"Fabulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I found "The Pears" much shaken from their even tenor. The relic-hunters had penetrated their omnium gatherum and offered fabulous sums for the quaint old bits they found there. One of them declared he must and would have these wonders for the New England Kitchen. But the sisters were outraged. Adroitly I managed to hint a desire to see those ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... Fabulous as these stories sound, they still prove that Rhodopis must have been no ordinary woman. Some scholars would place her on a level with the beautiful and heroic Queen Nitokris, spoken of by Julius Africanus, Eusebius and others, and whose name, (signifying the victorious ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... diminutive head; for its fearful tusks, and thick-set projecting whiskers, gave its visage a most truculent expression; and with its grotesquely fashioned ponderous carcass, provided with fin feet of strange formation, seemed to mark it as a personification of one of the fabulous ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... narrated had transpired, and the old man had become a respected citizen of an obscure Spanish town, but the love of gold was still so strong upon him that he risked all to acquaint his son with the means of attaining fabulous wealth for ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... maintained a system of Negro education which has produced disappointing results, and I am opposed to the perpetuation of this system. My own idea is, that the character of education for the Negro ought to be changed. If, after forty years of earnest effort, and the expenditure of fabulous sums to educate his head, we have only succeeded in making a criminal of him and impairing his usefulness and efficiency as a laborer, wisdom would suggest that we make another experiment and see if we cannot ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... may appear worth the seeking and the keeping, since they assert that the land is so rich in gold and silver, that upon the slightest turning it up with a spade or pick-axe, these rich metals plainly appear mixed with the mould. It may be objected that this looks a little fabulous; but to this two satisfactory answers may be given: the first is, that later discoveries on the same coast confirm the truth of it, which for anything I can see ought to put the fact out of question; but if any doubts should remain, my second answer should overturn ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... carpets and curtains which spit dust at you if you touch them. (Is there not some fabulous animal which does the same, thereby to escape in the mirk it has itself created?) Most of the furniture has been removed, but here and there bulky pieces remain, an antique sideboard, maybe too large to be taken away; like Robinson Crusoe's boat, too ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... and tucker. In such bilge lie the springs of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of some of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids are led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out that they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres, and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... appearances of the various strange animals found in that country—the crocodile, the hippopotamus, and the elephant, are described with considerable spirit and fidelity; and even the form and colours of the fabulous phoenix, are delineated with all the confidence of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... a letter from his pocket, and with her own eyes she read an editor's acceptance of the new novel for what seemed to her a fabulous sum. No argument could have influenced her as the single typewritten sheet did. Why should she not trust this man, whom all the world admired and trusted? Heart and mind were reconciled now; Susan's eyes, when they were raised to his, were full ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... themselves to render fruitful. It is an instance of poor, naked human nature caught in the fact. But, as in other instances, she cannot play the woman with impunity. Madame des Ursins dwells with complacency upon her description of the fabulous cortege which he has in preparation. Lackeys innumerable, a legion of pages and gentlemen, fiocches and carriages, emblazoned with gold, a suite with which in the present day a sovereign would not encumber himself, and which ate up the remainder of her fortune, ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Brune over the Anglo-Russians under the duke of York, and fourteen days after that of Zurich, gained by Massena over the Austro-Russians under Korsakov and Suvorov. He traversed France, from the shore of the Mediterranean to Paris, in triumph. His expedition, almost fabulous, had struck the public mind with surprise, and had still more increased the great renown he had acquired by the conquest of Italy. These two enterprises had raised him above all the other generals of the republic. The distance of the theatre upon which he had fought ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... and Serapis, emblems of the immortal youth and signs of the renewing power of Nature as they are, has fallen the gray shadow of the past. Each pathetic bit of ruin has about it the consciousness of an almost fabulous antiquity, and by its very vagueness appeals more powerfully to the imagination than any historical associations. "Time here seems to have folded its wings." In the immemorial calm that is in the air a thousand years seem as one day. Through all the dim ages ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Greeks, in common with the Egyptians and other Eastern nations, placed the reign of the gods anterior to the race of mortals, Grecian mythology—which is a system of myths, or fabulous opinions and doctrines respecting the universe and the deities who were supposed to preside over it—forms the most natural and appropriate introduction ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... 'Misericordia!' The foreigner from the north of Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description, waits with impatience to feel the movement of the earth, and longs to hear with his own ear the subterranean sounds which he has hitherto considered fabulous. With levity he treats the apprehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives: but, as soon as his wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek safety ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... And this effect, being exerted upon the sensitive part of our frame, is altogether independent of argument, proof, or reason; is as formidable to a true religion as to a false one; to a well-grounded faith as to a chimerical mythology, or fabulous tradition. Neither, let it be observed, is the crime or danger less, because impure ideas are exhibited under a veil, in covert ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... says the historian, "which had been withdrawn from the Bank of the United States was deposited in local banks, money was easy and speculation extended to every branch of trade. New cities were laid out; fabulous prices were charged for building-lots which existed only on paper" etc. And in Van Buren's time the people paid the violinist, as they have in ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... Henry VIII, to search all the libraries, and religious houses in England, when those archives were preserved, before their destruction was produced by the reformation, or Polydore Virgil had consumed such curious pieces as would have contradicted his framed and fabulous history. He for some reasons believed Oxford or Berkshire to have given birth to this great man, but has not informed us what those reasons were that induced him to believe so, and at present there appears no other, but that the seats of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... when men lived in the giddiness and the exultation of a constant creation—when a day was sufficient for Rubens to paint the "Kermesse" thirteen days to paint the "Mages", even or eight to paint the "Communion de St. Francois d'Assise"—and blotting from our mind the fabulous production of Tintoretto and Veronese, let us merely remember that thirty years ago Millais painted a beautiful picture every year until marriage and its consequences brought his art to a sudden close. ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... that the nobler and purer a woman's heart is, the less she credits the existence of vice and the possibility of crime among her own sex. You doubtless consider the Brinvilliers, Fredegonds, Fulvias and Faustinas, quite as fabulous as Centaurs, Sirens and Were-wolves; and I feel as reluctant to shake your fair faith in womanhood, as to dash the dew from a rose-bud, or rudely brush the bloom a cluster of tempting grapes; but the grim truth must be told, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... northwest and southwest [sic] and north and south, so that in one direction they reach to the strait of Sincapura [Singapore], twenty-five leagues' distance from Malaca, and at the other almost to the Malucos and other islands, where a fabulous amount of cloves, pepper, and ginger is gathered, for there are whole mountains of these spices. The first to discover these islands were Spaniards, who went thither with the famous Magallanes, but did not conquer them, for they were more experienced in navigation ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... gross freight paid the vessel. Before the Great War in Europe, freights were low and the schooner skippers earned scanty incomes. Then came a world shortage of tonnage and immediately coastwise freights soared skyward. The big schooners of the Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their masters shared in the unexpected opulence. Besides their primage they owned shares in their vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently their settlement at the end of a voyage coastwise amounted ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... into the emerald depths of oceans now vanished,—what wouldst thou have said, could the thought have crossed thy brain, that one day thou shouldst be here? Under a glass! ticketted, numbered, pasted to the wall! forming an item in a collection of things fabulous, and exhibiting thy venerable form, thine antediluvian physiognomy, to thousands of badauds, who either pass thee without a glance, or examine thee with unfeeling curiosity, bestowing not a thought ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... Moreover, in the cases where these were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns the present, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time, as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets, having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of Greece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of place as well as that of time; and he must ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... I would I could infuse my blood into your veins that you might be a part of me, my thought your thought, and your heart mine—A murmur has just escaped your lips as though it were a soft reply. Be calm and beautiful forever as you are now! Ah! would that I possessed that fabulous fairy power which, with a wand, could make you sleep while I am absent, until, returning, I should wake you with ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... C, D, ETC.—In the chronicles of Robert of Gloucester the age of Brutus is purely legendary. The whole chronicle is partly taken from the fabulous history ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... famed for its wealth in precious minerals and precious stones. Poets often celebrated its golden resources. But its wealth in this respect was always fabulous rather than real. India is in reality poor in minerals. It has a good deal of iron—iron of the choicest quality. It has also a good deal of coal, but its coal is poor, owing to its superabundance of ash. It has ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... it is said, Richard had not ceased for a moment to deal out his blows, and the skin of his hand adhered to the handle of his battle-axe. This narration would appear almost fabulous, were it not that it is attested in the chronicles of several eye-witnesses, and for centuries afterwards the Saracen women hushed their babes when fractious by threatening them with Malek-Rik, the name which ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... who formerly met one with volubility and the expectation of a fabulous tip have given place to khakied orderlies, the polite customs officials to old-soldier myrmidons of the worried embarkation officer. Store dumps with English markings are packed symmetrically on the cobbled stones. The ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... to place a greater value upon the traditions of the Indians than has been attached to them by those who do not view them as a series of authentic annals. For myself, I hold them in the light of historical records, mixed up indeed with much that is fabulous, but not in a greater degree than the early annals of other unenlightened nations, who could not perpetuate them by means of letters. After all it will remain for the reader to fix the degree of estimation in which these traditions shall be held, and to determine the degree of credit that ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... of the Clan Mackenzie, though vouched for by certain charters and local histories, is now believed to be fabulous. It seems to have been first advanced in the 17th century, when there was an absurd desire and ambition in Scotland to fabricate or magnify all ancient and lordly pedigrees. Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, the Lord Advocate, and Sir George Mackenzie, the first Earl of Cromartie, were ready to swear ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... It began at the back of her head, covered her body with a thick mantle, flowed in front of her from the shoulders in two waves which united under the chin, and fell down to her feet in one wavy sheet. It was, indeed, the miraculous hair, a fabulous fleece, with heavy twists and curls, a glorious, starry efflorescence, the warm and living robe of a saint, ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... Africa, and that a four months journey, to a particular city, would not be looked upon at the time as transgressing the bounds of truth. It is most probable that Buckar Sano alluded to Timbuctoo, a place that has given rise to more extraordinary conjectures, and respecting which, more fabulous stories have been told than of Babylon, or of Carthage of ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... in his thoughts, he compared himself to the legendary Gringos, neither dead nor alive, bound down to their conquest of unlawful wealth on Azuera—weighed heavily on the independent Captain Fidanza, owner and master of a coasting schooner, whose smart appearance (and fabulous good-luck in trading) were so well known along the western seaboard ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... this fabulous land was said to wear a magnificent attire fragrant with a costly gum, and sprinkled with gold dust. His palace was of porphyry and alabaster, and ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... a roaring trade. It was crowded from roof-tree to cellar. Rooms cost a fabulous price. Mrs. Wilders managed to be very comfortably lodged ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... distilling fast from the end of every leaf of this wonderful tree; at least it was so with us, who had been labouring four days through extreme heat without receiving the least moisture, and were now almost expiring for want of it." The testimony of travellers is too often enshrined among the fabulous; and their credentials either altogether rejected by some, or at least received "cum grano salis." Bruce of Kinnaird forms the most remarkable example of this kind, and the caricature of Baron Munchausen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... Stout garments in which man bides the buffet of wintry elements. From the rind of the stately butternut, drew they a brown complexion, Or the cerulean borrowed from the tint of the southern indigo. Thus rustic Industry girded itself, amid household music, As History of old, set her fabulous legends to the harp. Ears trained to the operas of Italy, would find discordance to be mocked at, But the patriot heard the ring of gold in the coffers of his country, Not sent forth to bankruptcy, for ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... true, to say that his History seems to be a kind of combination and exaggeration of the peculiarities of all his former efforts. It is as full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy as any of his parliamentary speeches. It makes the facts of English History as fabulous as his Lays do those of Roman tradition; and it is written with as captious, as dogmatical, and as cynical a spirit as the bitterest of his Reviews. That upon so serious an undertaking he has lavished uncommon exertion, is not to be doubted; nor can any ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to point with unmistakable clearness to a contemplated massacre,[878] of which, however the case may stand with respect to his mother, it is all but certain that he had at this time no idea, can only be regarded as fabulous additions of which the earliest disseminators of the story were altogether ignorant. The fact that the cardinal legate's rejection of the ring was publicly known[879] seems to be a sufficient proof that it was offered simply ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... opera house to get a box for this evening. They gave the "Barber," my favourite little opera. I aspire to something unheard of, fabulous; I want to be famous, I will sing. It is queer, the whole Italian company saluted me. We were in No. 2. I wore my Empire gown, in which I like myself best. Hair dressed like an Olympian goddess, falling lower than the belt, and ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... and it was thus that they sauntered back to the shade of the great forest trees, under whose arching vaults they slowly went, with love awakening within them. Albine said that she felt a little tired, and rested her head on Serge's shoulder. The fabulous tree was now forgotten. They only sought to draw their faces nearer together that they might smile in one another's eyes. And it was the trees, the maples, the elms, the oaks, with their soft green ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... certainly understood the art of compromise, which was the moving genius of that period of shifting politics. Is it not a rare merit to be able to take the measure of the time? This coat, which the young men of the present day may conceive to be fabulous, was neither civil nor military, and might pass for civil or military by turns. Fleurs-de-lis were embroidered on the lapels of the back skirts. The gilt buttons also bore fleurs-de-lis; on the shoulders ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... your majesty has given me, I have learned that the Firedrake, like the siren, the fairy, and so forth, is a fabulous animal which does not exist. But even granting, for the sake of argument, that there is a Firedrake, your majesty is well aware that there is no kind of use in sending me. It is always the eldest son who goes out first, and comes to grief on these occasions, and it is always the third son ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... Fabulous stories are told of the early wealth and glory of Mattra. Ferishta relates that when Mahmoud of Ghazni had arrived with his troops in the neighborhood in the year 1017, he heard of this rich city consecrated to Krishna Vasu-Deva, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... the exception of two or three, whose salvation adds to the absurdity), mingles the hell of Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. Dominic; sets Minos at the door as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus, and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of purgatory, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Sanskrit scholar. Kalidasa is mentioned with Bharavi as a famous poet in an inscription[105] dated A.D. 585-6 (507 Saka era), and for the present I see no reason to place him much earlier. As to the Laws of Manu, which used to be assigned to a fabulous antiquity,[106] and are so still sometimes by those who write at random or at second-hand, I doubt whether, in their present form, they can be older than the fourth century of our era, nay I am quite prepared to see an even later date assigned to them. ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... looked like an enormous poppy in his red uniform; the sun blazing through the glass roof almost set him on fire (the diplomats were begged to come in uniform, and that meant coats padded and buttoned up to the chin). Johan tells fabulous stories of the number of stout old ladies he saved, who all threatened to faint away on his decorations. He says he carried them bodily through the crowd and deposited them on the grass outside and went back for more. I was miraculously saved. ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... both men slept the sleep of the weary. The fire, a great mass of red coals, faded and flushed like some fabulous jewel. The wind washed over the cabin and fingered the eaves, and brushed furtive hands ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... in mind, all of these placers are the ancient beds of a least two separate periods of a great river, consequently, bed-rock will undoubtedly reveal fabulous wealth which cannot be uncovered in an examination. It would be useless to attempt to exaggerate the possibilities of these properties. The plain, simple facts are far more potent than unestablished fiction ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... and Russian trading company of wealthy merchants which was known as the Muscovy Company—an association of great influence that desired to extend its commerce to far-off China, whose wealth in those days was considered to be fabulous. All the maritime nations of Europe desired to gain the China trade and to bring to their own ports the rich silks and spices of the Orient. All of them were seeking for some quick and easy route for sailing vessels from Europe to China, and fortunate indeed ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... the earth was a flat plain of indefinite extent, and that around the inhabited regions on all sides extended, to vast distances, either desert wastes or trackless oceans. How could that same sun, which plunged into the ocean at a fabulous distance in the west, reappear the next morning at an equally great distance in the east? The old mythology asserted that after the sun had dipped in the western ocean at sunset (the Iberians, and other ancient nations, actually imagined that they could hear the hissing of the waters ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... patient may be plunged into a deep and prolonged unconsciousness lasting from a few hours to several years. It is in this condition that the lay journals find argument for their stories of premature burial, and from the same source the fabulous "sleeping girls" of the newspapers arise. Dana says that some persons are in the habit of going into a mesmeric sleep spontaneously. In these states there may be a lowering of bodily temperature, a retarding ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... platform and audience in an easy, unassuming manner, and delivered an address amusing and learned, yet understandable. And well he might, for he was not a mere painter, but one who had lectured on art to select audiences, and had sold pictures at fabulous prices. At this very moment London was asking, "Where is Custance?" and here he was ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... worship which in ancient times prevailed so extensively over the East. The serpent was formerly regarded as the symbol of a beneficent God. In Hindustan, says Maurice, "the veneration of the serpent is evident in every page of their mythologic history, in which every fabulous personage of note is represented as grasping or as environed with a serpent." According to Lajard, the word which signifies "life" in the greater part of the Semitic languages signifies also "a serpent" And Jacob Bryant says that the word "Ab," which in Hebrew ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... and this something has power to strike the imagination of every one who visits the great city of Vienna. It is perhaps the contrast of luxury on the one hand and black bread on the other, and the almost fabulous descent of the crown. Wrangel's officers use hundred-rouble notes for shaving-papers, and Americans in Vienna behave as unceremoniously with crowns. The lower denominations of the rouble are much cheaper than the price of paper, and the Austrian ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... simply this: That the Agricultural Department, with no motive but to tell the truth, and with its corps of trained experts, might mislead the public, but they (the promoters) could not possibly be mistaken in their fabulous figures compiled for the purpose of getting money from some ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... poetry, a second life within life, even within common real life. We admire the great facility with which, in his occasional poems, he elevates all circumstances by the feelings, and embellishes them with suitable sentiments, images, and historical and fabulous traditions. Their roughness and wildness belong to his time, his mode of life, and especially to his character, or, if one would have it so, his want of fixed character. He did not know how to curb himself; and so his ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... still to be written. There still exists a widespread opinion that the coral reef and the coral island are the work of an "insect." This fabulous insect, accredited with the genius of Brunel and the patience of Job, has been humorously enough held up before the children of many generations as an example of industry—a thing to be admired, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... career, in the thread of which, glory and disgrace, far-sighted and princely public spirit and insatiate private greed, were to be so strangely intertwined. In 1592 he planned the great adventure which astonished London by the fabulous plunder of the Spanish treasure-ships; in the same year he was in the Tower, under the Queen's displeasure for his secret marriage, affecting the most ridiculous despair at her going away from the neighbourhood, and pouring forth his flatteries on this old woman of sixty as if he had no bride ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... is no such enchanted spot as the Latin Quarter, but that every generation sets back the mythical land into the golden age of the Commune, or of 1848, or the days of 'Hernani.' It is the same with New York's East Side, 'the fabulous East Side,' as Mr. Huneker calls it in his collection of international urban studies, 'The New Cosmopolis.' If one judged externals by grime, by poverty, by sanded back-rooms, with long-haired visionaries ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... not a very large place; but looking for a lady there was something like looking for the fabulous ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... gone. She could draw but one conclusion from such a strain of remark about people with fabulous incomes. The cheerful cosmopolitan must have been dining with Mr. Midas, and must have sat much too long at table. What a pity that so pleasant a man should permit himself such excesses! There was, however, ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... according to the legend, Christ used it at the Paschal Supper; and Joseph of Arimathea afterwards employed it to catch the blood flowing from his wounds. Many cities formerly claimed the honour of possessing this fabulous relic. Of course, as Price shows, it was an old Oriental magic-dish legend, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... St. Lawrence, black-fox breeding has been going on for ten years, and is now on a successful basis. One man has made a fortune in the business, and it is rumored that a stock company is considering the purchase of his ten-acre fox ranch at a fabulous figure. The enormous prices obtainable for live black foxes, male or female, make diamonds and rubies seem cheap and commonplace; and it is no wonder that enterprising men are ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... sort?' But his mind was at ease again when he was assured by further conversation that the owner was entirely ignorant of the momentous truth. The 'Squire's offers were tempting, and, from byplay and bantering, at last amounted to what appeared a perfectly fabulous sum. The upshot of the matter was that the coolheaded Jones got rid of the wretched little lot for $490 cash. The purchaser was now quite sure that he was the shrewdest fellow in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... man, and the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or how ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... perambulators—lolling over the handle, which they usually held with their left hands, the right holding a copy of Orange Blossoms or some halfpenny paper, and so interested in the story of the Marquis of Lymejuice—a young man of noble presence and fabulous wealth, with a drooping golden moustache and very long legs, who, notwithstanding the diabolical machinations of Lady Sibyl Malvoise, who loves him as well as a woman with a name like that is capable of loving anyone, is determined to wed none other than the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... whithersoever they go. Bayan's real name was Mat Saman, but we always called him Bayan—which means the Paroquet—because the tale which he sang told of the wonderful doings of a prince, who was transformed into a fabulous bird called the Burong Agot, and whose attendants were the Paroquet and the Pied-robin (Murai). As he sat kneading me, as a baker kneads dough, he began to sing, and, that evening, and for many nights after, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... sense notorious for having written and published a bitter, cold and pitiless attack on religion, which was the favourite reading of many scholars and literary men, and this notable performance, together with the well accredited reports of his almost fabulous wealth, secured for him two social sets,—the one composed of such human sharks as are accustomed to swim round the plutocrat,—the other of the cynical, listless, semi-bored portion of a so-called cultured class who, having grown utterly tired of themselves, presumed that it was clever ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... round the place a good deal, and when the man found I really had money and meant something, he took me into all sorts of alleys and hiding-places, where he stored his old things away. I made fabulous bargains there, for either the old Jew liked me particularly, or I liked things that nobody else wanted. In the days when his principal customers were wharf-rats, and his principal business the traffic in old cordage and copper, he had hung out as a sign an ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... preached and incited the people to what they considered a Holy War. The promises of absolution of past and future sins were in proportion to the money given. In the diocese of London alone, a tun full of gold and silver was gathered, and by Lent the total amounted to what at that time was the fabulous sum of 2,500,000 francs. Thomas, Bishop of London, and brother to the Earl of Devonshire, was appointed by Urban to go with the Duke of Lancaster to Spain, as chief captain, with two thousand spears and four thousand archers, and half the money gathered was to be spent on this expedition, ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... merely because they are historic. I have always regarded this treasure-trove as purely antiquarian in its interest. It may contain some vessels or statuettes worth money; but to what extent? Certainly not such fabulous sums as ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... being retained in the dairy for the manufacture of butter and cheese. So that it actually happens that the poor mother in the courts of the metropolis can obtain milk easier than her far-away sister in those fabulous fields which the city woman has never seen, and, perhaps, never will. Often in arable districts there are scarcely any cows kept. No one cares to retail a pennyworth of milk. It is only by favour, through the interest taken by some farmer's ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... title of Ti, or Emperor, was first assumed. Hoang-ti means "Yellow Emperor," and became a favorite name with the founders of later dynasties. His wife, Se-ling-she, was the first to unravel silk from cocoons and weave it into cloth. Several others followed, all partly or wholly fabulous, until Yao ascended the throne in 2356 B.C. With this emperor history begins to throw off some little of the mist ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Clara, and Charley said the same. But the good old gentleman shook his head, and declared that here ended the history, real or fabulous, of ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... among them, and they were proud of him and proud of themselves, and delighted that they had been the first to carry out the idea of a Rummage Sale, which had been brought to them by a visitor from western New York, who explained its workings, and gave almost fabulous accounts of the money made by such sales. The village had intended to have one, but District No. 5 was ahead, with the result that many of the villagers joined in, glad to be rid of articles which had been stowed ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... fable accordingly conveying a character of its authors, throws light on some ages of which no other record remains. The superiority of this people is indeed in no circumstance more evident than in the strain of their fictions, and in the story of those fabulous heroes, poets, and sages, whose tales, being invented or embellished by an imagination already filled with the subject for which the hero was celebrated, served to inflame that ardent enthusiasm, with which so many ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... ninety-three, he is as erect as a pine, and he rides his horse with his usual vigor and grace. He is thin and spare and very tall, and those who knew him fifty years or more remember him as the most skilful horseman in the neighborhood of San Diego. And yet, as fabulous as it may seem, the man who danced this Don Antonio on his knee when he was an infant is not only still alive, but is active enough to mount his horse and canter about the country. Some years ago I attended an elderly gentleman, since dead, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... a nature to make Oki much better known to-day than in the medieval period of Japanese history. There are still current among the common people of the west coast extraordinary stories of Oki much like those about that fabulous Isle of Women, which figures so largely in the imaginative literature of various Oriental races. According to these old legends, the moral notions of the people of Oki were extremely fantastic: the most rigid ascetic could not ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... It appeared to me that its true course and character had never been fully illustrated. The world had received a strangely perverted idea of it through Florian's romance of "Gonsalvo of Cordova," or through the legend, equally fabulous, entitled "The Civil Wars of Granada," by Ginez Perez de la Hita, the pretended work of an Arabian contemporary, but in reality a Spanish fabrication. It had been woven over with love-tales and scenes ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... boat, not even a herd of cattle was to be seen, and Rezanov, for a moment forgetting to exult in the length of Russia's arm, yielded himself to the subtle influence abroad in the air, and felt that he could dream as he had dreamed in a youth when the courts of Europe to the boy were as fabulous as El Dorado in the immensity ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... follow tradition, we must assume a number of 84,000 burgesses who were freeholders and capable of bearing arms; for such, we are told, were the numbers ascertained by Servius at the first census. A glance at the map, however, shows that this number must be fabulous; it is not even a genuine tradition, but a conjectural calculation, by which the 16,800 capable of bearing arms who constituted the normal strength of the infantry appeared to yield, on an average of five persons to each family, the number of 84,000 burgesses, and this number ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... War waged all over the country with ruthless religious ferocity. Spain, again, was a land which had stored up, during long centuries, nearly the whole of its accumulated possessions in every art, sacred and secular, of fabulous value, within the walls of its great fortress-like cathedrals; Napoleon's soldiers over-ran the land, and brought with them rapine and destruction; so that in many a shrine, as at Montserrat, we ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... power of discrimination. Like inexperienced mariners, they know not where to look for the deep and the shallow water, and, allured by enchanting circumstances, they may, like those who are reported to have been enticed by the voices of the fabulous Syrens, easily overlook the danger, that assuredly awaits them ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... at the Chateau de Loches, and who has also the enjoy- ment of a garden - a garden compressed and curtailed, as those of old castles that perch on hill-tops are apt to be - containing a horse-chestnut tree of fabulous size, a tree of a circumference so vast and so perfect that the whole population of Loches might sit in con- centric rows beneath its boughs. The gem of the place, however, is neither the big marronier, nor the collegial church, nor the mighty dungeon, nor the hideous ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... expected this blow; she, however, carried him off to the moose-deer, and from moose-deer to round-towers, to various architectural antiquities, and to the real and fabulous history of Ireland, on all which the count spoke with learning and enthusiasm. But now, to Colonel Heathcock's great joy and relief, a handsome collation appeared in the dining-room, of ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... quality, and its flesh is not esteemed. The vicuna, on the contrary, yields a wool which is eagerly sought after, and which in the Andes towns will sell for at least five times its weight in alpaca wool. Ponchos woven out of it are deemed the finest made, and command the fabulous price of 20 pounds or 30 pounds sterling. A rich proprietor in the cordilleras is often seen with such a poncho, and the quality of the garment, the length of time it will turn rain, etcetera, are favourite subjects of conversation with the wearers of them. Of course ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... on, the fair wind lasting us till we got to the latitude of the Cape de Verde Islands, and I began to fancy that the stories I had heard of gales and hurricanes were fabulous, and that we were to enjoy the same sort of ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... Rome. What the devil does it signify setting us in these days right as to the Licinian Rogation, and Livy's myths? Every school-boy knew that Livy lied; but the main story was clear enough for all the purposes of experience; and, that being so, the more fabulous and entertaining the subsidiary matter is the better. Tell Thackeray not to go ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... luxuriantly indefinable to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... enter: two or three men mounted on their own horses, beautiful creatures concerning whose value fabulous tales are told in the stable; the best rider of the school, very quietly and correctly dressed, and managing her horse so easily that the women in the gallery do not perceive that she is guiding him at all, although the real judges, old soldiers, ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... letter of condolence on Mr. Thrale's death, Johnson speaks of her having enjoyed happiness in marriage, "to a degree of which, without personal knowledge, I should have thought the description fabulous." The "Autobiography" and "Thraliana" tell a widely different tale. The mortification of not finding herself appreciated by her husband was poignantly increased, during the last years of his life, by finding another offensively preferred to her. He was so ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... in the destruction of the Roman greatness. He celebrates with peculiar satisfaction this memorable triumph of Christ, and insults his adversaries by challenging them to produce some similar example of a town taken by storm, in which the fabulous gods of antiquity had been able to protect either ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... not why. It is quite funny to see. They strike each other with fists and clubs, and break each other's heads. It is gross. They are like a lot of animals. They are like dogs wrangling over bones. Jobs are bones, you know. Now, if they fought for women, or ideas, or bars of gold, or fabulous diamonds, it would be splendid. But no; they are only hungry, and fight ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... closely interwoven, that Sam found himself most of the time in a constantly unhappy frame of mind. Why Jack should continue to buy things he couldn't pay for, instead of painting pictures which one day somebody would want, and at fabulous prices, too, was one thing he could never ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... his "History of Britain," from the fabulous period of the Norman Conquest. And in the same year he published in one volume "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes." It has been currently asserted that Milton preferred the "Paradise Regained" to "Paradise Lost." This is not ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... occasional hint, however, I have endeavored to pave the way for stranger things to come, which, had they been disclosed at once, Monsieur du Miroir might have been deemed a shadow, and myself a person of no veracity, and this truthful history a fabulous legend. But, now that the reader knows me worthy of his confidence, I will begin to ...
— Monsieur du Miroir (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bizarrely those half-fabulous names fell from Signet's lips in the turquoise and gold of the afternoon. It was like the babble of some monstrous and harmless mythology. And all the while, as he kicked his bare heels on the deckhouse and harassed me with his somnolent greed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of needlework reached its climax long ago, and is now very old. History and faded rags are the only witnesses to its fabulous glories, in Classical, Oriental, and early Mediaeval days. It would appear that nothing new remains to be invented. Copies of past styles, and selections from the scraps we retain and value as models, are all that we can ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists had fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vague was a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, without unfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination to make what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. This tendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, and it led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macpherson were presently received. The earliest specimens of Ossian were revealed to ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... quality, charging them at the highest prices, and as these consisted principally of tobacco, salt, iron, sirih and pieces of calico they lasted no time, and had to be frequently replaced. As a matter of course this fraudulent manner of trading made the poor Sakais' debts amount to fabulous proportions and then their swindling creditor dictated the conditions he best liked: the man had to follow and serve him or if there was some woman in the family he preferred, he would carry her off either to keep for himself, or privately ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... do to smother either. Though to open the ventilator would be to invite another invasion by the black mold, not to mention the amoebae and other fabulous monsters that had up to now been kept at a safe distance by the repeller zone, a simple adaptation of a very old discovery. A zone of mechanical vibrations, of a frequency of 500,000 cycles per second, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... will be noticed in connection with Denmark; these two countries forming a greater part of the ancient Scandinavia, from which our Teutonic ancestors migrated, the land of Odin, and Frea, and Thor, those half-fabulous deities, concerning whom there are still divided opinions; some supposing that they were heroes, and others, impersonations of virtues, or elements and wonders of nature. The mythology of Greece does not more fully abound with gods and goddesses, than that of the old Scandinavia with ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... required to be believed things not demonstrated (whether it was that they could in themselves be demonstrated but not to certain persons, or could not at all be), whereas among the Manichees our credulity was mocked by a promise of certain knowledge, and then so many most fabulous and absurd things were imposed to be believed, because they could not be demonstrated. Then Thou, O Lord, little by little with most tender and most merciful hand, touching and composing my heart, didst persuade me- considering what innumerable ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... guaranteed—"perceived that Love is not merely a sentiment, an appetite, or a passion, but a great means of intellectual development." Of course Solomon did not know this, nor Sappho, nor Catullus, nor the fashioners of those "sentiments" of the Middle Ages which brought about the half-fabulous Courts of Love itself, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Donne. It was reserved for—but one never ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... an ordinary rescue of Peter; and the raising of Lazarus will be only a similar glorification of a commonplace feat of artificial respiration, whilst others will scoff at it as a planned imposture in which Lazarus acted as a confederate. Between the rejection of the stories as wholly fabulous and the acceptance of them as the evangelists themselves meant them to be accepted, there will be many shades of belief and disbelief, of sympathy and derision. It is not a question of being a Christian or not. A Mahometan Arab will accept literally and without question parts of the ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... long tunic, if I remember rightly, of red damask, as well as some other things." This pope, whose body was thus washed with his shirt torn in half for want of a towel, was that same Sixtus the enormous wealth and boundless luxury of whose nephews seem almost fabulous to readers even of these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... his hands, other followed, and in a moment clapping of hands was heard all around,—for Crispinilla had been divorced a number of times, and was known throughout Rome for her fabulous debauchery. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... way; he proffered fabulous rewards to any who would save him; but none could help; nay, all were in like distress. His brain ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... subordination of all to one, either as the prominent person, or the principal object. Cymbeline is the only exception; and even that has its advantages in preparing the audience for the chaos of time, place, and costume, by throwing the date back into a fabulous king's reign. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... speak of such surplus of luxuries as was brought to his doors by his old and paternal friend, "John Company." His wants were simple, his life healthy, though full of toil, his appetite great—an appetite which throve upon what it fed, and gave rise to fabulous feats of eating, recalling the exploits of the beloved and big-bellied ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... futile controversies have prevailed. Practically speaking, we know nothing whatever about the matter. There used to be a theory that the Charlemagne Romances owed their origin more or less directly to the fabulous Chronicle of Tilpin or Turpin, the warrior-Archbishop of Rheims. It has now been made tolerably certain that the Latin chronicle on the subject is not anterior even to our existing Chanson de Roland, and very probable that it is a good deal later. On the other hand, of actual historical basis ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Wall St., leaving misery, class antagonism and resentment in its trial. The old free America of our fathers was undergoing a profound change. Equality of opportunity was doomed. A new social alignment was being created. Monopoly was loosed upon the land. Fabulous fortunes were being made as wealth was becoming centered into fewer and fewer hands. Modern capitalism was entrenching itself for the final and inevitable struggle for world domination. In due time the social ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... the famous bridge across the Rhine, but a hurried examination brought him no comfort. He looked over at Snorky across the aisles and Snorky winked back at him in the triumph of achievement. Still if Snorky was to share in the fabulous returns it was only right that Snorky should contribute to the practical details! The truth is that Skippy in calmer mood had already begun to regret the impulse of the day before. Five million dollars after ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... Thoughts, is his frequent Allusion to Heathen Fables, which are not certainly of a Piece with the Divine Subject, of which he treats. I do not find fault with these Allusions, where the Poet himself represents them as fabulous, as he does in some Places, but where he mentions them as Truths and Matters of Fact. The Limits of my Paper will not give me leave to be particular in Instances of this kind; the Reader will easily remark them in his Perusal of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... haughty heart Thrust through by Love's audacious dart? Strange conqueror, Love! And happy he, And strangely privileged and free, Who only knows by story Him and his feats of glory! If on this subject you are wont To think the simple truth too blunt, The fabulous may less affront; Which now, inspired with gratitude, Yea, kindled into zeal most fervent, Doth venture to intrude Within your maiden solitude, And kneel, your humble servant.— In times when animals were speakers, Among the quadrupedal ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Albuquerque dined on an egg and a pigeon, yet it required six weeks to make an inventory of his plate. At this period, when the nobles gave fetes the lamps were often decorated with emeralds and the ceilings garlanded with precious stones. The women fairly blazed with sparkling gems of fabulous value, while the country was starving. Most, if not all, of this missing treasure was transferred to Asia, and with the silver current which flowed steadily from the Spanish coffers into India went many of the emeralds ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... daughter, born like Agassiz, "in the lovely month of May," and amid scenery as beautiful as the Pays de Vaud. Her father named her Rose, in defiance of Hillard's objection to idyllic nomenclature; and as a child she seemed much like the spirit of that almost fabulous flower, the wild orange-rose. Ten years later, she was the most graceful girl in the Concord dancing-school, and resembled her elder sister so closely that they could not have been mistaken for anything but sisters. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Harvey. "Such tales were long believed, even by writers on natural history; and I have some where a picture of a monstrous bat sucking the blood from a man's veins. But all this is now known to be fabulous. No kind of bat will attack an animal as large as itself, nor enter a house when there is an abundance of fruit and insects ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel
... sunlight and gravity, is a veritable production, yet it is not due to the process of combustion. It is not dependent for its creation upon the destruction of fabulous quantities of substantial materials. The rather does it originate in, and is it disseminated through the vast energies of spheres retro-acting upon spheres throughout the whole ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... bound to have the best the race could breed in all lines of endeavor. But when so many people migrated to other planets, she gradually lost many of her finest brains. Later, those other planets offered such fabulous wages to men and women with skills and trainings her first inhabitants lacked, ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... a young woman's favorite, sir, before I was born; and a very remarkable dog, too. The vital principle in that poodle, Mr. Kerby, must have been singularly intensified. He lived to a fabulous old age, and he was clever enough to play an important part of his own in what you English call a Romance of Real Life! If I could only have dissected that poodle, I would have put him into my ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... is piety and the fear of death and rich superstition. Inger, maybe, felt that she had more reason than others to fear the judgment of Heaven, and it would not pass her by; she knew how God walked about in the evening time looking out over all His wilderness with fabulous eyes; ay, He would find her. There was not so much in her daily life wherein she could improve; true, she might bury her gold ring deep in the bottom of a clothes chest, and she could write to Eleseus and tell him to be converted ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... got it into his head that a fortune was to be made out of these same guns. To buy them all, to hold on to them until war was declared again (as he had no doubt it would be in a few months), and then sell out at fabulous prices—this was the daring idea that addled the pate of Silas Trefethen, "Dealer in E. & W. I. Goods and Groceries," as the faded sign over ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... possession, less materialistic in their reading of life, less powerful in their grasp upon economic opportunity than their rivals. In the Latin countries industry yet remains largely on the small scale, which is economically wasteful, but which does not build up fabulous wealth at the expense of the individual worker. The great corporation designed for the rapid creation of wealth has not found that congenial home on Latin soil which it has on ours, or on German soil. And this fact accounts for the touch of handicraft lingering in the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... This fabulous creature was one of those destructive monsters of which many ravaged Greece in the age of fable. It had the body of a man and the head of a bull, and so great was the havoc it wrought among the Cretans that ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... consideration. It may be said that critical scepticism carried to the length suggested is historical pyrrhonism; that if we are altogether to discredit an ancient or a modern historian, because he has assumed fabulous matter to be true, it will be as well to give up paying any attention to history. It may be said, and with great justice, that Eginhard's "Life of Charlemagne" is none the less trustworthy because of the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... be worth a king's ransom. Not least were details respecting Michilimackinac, the Mackinaw already referred to. Nearly half a century before, Henry, a native of New Jersey, of English parents—his ambition fired by tales of the fabulous fortunes to be made in the fur trade—obtained from the commandant at Montreal a permit to proceed west as a trader. He outfitted at Albany, and the following summer set ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... a fabulous being possessing the head of a woman and the body of a sea-serpent, which was supposed to ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... his companion; "no one would believe it without proof—absolute proof." Then he leaned closer. "To me he made no such absurd claim, but from the way he talked—from his grandiose ideas, his strange philosophy, his fabulous hopes for humanity—I formed the opinion that the man is mad—not wholly mad, you understand, but touched, in one corner of the brain, by a wild hallucination. His daughter, naturally, believes in him. She is a most attractive girl. Polish women ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... he was to find himself in those remote solitudes between Dagsberg and the ruins of Nideck, sat long meditating what he must do to rejoin his household gods; then, gliding down the stream of his usual meditations, he went over the fabulous, heroic, or barbarous legends and chronicles of the former lords of that land. He went back to the Tribocci, that German nation settled about Strasbourg, remembering Clovis, Chilperic, Theodoric, Dagobert, the furious struggle between Brunehaut, Queen of Austrasia, and Fredegonde, ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... observed that your fabulous good fortune hasn't deserted you in the least." Lyad's glance switched to Trigger; she smiled again. It was a pleasant, easy smile that showed white teeth. "Would ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... statuettes from the ancient Grecian Colony of Tanagra, which no modern work of plastic art can imitate in grace of form and delicacy of color,—dating three or four hundred years before the Christian era; and in other rooms, a fabulous collection of jewels, and numberless precious vases, illustrating especially the progress of Ancient ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... possessing the faculty! Everybody remembers the remark of Sheridan, when Tierney, the prosaic Whig leader of the English House of Commons, ventured to bring in, as an illustration of his argument, the fabulous but favorite bird of untrained orators, the phoenix, which is supposed always to spring up alive out of its own ashes. "It was," said Sheridan, "a poulterer's description of a phoenix." That is, Tierney, from defect of imagination, could not ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... minstrelsy. And as one of his principles was that his hero must be a national hero, it was of course upon the Arthurian cycle that his aspiration fixed. When he did so, he no doubt believed at least the historical existence of Arthur. As soon, however, as he came to understand the fabulous basis of the Arthurian legend, it became unfitted for his use. In the Trinity College MS. of 1641, Arthur has already disappeared from the list of possible subjects, a list which contains thirty-eight suggestions of names from ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... agreeable freshness of which was very pleasant to us. All at once Lucien pointed out to me a basilisk sitting on a stone, the rays of the sun setting off its bright shades—yellow, green, and red. This member of the Iguana family, which bears no resemblance to the fabulous basilisk of the Greeks, got up at our approach, puffed out its throat, and shook the membranous crest on the top of its head. Its bright eye seemed to scan the horizon; no doubt it caught sight of us, for its flaccid body stiffened out, and with a rapid bound it sprang into the stream. ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... verbenas, purple bunches of grapes, and golden lambs that fat little angels were caressing with their chubby hands. The most ancient, of soft and rather faded colours, showed Persian gardens with blue waters in which fabulous reddish beasts were drinking. ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
