"Colossal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Affghanistan from us in 1840); the conquest of Parthia; and the cutting a ship canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. The reformation of the Calendar he had already accomplished. And of all his projects it may be said that they were equally patriotic in their purpose and colossal in their proportions. ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... character it was interesting to the boding fancies of the noble tenant. It is said to have been constructed from a design of Michael Angelo; and in the grandeur of its features exhibits a bold and colossal style ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... to give free scope to their original and native talent. This regeneration was effected by the despised and simple organists of the Protestant churches. In 1717, Schroeder, a native of Hohenstein in Saxony, invented the pianoforte and improved the organ. Sebastian Bach, in his colossal fugues, like to a pillared dome dissolved in melody,[3] raised music by his compositions to a height unattained by any of his successors. He was one of the most extraordinary geniuses that ever appeared on earth. Handel, whose glorious melodies entranced ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... away last August, you said you wanted me to tell you about our travels, particularly about China. Like most Americans, you have a lurking sentimental feeling about China, a latent sympathy and interest based on colossal ignorance. Very well, I will write you as fully as I can. Two months ago my ignorance was fully as overwhelming as yours, but it is being rapidly dispelled. So I'll try to do the same for you, as you said I might. Rash ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... intention of some magnificent intervention on behalf of Lady Harman remained unchanged, it produced a number of moving visions of flights at incredible speeds in (recklessly hired) motor-cars of colossal power,—most of the purchase money for Black Strand was still uninvested at his bank—of impassioned interviews with various people, of a divorce court with a hardened judge congratulating the manifestly quite formal co-respondent ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... festivity! And mark, 'tis nigh; already the sun bids His evening farewell to the Pyramids. As he hath done age after age till they Alone on earth seem ancient as his ray; While their great shadows stretching from the light Look like the first colossal steps of Night Stretching across the valley to invade The distant hills of porphyry with their shade. Around, as signals of the setting beam, Gay, gilded flags on every housetop gleam: While, hark!—from all the temples a rich swell Of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the shock she had given him, flashed back at her his cool and cynical smile. In spite of being caught in an unpleasant lie, he admired this golden-haired, blue-eyed slip of a woman for the colossal bluff she was playing. "Personally, I'm sorry," he said, "but I couldn't ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 of the field ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... his ignorance was colossal. Such men were not complex, they moved by instinct rather than reason, they were not guided by conscience, the values of right and wrong were not intuitive with them, muscle rather ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... Sisily. The end of the week saw him returning from uncharted areas of outer London to the more familiar thoroughfares of the city's life, for in that time his dauntless spirit had realized the colossal folly of any attempt to search London by system. He had no intention of abandoning his quest, but he now felt that it did not matter where his footsteps led him, because it was only by a piece of wonderful luck that he ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... him appear a bad loser. "It would look, boys," he said, "as though I couldn't take my medicine. Looks like kicking against the umpire's decision. Old Gilman fought fair. He gave me just what was coming to me. I think a darn sight more of him than do of that bunch of boot-lickers that had the colossal nerve to pretend ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... opened the door to Maggie. She was a 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 ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... 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
... anything like this revolution in the history of the world. There is nothing analogous between it and the American Revolution or the French Revolution. It is unique, colossal. Other revolutions compare with it as asteroids compare with the sun. It is alone of its kind, the first world-revolution in a world whose history is replete with revolutions. And not only this, for it is the first organized movement of men to become a world movement, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... speakers were in a great room with a tall ceiling traversed by blackened beams. From the street below there came dimly through the closed casements the sound of rumbling traffic and the street cries of the London of the seventeenth century. Two vast presses of such colossal size that their wooden levers would tax the strength of the stoutest apprentice, were ranged against the further wall. About the room, spread out on oaken chairs and wooden benches, were flat boxes filled with leaden type, freshly molten, and a great pile of paper, larger ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... apart from this horrid misuse of classic details the greatest fault of the facade at Coimbra is the disproportionate size of some of the details; the obelisks and the cherubs' heads on which they stand, the statues at the ends, and the central cross, and above all the colossal acanthus leaves in the great scrolls are of such a size as entirely to ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... believer in Christ or not, he cannot refuse to admit that this new religion grew from the smallest of all seeds to be a mighty tree, so that the birds of the air took refuge in its branches; that it was the little stone cut without hands which dashed into pieces the colossal image of heathen greatness, and grew till it became a great mountain and filled the earth. Alike to the infidel and to the believer the Crucifixion is the boundary instant between ancient and modern days. Morally and physically, no less than spiritually, the faith of Christ was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... said the scientist; "of the most colossal. For it is a discovery you have of him made he is new he is wonderful ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... colossal. Makes him more important than if he'd stayed on the spot and fought the ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... of this singular flooring. The dusty walls exhibited a curious mosaic of wood and brick, stones and iron, welded together with a solidity due to time, possibly to chance. For more than a hundred years the ceiling, formed of colossal beams, bent beneath the weight of the upper stories, though it had never given way under them. Built en colombage, that is to say, with a wooden frontage, the whole facade was covered with slates, so put on as to form geometrical figures,—thus preserving a naive image ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... pressing my left elbow into the pillow, and with the right hand rubbing both eyes in an endeavor to see once more my natural surroundings. But no! Instead, suspended in this endless light, appeared a wonderful colossal cross of indescribable splendor. This wonderful cross can be likened only to a gigantic opal. Its rays of light seemed to penetrate me through and through as over my mind flashed the thought, "I must have died, ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... employed. To adorn the new city, the cities of Greece and Asia were despoiled of their choicest treasures of art. In the Forum was placed a lofty column of porphyry, one hundred and twenty feet in height, on whose summit stood a colossal statue of Apollo, supposed to be the work of Phidias. In the stately circus or hippodrome, the space between the goals, round which the chariots turned in their swift flight, was filled with ancient statues and obelisks. Here ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the genuine by letting a flutter of real envy be seen. 'My wife would like to meet such a Frenchwoman. It must be a privilege to dine with him—to know him. I know what he has done for English Commerce, and to build a colossal fortune: genius, as I said: and his donations to Institutions. Odd, to read his name and Mrs. Burman Radnor's at separate places in the lists! Well, we'll hope. It's a case for a compromise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... or hard work. Truly they 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 ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... as able and useful a man as Shelley. The historian loved a young French lady, but his father refused consent to their marriage, and Gibbon quietly obeyed and accepted his hard fate. The passion sanctified his whole life, and, as he says, made him more dear to himself; he settled his colossal work, and remained unmarried for life. He may have been foolish: but I prefer his behaviour to that of a man who treats his father with contumely and ingratitude even while he is living upon him. We hear much of Shelley's ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... very inner impulses to amend, to improve, came from God as clearly as the very evils that He permitted and indeed originated. What was the exit from this intolerable tangle of thought? Law indeed seemed absolute, law on a scale at once so colossal and so minute, law that sent the planets whirling through space round the central sun—and yet dwelt, cell within cell, in the heart of the smallest pebble that rolled upon the sea-beach. And side by side ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a masterpiece of fine art! His father was the original founder of the importing trade graft. He was the first man to discover that a colossal fortune could be made over night by swindling the United States Government at the port of New York. His people have been noted for their solid and substantial standing in the business world. The head of the house was known ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... was a keen artistic delight. On a colossal pedestal, the cliff,—motionless at the extreme edge of the capping rock and sharply outlined against the sky,—was an equestrian statue of impressive dignity. The figure of the man sat the figure of the horse, straight and soldierly, but with the repose of a Grecian god carved in the marble ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... same under separate headings, such as "currents," "velocity," "flood-rises," with statistics without end showing that the carrying-trade of the great water highway would amount in 1950 to something so colossal that there is no room for it here, while a future for the cities that stud its banks was predicted that would satisfy their most ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... the misty night, brought up easily on the landing stage. The other planes which had been there when he and Steinholt had taken their departure were gone and Dirk felt a sense of relief when he observed this. Inga, then, must have departed with the other occupants of the colossal structure. Things were going according to the plan that he had conceived. He stepped out of the cabin, followed by Steinholt, and proceeded hastily along the terrace and turned ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... across the Pacific being in a sailing vessel, was a longish one and occupied nearly ten weeks from start to finish. However, anchor was dropped at last; and on August 23, 1855, a "colossal attraction" was announced in "Lola Montez in Bavaria" at the Victoria Theatre, Sydney. There, thanks to the interest aroused by her exploits in other parts of the world, the newcomer was assured ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... tiny object in it. From a fifty-foot distance, he swept his hand from one end to the other of the wrecked ship. Flame leaped up. The magnesium-alloy vessel burned with a brightness that stung and dazzled the eyes. A monstrous, a colossal flaming flare leaped and soared ... and died. Too late, Soames fumbled for his camera. There was no longer a wrecked ship on the ice. There were only a ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... War? For on this high matter the judgment of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny. Examining his writings, even from The Cossacks, through such a masterpiece as War and Peace, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his thought reveals itself—gradually increasing vehemence in the expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of oppression, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... which the bodies of the dead were carried by the priests before burial, and the beautiful Mokattam Hills bounding the view, wearing the soft lilac hue of distance. Only two or three places on earth can rival the overwhelming interest which the city possesses. But the colossal associated temples of Karnac and Luxor are absolutely unique. There is nothing on earth to equal them. They are man's greatest achievements in religious architecture. Long rows of stupendous pillars, covered from base to top with coloured pictures and hieroglyphics, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... back over the city; say, I want to tell you that place was—well, gigantic! It was colossal; at first I thought the size was due to that illusion I spoke of—you know, the nearness of the horizon—but it wasn't that. We sailed right over it, and you've ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... they climbed and clanged with slow precision she continued to count, audibly and with equal precision, noting their hollow reverberation. How many steps had the stair? She wished she knew. No need! The colossal trampling announced the lessening distance in an increasing volume of sound not to be misunderstood. It turned the curve; it reached the landing; it advanced—slowly—down the hall; it paused before her door. Then knuckles of iron shook the frail panels. Her nerveless tongue gave no invitation. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... barrels. The town seemed to wake up and the open spaces began to fill with people. The sailors and cadets on Drake Island poured out from the casements like rabbits from a warren. With our glasses we could see the dense crowd on the Hoe, which is now a public park. We could see the colossal statue of Sir Francis Drake towering aloft over the Hoe, speaking trumpet in hand, as if welcoming us, for certainly this was a great Armada that was entering the Sound, a peaceful Armada, greater than that ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... refers, of course, to the colossal bronze Statue of Liberty by the French sculptor, Frederic Bartholdi, which stands in New ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... highest violation of the duty owed by man to himself, considered as a moral being singly (owed to the humanity subsisting in his person), is a departure from truth, or lying."[1] And when a man like Fichte,[2] whom Carlyle characterizes as "that cold, colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of beauty and virtue in the groves of Academe," declares that no measure of evil results ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... could the blackbird or the throstle (From the poet each has had his due) Win from me such perfectly colossal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... asserted and reasserted in opposition to Mr. Browning's own statement of the case. According to Mr. Hawthorne, the name was derived from Apennino, and bestowed on the child in babyhood, because Apennino was a colossal statue, and he was so very small. It would be strange indeed that any joke connecting 'Baby' with a given colossal statue should have found its way into the family without father, mother, or nurse being aware of it; or that any joke should have been accepted there which ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... This colossal automaton, almost terrifyingly impersonal, loomed always above them, throwing its powerful and gigantic shadow across their lives. As they grew old enough to understand, it became to them the embodiment of occult ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... trenches whose walls run down like waves, with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers go forward endlessly, towing each other. They go as quickly as they can, as if the walls were going to close upon them. They are bowed as if they were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which they carry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they might rocks in hell. From minute to minute we are filling the places of the obliterated hosts who have passed this way like the wind or have stayed here ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... order of things that I, who gave my best years to devising the ruin of Kings, should be chosen in my dotage to help in fixing a King firmly on his throne. It is some sport of the gods, I suppose, a superhuman jest, perhaps the touch of farce that makes tragedy more vivid, since even that colossal Shakespeare of yours thought fit to lighten Hamlet by introducing a comic gravedigger. Be that as it may, Joan, you are Alec's Queen, and, as he cannot come for you it follows that you must go to him. Shall I ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... and I went to visit Macdonald's collection of sculpture to-day. I was very much pleased with some of the things; there are some good colossal figures, and an exquisite statue of a kneeling girl, that charmed me greatly; there are some excellent busts, too. How wonderfully that irrevocable substance assumes the soft, round forms of life! The color in its passionless purity (absence of color, I suppose ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... point, he allowed more plausibility to be given to certain projects for subdividing the Netherlands than his brother would ever have sanctioned. The Prince was a total stranger to these inchoate schemes. His work was to set his country free, and to destroy the tyranny which had grown colossal. That employment was sufficient for a lifetime, and there is no proof to be found that a paltry and personal self-interest had even the lowest place ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... even women, understand, either in great or in little things, what it is the being "in charge"—I mean, know how to carry out a "charge." From the most colossal calamities, down to the most trifling accidents, results are often traced (or rather not traced) to such want of some one "in charge" or of his knowing how to be "in charge." A short time ago the bursting of a funnel-casing on board the finest and strongest ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... Egypt,' in which the voice of the composer is 'as the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of many thunderings, saying, "Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!"' that these colossal compositions were never heard by Handel from any chorus larger than the most modest of our church choirs? At the last performance of 'The Messiah' at which Handel was advertised to appear (it was for the ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to women's false position, showed, at all events, that this young creature held a burning conviction that the subjection of her sex was the world's Root-Evil. With no apparent apprehension of the colossal audacity of her position, the girl moved gravely that 'this meeting demands of the Government the insertion of an enfranchisement clause in the Plural Voting Bill, and demands that it shall become law during the present session.' Her ignorance of Parliamentary procedure ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... to agree to reverse that position. He, Dickens, was to have the command of the story, and the artist was to illustrate him. How far these altered relations would have worked quite smoothly if Seymour had lived, and if Dickens' story had not so soon assumed the proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to speculate. Seymour died by his own hand before the second number was published, and so ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It was, however, in deference to the peculiar bent of his art that Mr. Winkle, with his disastrous ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... wish 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 in the flesh should ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of ancient mythology, there still exist some memorials of this. On the banks of the river Nile, in Egypt, are two colossal statues, one of which is said to be the statue of Memnon. Ancient writers record that when the first rays of the rising sun fall upon this statue a sound is heard to issue from it, which they compare to the snapping of a harp-string. There ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... colossal and simple, thanks to which Egypt would find population, the earth-tillers aid in their labor, and the treasury of the pharaoh an endless source ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... was like the sleep of a pugilistic terrier, who in his dreams encounters and overcomes even deep-mouthed mastiffs and colossal Saint Bernards. He sniffed and snorted defiance as he lay, and his brow was damp with the sweat of battle, and his lips curled with the smile of victory. As soon as he awoke his hand sought the pocket where the wonderful book lay; and even as he tidied up the office ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... she "hated" him for it. They saw a very great deal of each other, each serving as a sort of balance-wheel to the other's self-centred complacency. Perhaps the one subject upon which they could agree was Jim Galloway; Elmer still liked to look upon the gambler as a colossal figure standing serene among wolves, while Florrie could admit to him, with no fear of a chiding, that she ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... magnificent proportions ere they passed on into the frescoed hall, where eight or ten tall lackeys were drawn up in line, and bowed profoundly to their new master and mistress. Skilful artists had retouched the ancient frescoes, and made them glow with all their original brilliant tints. The colossal figures of Hercules were still supporting the heavy cornice, and the busts of the Roman emperors looked out majestically from their niches. Higher up, the vine climbing on its trellis was as luxuriant as in the olden time, and there were no unsightly stains on the bright blue ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the Septizonium of Septimus Severus—an imitation, doubtless, on a far larger scale, of the one at Carthage. This huge construction, water-works probably of enormous size, with its ordered columns placed line above line, was, so to speak, the portico whence opened the most wonderful and colossal architectural mass known to the ancient world. Modern Rome has nothing at all to shew which comes anywhere near it. Dominating the Roman Forum, and the Fora of various Emperors—labyrinths of temples, basilicas, porticoes, and libraries—the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... looks upon him. They say that all the worlds of heaven go bobbing on this river and are swept down with the stream, and that Infinity is thick and furry with forests through which the river in his course sweeps on with all the worlds of heaven. Among the colossal trunks of those dark trees, the smallest fronds of whose branches are man nights, there walk the gods. And whenever its thirst, glowing in space like a great sun, comes upon the beast, the tiger of the gods creeps down to the ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... obvious intention of the composer and the loveliness of his device weighed nothing in Campanini's mind against the fact that it interfered with popular appreciation of the "attack," of which he was proud. So he calmly waited until the colossal D major chord was silenced, then intoned his D softly, and made a beautiful crescendo upon it. After a rehearsal I ventured to call his attention to the beautiful effectiveness of Beethoven's device, but he answered: "It is music for the head, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... during the course of his daily life, in his home and among his friends, even with little children. Books have been written styled, "Conversations of Eminent Men"; and I have often thought had his ordinary conversations been reported, or, better, could the colossal crowds who admired him have been, as we, his privileged listeners, they would have been no less charmed with his brilliant talk than with the public displays of eloquence with which ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... College kolegio. Collier karbfosisto. Colliery karbejo. Collision interfrapo. Colon dupunkto. Colonel kolonelo. Colonial koloniano. Colonist koloniisto. Colonize koloniigi. Colonnade kolonaro. Colony kolonio. Colossal kolosa. Color koloro. Color kolori. Color (complexion) vizagxokoloro. Colorless senkolora. Colt cxevalido. Column kolono. Comb kombi. Comb kombilo. Combat batalo. Combat batali. Combatant batalanto. Combine ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... and his hand gripped deeply into the ground. His face seemed as though it had been hammered from hard rock, a massive, blunt face as rigid as his arm. The third man can scarcely be described. He was neither short nor tall. He was muscled as heavily as the second man. As he sat he looked like a colossal toad squatting with his arms about his knees, and upon these his chin rested. He had no shape nor swiftness, and his head was flattened down and was scarcely wider than his neck. He had a protruding dog-like mouth that ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... for its huge size by general report, could not repress a feeling of astonishment as they approached it. First of all there was the triple wall of Nebuchadrezzar, with its moats, its rows of towers, and its colossal gateways. Unlike the Greek cities, it had been laid out according to a regular plan, and formed a perfect square, inside which the streets crossed one another at right angles, some parallel to the Euphrates, others ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... white specks of huts in the distance, and the little square of garden behind them; the paddock with a patch of bright green oats above the huts, and the yards and wool-sheds down on the flat below; all seen as through the wrong end of a telescope, so clear and brilliant was the air, or as upon a colossal model or map spread out beneath me. Beyond the downs was a plain, going down to a river of great size, on the farther side of which there were other high mountains, with the winter's snow still not quite melted; up the river, which ran winding in many streams over ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the two colossal Madonnas by Cimabue, preserved at Florence. The first, which was painted for the Vallombrosian monks of the S. Trinita, is now in the gallery of the academy. It has all the stiffness and coldness of the Byzantine manner. There are three adoring angels on each side, disposed one above another, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... do; for this reason, that to invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do, requires a colossal intellect; but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... a born popular leader the subtlety and craft of a trained and practised lawyer. O'Connell was one of the greatest orators of a day when political oratory could display some of its most splendid illustrations. He had a commanding presence, indeed a colossal form, and a voice which was marvellous alike for the strength and the music of its varied intonations. Such men as Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton have borne enthusiastic tribute to the magic of that voice, and have declared ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... out considerations to the /facade/ alone, which powerfully strikes the eye as an upright, oblong parallelogram. If we approach it at twilight, in the moonshine, on a starlight night, when the parts appear more or less indistinct and at last disappear, we see only a colossal wall, the height of which bears an advantageous proportion to the breadth. If we view it by day, and by the power of the mind abstract from the details, we recognize the front of a building which not only encloses the space within, but also covers much in its vicinity. The openings ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... modern invention. The hand of man unaided was not able to cope with his expanding opportunities; the giant steam and the magician electricity came at his call to work their wonders. The plow and scythe of the New England colonist on his little farm were metamorphosed into the colossal steam-driven shapes, in which machinery seems transmuted into intelligence, as he moved to the conquest of the acres of the West which summoned him to dominion. First the need was felt; the contrivance was created in response. A man of business sees before him ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... temples called Tjandi Sewoe, or Thousand Temples. In the neighbourhood of the former ruins there are six large and fourteen small temples, twenty separate buildings in all. The ruins of the latter group cover a space of six hundred, square feet, and contain many splendid colossal figures. They are arranged in five regular parallelograms, consisting of an outer row of eighty-four temples, a second of seventy-six, a third of sixty-four, a fourth of forty-four, and a fifth (forming an inner-parallelogram) of twenty-eight. The centre is ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... fond of this colossal old "bourru bienfaisant," as he was called in La Tremblaye, and believe that all his moroseness and brutality were put on, to hide one of the warmest, simplest, and tenderest hearts in ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... famous colossal statue of Zeus, the noblest production of Greek art, and looked upon as one of the wonders of the world. It was the work of Phidias, the greatest of Grecian sculptors, and was a seated statue of gold and ivory, over forty feet in height. The throne of the king of the gods was mostly of ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... credulity may be mentioned, for it was astonishing in a man of such colossal genius. He believed in the most incredible things, as the "Man in the Iron Mask," the twin brother of Louis XIV; in the octopus that has no mouth and feeds itself through its arms; and in the reality of the Japanese sirens which the Japanese were ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... upon the square in front of the Cathedral, where now stands the colossal statue of Andrew Jackson, in the midst of the most lovely and beautiful shrubs and flowers indigenous to the soil of Louisiana. The orange, with her pale green foliage, and sweet, modest white flowers, so delicate and so delicious; the oleander, the petisporum, and roses of every hue ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... assistance which he had rendered them in their marauding enterprises against the neighboring chiefs of Romagna. The other Italian princes, although deeply incensed and disgusted by this infamous alliance, stood too much in awe of the colossal power, which had planted its foot so firmly on their territory, to offer any resistance. Venice alone, surveying from her distant watch-tower, to borrow the words of Peter Martyr, the whole extent ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... to the window, was the cartoon which Signor Moretti had executed for the window we had been admiring. It is of the size of the original, and is in all respects a perfectly and highly finished drawing in black and white. The colors are not shown on it. On an easel near it was the drawing of a colossal head of Saint Donato, bishop and martyr, destined for a window for a church in Arezzo. It is full of life and vigor. The head is that of an evidently born and Nature-ordained ruler of men. And such Rome's bishops for the most part were in the days when Saint Donato gave his life for the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... left 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 ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... style, with shops and so forth, but no public-houses. Supposing, too, that he were to offer a house free to all the homeless folk, all the tramps, and broken men, and out-of-workers in Great Britain. Then, having collected them together, let him employ them, under fitting superintendence, upon some colossal piece of work which would last for many years, and perhaps be of permanent value to humanity. Give them a good rate of pay, and let their hours of labour be reasonable, and those of recreation be pleasant. Might you not benefit ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Christ not say now as He said so many centuries ago—'My House is called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves!' Is it not truly a den of thieves? What has the Man of Sorrows to do with all the evil splendour of St. Peter's?—its bronzes, its marbles, its colossal statues of dead gods, its glittering altars, its miserable dreary immensity, its flaring gilding and insolent vulgarity of cost! Oh, what a loneliness is that of Christ in this world! What ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Etienne longed for his father's colossal figure; he would fain have seemed strong, not puny. All the vanities of love and manhood came into his heart like so many arrows, and he remained in gloomy silence, measuring for the first time the extent of his imperfections. Embarrassed ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... they, individually, present rather the appearance of a small plantation than one great tree. It is only after you leave the woods, and ordinary objects of comparison present themselves to the mind, that you can realize in thought the colossal stature of ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... been insufferable and his ignorance colossal. What time he could spare from his English tailor—"and you just ought to see his clothes, and especially his checkerboard waistcoats"—had been spent in abusing everything in English art that wasn't ...
— A Gentleman's Gentleman - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that brain-paths cannot be deepened; that memory is not strengthened in that way. There is a natural retentiveness with which some of us are born—the men of colossal intellect—and they remember and are able to use infinitely more things acquired in the past, because they have a brain substance of greater tenacity in holding impressions than others possess. James compares some brains to wax in which the mark left by the ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... apertures for bodies like a honeycomb. I noticed that all the carving was of the rudest and coarsest kind. There was no trace of civilization anywhere, no theatre, no forum, nothing but a barbarous idea of splendour, worked out on a colossal scale in columns and temples. The most interesting thing was the Tombs. These were characteristic of Palmyra, and lined the wild mountain-defile entrance to the city, and were dotted about on the mountain-sides. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... a pair of stirrups made for me. The silver ornaments on the stirrups alone weighed forty pounds. The decorations of the saddle were of corresponding richness. The value of the silver on both saddle and stirrups was about 1500 dollars. The spurs used in Peru are of colossal magnitude. Old custom ordains that they must contain three marks (a pound and a half) of silver. The stirrup-bow is broad and richly wrought; the ornaments being either of the pattern called hueso de tollo,[34] or of that styled hoja de laurel con semilla.[35] The rowel ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... last I became sufficiently tranquil to be able to say my prayers and seek my couch. I had just extinguished my candle and lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said: "I lie in the ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... 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 its royalty over ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... at a moment when man's power to achieve good or to inflict evil surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of all ages. We can turn rivers in their courses, level mountains to the plains. Oceans and land and sky are avenues for our colossal commerce. Disease ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... townships and the small towns visit by the museum of Marvels on its provincial tour, Professor Thunder, gifted manager of this "colossal amusement enterprise," as the streamers eloquently phrased it, preferred to secure a shop in the main street to pitching his tent in some out-of-the-way place, where his persuasive powers might be wasted ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... Pitman set forth his sorrows. He had gone today to Waterloo, expecting to receive the colossal Hercules, and he had received instead a barrel not big enough to hold Discobolus; yet the barrel was addressed in the hand (with which he was perfectly acquainted) of his Roman correspondent. What was stranger still, a case had arrived by the same train, large enough and heavy enough ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... well and 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, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... you," says Emerson, "and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... in Great Britain and in Holland that the most remarkable instances of obesity have been seen, especially in the former country colossal weights have been recorded. In some countries corpulency has been considered an adornment of the female sex. Hesse-Wartegg refers to the Jewesses of Tunis, who when scarcely ten years old are subjected to systematic treatment by confinement in narrow, dark rooms, where ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... group which Mr. John Quincy Adams designed when Secretary of State. It was executed in marble by Luigi Persico, an Italian sculptor, whose work gave such satisfaction to Mr. Adams that he secured for him an order for the two colossal statues which now flank the central doorway. War is represented by a stalwart gymnast with a profuse development of muscle and a benign expression of countenance, partially encased in ancient Roman armor, while Peace is a matronly dame, somewhat advanced ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... cleared by means of excavation, the form and construction of which will best appear from the annexed ground-plan. [PLATE XXXVII., Fig. 3.] It seems to have consisted of three gateways, whereof the inner and outer were ornamented with colossal human-headed hulls and other figures, while the central one was merely panelled with slabs of alabaster. Between the gateways were two large chambers, 70 feet long by 23 feet wide, which were thus capable of containing ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... lodging: he had some poetry in his ambition after all. Lastly to the Albergo dei Poveri,[7] a noble institution, built by a Brignole and enriched by repeated benefactions; like all the edifices of the old Genoese, vast and of fine proportions. The great staircase and hall are adorned with colossal statues of its benefactors (among whom are many Durazzos), and the sums that they gave or bequeathed are commemorated on the pedestals. In the chapel is a piece of sculpture by Michael Angelo, a dead Christ and Virgin (only heads), and an altarpiece by Puget. Branching ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... of nearly everything that goes to the successful waging of war. It took nearly two years of patient endeavour before an advance could really be considered, and by far the greater part of that time was devoted to amassing supplies and organising means of transport. It was a colossal task, the magnitude of which was never even imagined by the people ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... German railway developments directed towards the frontiers of Belgium and of Luxemburg. This was an illuminating, indeed an ominous, experience. Entering the Kaiser's dominions by the route from the town of Luxemburg to Treves, one came of a sudden upon a colossal detraining station that was not quite completed, fulfilling no conceivable peaceful object and dumped down on the very frontier—anything more barefaced it would be difficult to conceive. Treves itself, three or four miles on, constituted a vast railway centre, and ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... which merits not only the gratitude but the admiration of the Filipino people, it is the organization of public education implanted by the American people. There is not a single Filipino capable of reasoning who does not see and understand the colossal transformation which our entire people experienced by virtue of that lay education. Not only did the Government organize an efficient educational system, but it extended it throughout the Archipelago in such a general way that some ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sudden, colossal tongue of blue-green light as the ton of atomically distorted mercury was exploded by a projector beam turned on ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... what a colossal move on the political chess-board the Coronation was. Bedford realized this by and by, and tried to patch up his mistake by crowning his King; but what good could that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gladness heard at the beginning, 'Oh! the blessedness of the man that delights in the law of the Lord,' holds on persistently, like a subdued and almost bewildered undercurrent of sweet sound amid all the movements of some colossal symphony, through tears and sobs, confession and complaint, and it springs up at the close triumphant, like the ruddy spires of a flame long smothered, and swells and broadens, and draws all the intricate harmonies into its own rushing tide. Some of you remember the great ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... amounted to more than one hundred thousand duros. But my uncle, who was an obstinate fellow, returned to the site of the shipwreck and this time he must have located the treasure, for he came back to England with a colossal fortune. Today the Hastings, who still live in England, are millionaires. Do you remember that Fanny who came to the tavern ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... Words are not adequate to describe this particular day in Marble Canyon; it must be experienced to be appreciated and I will not strive further to convey my impressions. As the sun sank to the western edge of the outer world we were rushing down a long straight stretch of canyon, and the colossal precipices looming on all sides, as well as dead ahead across our pathway, positively appeared about to overwhelm the entire river by their ponderous magnificence, burnished at their summits by the dying sun. On, down the headlong flood our faithful boats carried us to the gloom that seemed to be ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... suddenly to quadruple itself. His determination was that of the battering-ram, blind, deaf, resistless. The ugly set of his face became all the more ugly, the contorted eyes flashing, the great jaw all but simian. He appeared physically larger. It was no longer a man; it was a giant, an ogre, a colossal jotun hurling ice-blocks, fighting out a battle unspeakable, in the dawn of the world, in ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... moved in a double line, red limousines, blue limousines, mauve limousines, green limousines. She stood waiting for the flood to cease, and, as she did so, there purred past her the biggest and reddest limousine of all. It was a colossal vehicle with a polar-bear at the steering-wheel and another at his side. And in the interior, very much at his ease, his gaze bent courteously upon a massive lady in a ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... asked Prescott. He always had a feeling of repulsion toward Mr. Harley, his sounding talk, his colossal vanity and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... colors upon its slope changed to deeper reds, and then to amethyst, and {p.023} violet, and pearl gray. The sun-forsaken ranges below fell away to dark neutral tints. But the fires upon the crest burned on, deepening from gold to burnished copper, a colossal beacon flaming high against the sunset purple of the eastern skies. Finally, even this great light paled to a ghostly white, as the supporting foundation of mountain ridges dropped into the darkness of the long northern twilight, until the snowy summit seemed no longer a part of earth, but ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... sweet-faced woman of thirty, her blue-black hair brought in a bandeau over her dainty ears. She is the model of the gray-haired man on the left, a man of perhaps fifty, with kindly intelligent eyes and strong, nervous, expressive hands—hands that know how to model a colossal Greek war-horse, plunging in battle, or create a nymph scarcely a foot high out of a lump of clay, so charmingly that the French Government has not only bought the nymph, but given him a little red ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... of existence, long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion, long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from all social intercourse with ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... paints old Egypt's former glory, Of mighty temples reaching heavenward, Of grim, colossal statues, whose barbaric story The caustic pens of erudition still record, Whose ancient cities of glittering minarets Reflect the gold of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... doubt, however, whether the task before the genius of Greece, the task of making Proserpine out of a porker, was really so colossal. The primitive mind is notoriously capable of entertaining, simultaneously, the most contradictory notions. Thus, in the Australian "Legend of Eerin," the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception is positively stunning. Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late Town-Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general. He, at least, never betrayed his clients. As ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... in strength, but they were prudently slow in persuading themselves that the Greeks were unarmed, and incapable of defending the Church. Ere long they streamed in, and for the first time in the history of the edifice the colossal Christ on the ceiling above the altar was affronted by ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... at 11 o'clock, Evans riding with me as far as Mr. Nugent's. He was telling me so many things, that at the top of the hill I forgot to turn round and take a last look at my colossal, resplendent, lonely, sunlit den, but it was needless, for I carry it away with me. I should not have been able to leave if Mr. Nugent had not offered his services. His chivalry to women is so well known, that Evans said I could be safer and better cared for with no one. He added, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird |
