so human and excusable that it is, as ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... condition; an atmospheric current of extreme velocity was bearing them away beyond arid mountains, upon whose summits vast fields of snow surprised the gaze; while their convulsed appearance told of Titanic travail in the earliest epoch of ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... illustrations. When, with much merriment at 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 impressed and excitable child had become ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... shut in death, We bowed our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt him like the thunder's roll. With shivering heart the strife we saw Of passion with eternal law; And yet with reverential awe We watched the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... base of this Titanic mass lied enchained the petrified ocean, whose spell-bound waves appear fired as vast ranges of ice mountains, their blue peaks fading away in the far-off frost ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and art of ruling which spring from forms are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover—Germany, the earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything—every land, every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what is foreign; on ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Woman still exists. Strange to say, under its sharp-cut features a steamer has since been wrecked and sunk, and its expression of gloomy fate is now awfully appropriate. Marie had visited "the great Sea Water" with her father. Nature's titanic and fanciful frescoing and cameo cutting had strongly wrought upon her impressionable mind, and the old legends and superstitions of paganism had been by no means effaced by the very slight veneer of Christianity which she had received ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... they imply on all sections of the population. Such nations, of necessity, have engaged in fierce competition for markets for their industrial products. Thus they built up the background of world conflicts. The titanic struggles that have resulted have endangered the very lives of their people by starvation. Their war tactics have, in large degree, been directed to strangle food supplies. One other result of this ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... years' imprisonment in chains upon persons twice convicted of buying or selling paper money at less than its nominal value, and death upon investors in foreign securities, were powerless. The National Convention, fighting a world in arms and with an armed revolt on its own soil, showed titanic power, but in its struggle to circumvent one simple law of nature its weakness was pitiable. The louis d'or stood in the market as a monitor, noting each day, with unerring fidelity, the decline in value of the assignat; a monitor not ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... in a basin scooped out on its face, a hollow not more than five hundred yards square we could see, night and day, an eternal artillery conflict in progress, in the daylight by the smoke and in the dark by the flashes of bursting shells. It was an awe-inspiring and wonderful picture this titanic struggle; when I looked on it, I felt that it was not good to see—it was the face of a god. The mortal who gazed on it must die. But by night and day I spent most of my spare time in watching the smoke of bursting shells and the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... perceptibly nearer than the first—for the interval between it and the resulting clap of thunder was noticeably shorter, while the volume of sound was much greater and sharper. And still the sheet lightning continued to play vividly and with scarcely a second's intermission among the Titanic cloud-masses around and above us, lighting up the entire scene from horizon to horizon; so that we now had no difficulty whatever in following the movements of the various proas in sight, the whole fleet of which were obviously converging upon us as upon ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... 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! ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... afternoon, the youth and beauty, also the age and wisdom, of both Hollis Creek and Meadow Brook, gathered around the ball field of the former resort, to watch the Titanic struggle for victory between the two picked nines. As Sam took his place behind the bat for the first man up, who was Hollis, he felt his first touch of self-confidence anent the strictly amusement features of summer resorting. In all the other athletic pursuits ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... barbaric disdain of adversity, and how cheaply and waggishly it holds the malice, even though triumphant, of its foes! Aside from that inevitable egotism relatively pertaining to pine trees, spires, and giants, there were, perhaps, two special incidental reasons for the Titanic Vermonter's singular demeanor abroad. Taken captive while heading a forlorn hope before Montreal, he was treated with inexcusable cruelty and indignity; something as if he had fallen into the hands of ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... allegorical; but the evident intention was to assure his followers that God would protect them in their daily life. Safety was promised for believers, a safety that has been lacking for everyone. There is no evidence that God does protect believers any more than unbelievers. When the Titanic went down, those who perished were not solely the wicked persons; there was no distinction in the terrible ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... muscular power which admits of no surrender—the gauntlet has been thrown down, the chip has been knocked off the shoulder, the black flag is hoisted and skull and bones stand out in bold relief. There may be a calm, the wind may die out, but the monster waves once lashed up to a Titanic power move on of their own accord, and wash away the very vestige of resistance. Asking to be forgiven after slamming a door is like touching off a Rodman gun, and then calling out to the fort in front to 'look out' 'take care!' 'do get out of the way.' A first class slam is cumulative ...
— A Christmas Story - Man in His Element: or, A New Way to Keep House • Samuel W. Francis
... extraordinary evening! How calm the water is! It makes the swans look exactly like topaz clouds reflecting in a titanic mirror. ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... glare, illuminating the vast scene on which the battle was outspread; the black stems of the oaks and pines, the guns—some wheelless and broken now, the charging lines, fallen horses scattered in the scrub, all the medley and strain of a titanic battle. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a Titanic scene; the contest between gun and gunner; the battle of matter and intelligence; the duel between man ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... words of an exhaustive review of Fourier's writings, by Mr. John S. Dwight, in the Harbinger, are these:—"There is a Titanic strength in all the workings of that wonderful intellect. He walks as one who knows his ground. His step is firm, his eye is clear and unflinching, and he is acknowledged where he passes, for there is no littleness or weakness, no halting or duplicity, in his movement. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... has its own specialite in the way of bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 away ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... important epoch in our history. During its first session occurred the masterful debate upon the General Amnesty Bill. The very depths of partisan feeling were stirred, and for many days it was indeed a titanic struggle. The speeches attracting the greatest attention were those of Blaine and Garfield upon the one side, and Hill of Georgia and Lamar upon the other. This great debate recalled vividly that of Webster and ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... in the young man's nature to let the matter pass, or to delay the squaring of the account. He took a couple of strides and halted behind the unsuspecting joker. Then he drew back and delivered a kick of such titanic vigor that it lifted Tom clear over the footlights and landed him on the heads of the front row of the Sons ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in limited spheres and at the expense of enemies who had no pretensions to be her naval rivals. But in 1914 the second navy in the world seemed by the conduct of Germany to challenge the first, and for nearly four and a half years there were hopes and fears of a titanic contest for the command of the sea. But in fact the challenge was not forthcoming, and from first to last the command remained in our hands through Germany's default. There was no Trafalgar because no one came forth to fight, and in the end the German Navy surrendered ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... husband, and it was not until she saw Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in Marty Burke than in her daughter's future, but a titanic struggle fired her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child's vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... arrival of the evening boat from the city, that they might obtain the latest news. When word came that a Contingent was being formed for overseas service, then all were aware that Canada was getting ready for her part in the titanic conflict. ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... landmark for the Austrian aviators. Over the celebrated equestrian statue of Colleoni—of which Ruskin said: "I do not believe there is a more glorious work of sculpture existing in the world"—has been erected a titanic armored sentry-box, which is covered, in turn, with layer upon layer of sand-bags. Could the spirit of that great soldier of fortune be consulted, however, I rather fancy that he would insist upon sitting his bronze warhorse, unprotected and unafraid, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... agitated. Sometimes it uplifted itself on high, then plunged downwards, and again jerked itself from side to side; occasionally it would quite vanish for an instant. Accompanying this manifestation there was a clawing and reaching of shadowy arms: altogether, it was as if some titanic spectral grasshopper, with a heart of fire, were writhing and kicking in convulsions of phantom agony. Such an apparition, in an hour and a place so lonely, might stagger a less superstitious soul than that of Don Miguel ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... The two titanic war-vessels now in course of construction for the United States Navy will each carry a battery of ten fourteen-inch rifles, which will be the most powerful weapons ever constructed and will greatly exceed in range and hitting ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... 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 ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... little island that I knew, and thought a little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a thing stricken with some creeping malady—one of those maladies which begin in the lower members ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... no nation-wide 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, even judged by democratic standards, and surprisingly ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... A titanic upheaval of water; volcanic fires leaping out of the heart of the deep; a roar so absolutely appalling that it reduced the battle to ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... of the brothers with their knives and forks uplifted, the fourth, a blond Titanic youngster, with his elbows on the table, his face turned up to ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... fancied them, the personal man might feel his littleness, and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in her earlier visits, when the compassed splendor Of the actual interior glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called it a great prettiness; a gay piece of cabinet work, on a Titanic scale; a jewel casket, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... account had been taken from the lips of Mrs Gater, housekeeper at Sneyd Hall. She had related to a reporter how, upon going into the state suite before retiring for the night, she had surprised a burglar of Herculean physique and Titanic proportions. Fortunately she knew her duty, and did not blench. The burglar had threatened her with a revolver, and then, finding such bluff futile, had deliberately jumped through a large plate-glass window ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... three hundred feet to four hundred feet deep, in the bottom of which crevasses appeared to go down for ever. The sides were splintered and crumpled, glittering in the sunlight with a million sparklets of light. Towering above were titanic blocks of carven ice. The whole was the wildest, maddest and ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... of a titanic struggle between the Czecho-Slovak forces and the Bolsheviks, who had in case of defeat planned the complete and effective destruction of the line by blowing up the numerous tunnels alongside the lake, which ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... effect on his mind that he wished to produce on the minds of others—an effect that was emotional and peculiar to his habitual moods. We know that his constitution gave him the staying-power, while his fiery Titanic spirit gave him the energy, to carry out and perfect his mighty frescoes and statues at the same heat that the creative hour yields other men for the production of a sketch alone. This giant son ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... and the heart of a thousand. He pulled 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
... months, till March, '71, he was the arch-destroyer—nothing else was taken into account; if he chose to establish a new holy Roman empire, of course he could do it; but it would be the work of his Titanic will, and nothing on earth could resist—since France could not! Thus reasoned French vanity, and if this curious condition of the public mind in France be not understood, the reconstitution of united Germany into a great cohesive ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Terra, who reigned over Libya, or Africa, and dwelt in a forest cave—was so famed for his Titanic strength and skill in wrestling that he was emboldened to leave his woodland retreat and engage in a contest with the renowned hero Hercules. So long as Antaeus stood upon the ground he could not be overcome, whereupon Hercules lifted him up in the air, and, having apparently squeezed ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... exquisite excellence of various lines and passages in Marlowe's first play must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be allowed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts. With many and heavy faults, there is something of genuine greatness in "Tamburlaine the Great"; and for two grave reasons it must always be remembered with distinction and mentioned with honor. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... source of fascination, surely one of the most influential novels ever written, an inspiration for such scientists and discoverers as engineer Simon Lake, oceanographer William Beebe, polar traveler Sir Ernest Shackleton. Likewise Dr. Robert D. Ballard, finder of the sunken Titanic, confesses that this was his favorite book as a teenager, and Cousteau himself, most renowned of marine explorers, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... 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
... prodigious failure, he was superlatively great in all that pertains to government, the quickening of human energies, and the art of war. His greatness lies, not only in the abiding importance of his best undertakings, but still more in the Titanic force that he threw into the inception and accomplishment of all of them—a force which invests the storm-blasted monoliths strewn along the latter portion of his career with a majesty unapproachable by a tamer race of toilers. After all, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... looking through Petersen for a subject which would display, in broad and primitive forms, the clash of character in an ancient Norwegian family, he fell upon "Volsungasaga," and somewhat rashly responded to its vigorous appeal. He thought that in this particular episode, "the titanic conditions and occurrences of the 'Nibelungenlied'" and other pro-mediaeval legends had "been reduced to human dimensions." He believed that to dramatize such a story would lift what he called "our national epic material" to a higher plane. There is one phrase ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse |
