"Fantastical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... [afterward] bemired themselves in causing the archbishop to return to Manila. These men went about talking and declaiming to everyone in the community about the great difficulties, both spiritual and temporal, which must follow from [the banishment]; but in reality all these were fantastical, since there would be no further difficulties than those which the governor chose—as there were none when the archbishop was banished the previous time; [141] for one would hardly believe how great is the hatred that most persons feel toward ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... impossible to convey to you an adequate idea of the bouleversement which has taken place in our religious relations, —even in each man's little sphere. It is as if the religious world were a masquerade, where you cease to feel surprise at finding some familiar acquaintance disguised in the most fantastical costume. There is our old friend W——, rigorously, as you know, educated in his old father's Evangelical notions, ready to be a confessor for the two wax candies, even though unlighted, and to be a martyr for them if but lighted. His cousin in the opposite direction has found even the most meagre ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... de Armado, the fantastical Spaniard of "Love's Labour's Lost," admits that he is "ill at reckoning," and cannot tell "how many is one thrice told," his page Moth observes "how easy it is to put years to the word three, and study three years in two words, the dancing ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... been very unexpectedly charmed with this volume. Inverted and fantastical as he may be in his poems, Mr. Smith's essays are fresh, natural, racy, and genial. They are models in their way, and we wish our contributors would study them as such. Each essay is complete in itself; every sentence full of interest; there is no straining ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... been narrowed and embanked, and two tiny rustic bridges, of fantastical wood-work, spanned its dark water. The dreary pollard- willows had vanished, and evergreens occupied their places. The black rushes had been exchanged for flowers. A trim little garden appeared where all had once been waste ground; and a flag-staff, ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... irresistible rage and sense of frustration. The image of Rodney came before him with every circumstance of folly and indignity. That little pink-cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine? that gibbering ass with the face of a monkey on an organ? that posing, vain, fantastical fop? with his tragedies and his comedies, his innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he looked as stark an image ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of America and cannot be far from San Francisco. That gives one a start. Swift, writing in 1725 with a world to choose from, selects the Californian coast as the most remote and unknown for the scene of his fantastical adventure. It thrusts 1725 into a gray antiquity. And yet there are many buildings in England still standing that antedate 1725 by many years, some by centuries. Queen Elizabeth had been dead more than a hundred years. Canterbury ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... he speeded in the direction of the lake; and after him they thundered, straining every sinew in the desperate chase. It was a wild and extraordinary sight, and partook of the fantastical character ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden: there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewel: there Guzman d'Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted. Even the 'high fantastical' Duchess of Newcastle, with her laurel on her head, is received with grave honours, and not the less for declining to trouble herself with the constitutions of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... for the first time at the Pau school on February 17, 1915, in a three-cylinder Bleriot. But these were only short leaps, though sufficiently audacious ones. His monitor accused him of breakneck recklessness: "Too much confidence, madness, fantastical humor." That same evening he wrote describing his impressions to his father: "Before departure, a bit worried; in the air, wildly amusing. When the machine slid or oscillated I was not at all troubled, it even seemed funny.... Well, it diverted me immensely, but it was lucky that Maman ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... world; it disentangles those threads in each that can be woven into the other. That the artist should be eccentric, homeless, dreamful may almost seem a natural law, but it is none the less a scandal. An artist's business is not really to cut fantastical capers or be licensed to play the fool. His business is simply that of every keen soul to build well when it builds, and to speak well when it speaks, giving practice everywhere the greatest possible affinity to the situation, the most delicate adjustment ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... order to give the young man such splendid news. Eligi Brancaleone was but moderately flattered, as you will easily believe, by the fisherman's magnanimous intentions towards him; but like the finished seducer that he was, he appeared enchanted at them. Recollecting his character as a fantastical student and an out-at-elbows poet, he fell upon his knees and shouted a thanksgiving to the planet Venus; then, addressing the young girl, he added, in a calmer voice, that he was going to write immediately to his own father, who in a week's time would come to make his formal proposal; ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it. It is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies, has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable substances ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... world is full of fantastical fools," answered Constance, lightly. "We be all nigh fools, sweeting—big fools and little ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... family evidently believed in his great powers; for I am informed by Francis Galton, Esq., F.R.S., that there is a fantastical monument on the right-hand side of the central avenue of the Kensal Green Cemetery, about half way between the lodge and the church, which bears the following inscription:—"Tomb of Frederick Albert Winsor, son of the late Frederick Albert Winsor, originator of public Gas-lighting, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... and silent shepherd. But when the long month of September comes, a shroud of snow spreads itself from the peak of the mountains down to their base, respecting only this deeply excavated path, a few gorges open by torrents, and some rocks of granite, which stretch out their fantastical forms, like the bones of a ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... conclude in perjuries; Beauty, and Youth, and Wealth, and Luxury, And sprightly Hope and short-enduring Joy, And Sorceries, to raise the infernal powers, And Sigils framed in planetary hours; Expense, and After-thought, and idle Care, And Doubts of motley hue, and dark Despair; Suspicions and fantastical Surmise, And Jealousy suffused, with jaundice in her eyes, Discolouring all she viewed, in tawny dressed, Down-looked, and with a cuckow on her fist. Opposed to her, on the other side advance The costly feast, the carol, and the dance, Minstrels and music, poetry and play, And balls by night, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... But this fantastical experiment was cut short by the interference of the law. A public prosecution was instituted against the St Simonians; and Pere Enfantin, and other chiefs of the sect, were brought before the tribunal at Paris. It will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... bound to acknowledge our partial, if not entire concurrence, in the general criticism on the central front, and of the two wings. The first impression is far from that produced by unity, grandeur, or elegance; there is a fantastical assemblage of turrets, attics, and chimneys, and a poverty or disproportion, especially in "the temple-like forms" which complete the ends towards the park. The dome, too, has been sarcastically compared with a "Brobdignagian ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... referring to the horseback-ride home after the wedding-ceremony: "Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... in spite of the Reformers, and to their no little discontent. Pilkington, Bishop of Durham, in a letter to Archbishop Parker, dated 1564, complains that, "among other things that be amiss here in your great cares, ye shall understand that in Blackburn there is a fantastical (and as some say, lunatic) young man, which says that he has spoken with one of his neighbours that died four year since, or more. Divers times he says he has seen him, and talked with him, and took ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... in a blue Fly, were much longer then the body, but in other kind of Flies they are of very differing proportions to the body. These films, in many Flies, were so thin, that, like several other plated bodies (mention'd in the ninth Observation) they afforded all varieties of fantastical or transient colours (the reason of which I have here endeavoured to explain) they seem'd to receive their nourishment from the stalks or wires, which seem'd to be hollow, and neer the upper part of the wing LL several of them seem'd jointed, the shape of which will sufficiently appear ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... most fantastical history, and one which leaves us in some doubt whether it be a genuine legend of Heidelberg, or one of M. Dumas's dreams in the diligence after dining upon pig and cherry sauce. At any rate, if not true it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... pursuing each other across black clouds. Touki offers Sikou a cardboard mask representing the bloated countenance of Dai-Cok, god of wealth; and Sikou replies by a long crystal trumpet, by means of which are produced the most extraordinary sounds, like a turkey gobbling. Everything is uncouth, fantastical to excess, grotesquely lugubrious; everywhere we are surprised by incomprehensible conceptions, which seem the work ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... all the sundry activities of life, thus bringing both action and thought under the form of service of the ideal. At the same time it offers a supreme object for the passions, which are otherwise divided against {254} themselves, or vented upon unworthy and fantastical objects. Through being thus economized and guided, these moving energies may be brought to support moral endeavor and bear it ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... resolutions are vain; I had the same thoughts yesterday that I have today, and I act today contrary to what I resolved yesterday; I must convey myself out of the sight of the Duke de Nemours; I must go into the country, however fantastical my journey may appear; and if Monseur de Cleves is obstinately bent to hinder me, or to know my reasons for it, perhaps I shall do him and myself the injury to acquaint him with them." She continued in this resolution, and spent the ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... on this occasion with a most fantastical and exaggerated account of the celebrated Santissima Casa of Loretto, which he imagined was still endowed with all the treasures it possessed anterior to its losses during the pontificate of Pius VI. He asserted that it was the richest tabernacle in ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... commentator, who avails himself of the best assistances to explane any genuine author. But in many other instances, where the words are either not ancient or not used in their ancient sense, the interpretations are totally unfounded and fantastical; and at the same time the words cannot be altered or amended consistently with any rules of criticism, nor can the interpretations be varied without destroying the sense of the passage. In these cases, I think, there is a just ground for believing, that the words as well as their ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... evil custom of aping life and movement on the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure repose had been exhausted. "Why," asks the Duchess of Malfi, "do we grow fantastical in our death-bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?" "Most ambitiously," answers Bosola; "princes' images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache): they are not carved with their eyes ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... region of long forgotten infantile or early sex memories where, as in every normal human being they lie, the shadowy outlines of instinctive feelings whose roots are in a far away, phylogenetic past, having apart from suggestion no role as factors in the production of morbid fears or fancies. The fantastical and too often repulsive dream interpretations of this school forcibly remind us of the words of Lord Bacon, "With regard to the interpretation of natural dreams it is a thing that has been laboriously handled by many writers, but it is full of follies." All kinds of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... fire climbing up swiftly through airiest fuel. There is a quick flash or two, like darting tongues of flame. A combination of swirling and bickering and pulsating composes the commonest Loge-motif, but the variety is endless of the fire's caprices. Fantastical, cheery, and light it is mostly, sinister sometimes, suggestive of treachery, but terrible never; its beauty rather than its terror is reproduced. So characteristic are the fire-motifs that after a single hearing a person instinctively when one occurs ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... himself with the things of his immortality. This is suggested in the words of the Upanishad already quoted: "There, where the dividing of the hair turns, extending upward to the crown of the head"; all of which may sound very fantastical, until one ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader—(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... circumstance, because it was one upon which a thousand wild and fantastical reports were founded, though one would have thought that the truth scarcely required to be improved upon; and again, because it produced a strong and lasting effect upon my spirits, and indeed, I am inclined to think, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... half-educated little woman, whose worldly experience was bounded by the suburbs of Barlingford, be otherwise than delighted by the glare and glitter of foreign cities? Georgy was childishly enraptured with everything she saw, from the sham diamonds and rubies of the Palais Royal, to the fantastical bonbons of Berlin. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Pantomime (HUTCHINSON) has placed me in something of a quandary. In an ordinary way, finding a story with this title, in which moreover the chief characters are spoken of as Princess and Principal Boy, and the narrative is broken every now and then by fantastical little dialogues with Fairies, I should have said at once that here was a clever young writer whom a natural admiration for the work of Mr. DION CLAYON CALTHROP had betrayed into the sincerest form of flattery. But Mr. (or perhaps Miss) G. B. STERN has disarmed me by an open avowal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... excruciatingly vulgar, and that they were people of no education. His studio was a pattern of elegance; he kept a couple of magnificent footmen; took a number of dandified pupils; had his hair curled; dressed half-a-dozen times a-day in various fantastical costumes. He was perpetually rehearsing improvements in his way of receiving visitors; meditating on all possible means of beautifying his person, and of producing an agreeable impression on the ladies. In short, it soon became impossible to recognise in him the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... anecdotes and allusions relating to historical or mythological persons of the ancient world; some being drawn from Plutarch, Pliny, Ovid, Virgil, and other sources, but many springing simply from Lyly's exuberant fancy. In the second place Euphues is a collection of similes borrowed from "a fantastical natural history, a sort of mythology of plants and stones, to which the most extraordinary virtues are attributed[22]." "I have heard," says Camilla, bashfully excusing herself for taking up the cudgels ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... balloon the car itself, which was of no inconsiderable weight, and thus, clinging with both hands to the net-work, I had barely time to observe that the whole country, as far as the eye could reach, was thickly interspersed with diminutive habitations, ere I tumbled headlong into the very heart of a fantastical-looking city, and into the middle of a vast crowd of ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable, or gave themselves the least trouble to render me assistance, but stood, like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner, and eyeing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it—the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail. Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests with ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of anything completely and consummately artificial in human shape that the person impresses us as an unreality, and as having hardly pith enough to cast a shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all this resulted in a wild, extravagant, and fantastical impression, as if his life and being were akin to the smoke that curled upward ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... and, I must admit, a very respectable saloon, although not exactly what I had expected to see at the very summit of the social Olympus. I dropped into a fauteuil near a centre-table, on which there was a fantastical silver-wrought card-basket. What struck me particularly about the basket was a well-known little Todworth envelope, superscribed in the delicate handwriting of my aristocratic cousin,—my letter of introduction, in fact,—displayed upon the very top of the pile of billets and cards. My ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... latter days, sketches such as Clara Militch, The Song of Triumphant Love, The Dream, and the incomparable Phantoms, he showed that he could equal Edgar Poe, Hofmann, and Dostoevsky in the mastery of the fantastical, the horrible, the mysterious, and the incomprehensible, which live somewhere in human nerves, though not to be ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... the Abbey, where he shut himself up to brood over his disgraces; grew gloomy, morose, and fantastical, and indulged in fits of passion and caprice, that made him the theme of rural wonder and scandal. No tale was too wild or too monstrous for vulgar belief. Like his successor the poet, he was accused of all kinds of vagaries and wickedness. ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... sail-like terraces, quite transparent, and floating in the thin air. Our earth hung over his head like a great dark red ball. Presently he discovered a number of beings, which might certainly be called men, but were very different to ourselves. A more fantastical imagination than Herschel's must have discovered these. Had they been placed in groups, and painted, it might have been said, "What beautiful foliage!" They had also a language of their own. No one could have expected the soul of the watchman ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Lancelot had it been, In lieu of idly dallying with the truth, To have trusted me as he hath trusted thee. Surely his King and most familiar friend Might well have kept his secret. True, indeed, Albeit I know my knights fantastical, So fine a fear in our large Lancelot Must needs have moved my laughter: now remains But little cause for laughter: his own kin— Ill news, my Queen, for all who love him, this!— His kith and kin, not knowing, set upon him; So that ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... and in the west there gleamed red, golden, and orange lights, similar to ribbons and gauzy veils, stretched over the whole sky. The mountains uplifted themselves in this glow; the cacti assumed different fantastical shapes, resembling people and animals. Jenny felt tired and sleepy, but they still hastened to the mountains, although they knew not why. Soon they saw rocks, and on reaching them they discovered a stream; they drank some water ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Holinshed, without the prospect of gaining any advantage commensurate to the licence taken in making that alteration? These are the words of the old chronicle: "This (the recontre with the witches) was reputed at the first but some vain fantastical illusion by Macbeth and Banquo, insomuch that Banquo would call Macbeth in jest king of Scotland; and Macbeth again would call him in jest likewise the father of many kings." Now it was the invariable practice of Shakspere to give ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... become possible for Parliament to get rid of a minister without getting rid of a ministry, and to express its disapproval of—let us say—some foolish project for rearranging the local government of Ireland without opening the door upon a vista of fantastical fiscal adventures. The party-supported Cabinet, which is now the real government of the so-called democratic countries, would cease to be so, and government would revert more and more to the legislative assembly. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... "Don't be fantastical!" he said. "We are not holding a debate on sex. If we are to be normal, we must declare that man and ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... little Watteau here, and a rare piece of fantastical brightness and gayety it is. What a delightful affectation about yonder ladies flirting their fans, and trailing about in their long brocades! What splendid dandies are those, ever-smirking, turning out ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by himself,) where he entered upon, debated, and resolved all the states' affairs of Christendom; and he verily believed that he was the wisest man of them all; and so he well might be, of the company." The fantastical imagination of this Triumpho furnishes a good illustration of the reality of companionship which one who possesses Plutarch may have in his own chamber with the greatest and most interesting men of ancient times. If he be worthy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... windmills all over the country make it look as if flocks of huge sea birds were just settling upon it. Everywhere one sees the funniest trees, bobbed into fantastical shapes, with their trunks painted a dazzling white, yellow, or red. Horses are often yoked three abreast. Men, women, and children go clattering about in wooden shoes with loose heels; peasant girls who cannot get beaux for love, hire them for money to escort them to the kermis, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... or slighted, is that they are many and growing in numbers, who hate England and all things English. There are many, not stigmatised as dullards or as fools, who publicly oppose the teaching of English history in the State schools. The feeling against England is not a fantastical crank, it is a movement growing yearly in strength. I have seen men keeping their seats in serious protesting silence when the health of the Queen has been drunk at public banquets, and have found in ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... shelves, and in elegant glass cupboards, there were a thousand knick-knacks; small vases, statuettes, groups in Dresden china, and grotesque Chinese figures, old ivory, and Venetian glass, which filled the large room with their precious and fantastical array. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... along the descending slope. All the rest of the island, spread out at our feet as in a map, was basking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantastical dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around each,—specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and went gliding along ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... graphic distinctness, but they want that air of reality which constitutes the singular excellence of his scenes drawn from nature; and there is a vagueness in them which has the effect of making them obscure, and even fantastical. Indeed, except when he paints from actual models, from living persons and existing things, his superiority, at least his originality, is not so obvious; and thus it happens, that his gorgeous description of the sultan's seraglio is like a versified passage of an Arabian ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... fantastically rich in phrase, rhythm, and image. His study of all the poets seems to have opened to him more avenues of beauty than were open to any poet of the middle seventeenth century. There is in his blood the fantastical romance of the Elizabethans; the love of spiritual contemplation which marked the seventeenth-century mystic; the passionate adoration of Nature and the open air which came with the early nineteenth century; modern introspectiveness; and that ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... beauty haunt the same spots. The great Eolis papillosa, of a delicate French grey; Eolis pellucida (?) (Plate X. fig. 4), in which each papilla on the back is beautifully coloured with a streak of pink, and tipped with iron blue; and a most fantastical yellow little creature, so covered with plumes and tentacles that the body is invisible, which I believe to be the Idalia aspersa of ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr. Lang's Red Fairy Book). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his Irish Sketch-Book, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost" (why "almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of the giant's breath occurs ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... Allen symbolized the unknown quantity in all the problems that absorbed him. His idealism was not a thing of the air, but a flowering from old and vigorous roots. His politics was a kind of religion, and it did not prove upon analysis to be either so fantastical or so fanatical as she had believed at first. As the days shortened, he would prolong their walk until the shops and factories discharged their employees upon the streets. The fine thing about the people was, he said, the fact that they were content to go on from day to day, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... agitation, and the blushes glowed more and more round her snowy hands and between her delicate fingers; and there is something so sacred about the modesty alarmed of an intelligent young woman—it is a feeling which, however fantastical, is so genuine in her, and so manifestly intense beyond all we can ourselves feel of the kind, that no man who is not utterly stupid or depraved can see it without a certain awe. Even Mr. Fountain, who looked on Lucy's distress as transcendent folly with ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... of 108,000 li to the Western Heaven. This promise, on the whole, he fulfilled in the service of Hsuean Chuang during the fourteen years of the long journey. Now faithful, now restive and undisciplined, he was always the one to triumph in the end over the eighty-one fantastical tribulations which beset ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... A singular, almost fantastical exaltation took possession of the young girl, an exaltation such as might have possessed itself of a priestess of old, pouring a libation to the gods in behalf of some devout suppliant. He had known her, this mysterious, homeless being that had come floating across the waters to hear the ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... horizontal lines; yet the general impression at a distance and at first sight, is essentially different from that of any of the towns of the middle ages. The outlines are far from being so sharp, so angular, so irregular, so fantastical; a certain softness, a peculiar repose, reigns in those broader, terrace-like rising masses. Only in the creations of Claude Lorraine or Poussin could we expect to find a spot to compare with the prevailing character of this picture, especially when lit up by a favourable ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... remarkable face, and afterwards reproducing them on paper; but if any singularly fantastic form or outre face came in his way, he would make a sketch of it on the spot, upon his thumb-nail, and carry it home to expand at his leisure. Everything fantastical and original had a powerful attraction for him, and he wandered into many out-of-the-way places for the purpose of meeting with character. By this careful storing of his mind, he was afterwards enabled to crowd an immense amount of thought and ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... to the cap of dignity which he had placed upon my head. "I do declare, Hilaro," said the lovely Fragrantia, "'tis pretty, 'tis interesting; I love you, and I like you, my dear Baron," said she, putting on another plume: "this gives it an air more delicate and more fantastical. I do thus, my dear Munchausen, as your friend, yet you can reject or accept my present just as you please; but I like the fancy, 'tis a good one, and I mean to improve it: and against whatever enemies you go, I shall have the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... introduced in his own person as an ardent admirer, and the last twenty-nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and Avisa's obduracy. To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose (canto xliv.) It is there stated that Willobie, 'being suddenly affected with the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while in secret grief. At length, not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W. S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... care of Douglas Jerrold whose comedy of manners was acted at the Haymarket in the midsummer of 1834. There is a charm about these Beaux, these odd blossoms of last century civilisation, the Brummells and the Nashes and the Fieldings, so "high fantastical" in their bearing, such living examples of the eternal verities contained in the clothes' philosophy of Herr Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh of Weissnichtwo. Their wigs were more important than their wit; the pattern of ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Kentucky. Rational Christianity will thrive more rapidly there than here. They are freer from prejudices than we are, and bolder in grasping at truth. The time is not distant, though neither you nor I shall see it, when we shall be but a secondary people to them. Our greediness for wealth, and fantastical expense have degraded, and will degrade, the minds of our maritime citizens. These are the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... is William Penn himself." It represents him in a curled wig, with full cheeks and a double chin—a pleasant, masterful, and serious person. Clarkson says that in his attire he was "very neat, though plain." Penn advised his children to choose clothes "neither unshapely nor fantastical;" and he illustrated to King James the difference between the Roman Catholic and the Quaker religions by the difference between his hat and the king's. "The only difference," he said, "lies in the ornaments that have been added to thine." His dress was probably that which ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... the expression I just made use of—which may have seemed to some of you fantastical—that the fire and the candles in the crowded room were breathing the same breath as you were. It is but too true. An average fire in the grate requires, to keep it burning, as much oxygen as several human beings do; each candle or lamp must have ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the little Trianon is both pleasing and moral; no doubt the reader has seen the pretty, fantastical gardens which environ it; the groves and temples; the streams and caverns (whither, as the guide tells you, during the heat of summer, it was the custom of Marie Antoinette to retire with her favorite, Madame de Lamballe): the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... friend as a supporter. Nash retired, for the moment, from the controversy, and in the prefatory epistle to a remarkable work, the most bulky of all his books, "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," he waved the white flag. He bade, he declared, "a hundred unfortunate farewells to fantastical satirism," and complimented his late antagonist on his "abundant scholarship." Harvey took no notice of this, and for four years their mutual animosity slumbered. In this same year, 1593, Nash produced the only play which has come down to us as wholly composed by him, the comedy of "Summer's ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... our lives fill a great part of them with the uneasinesses of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, weariness, with labour, and sleepiness, in their constant returns, &c. To which, if, besides accidental harms, we add the fantastical uneasiness (as itch after honour, power, or riches, &c.) which acquired habits, by fashion, example, and education, have settled in us, and a thousand other irregular desires, which custom has made natural ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... strewn, The quiet fishing smacks, the Eastern cove, The semi-circle of its dark, green grove. The luminous grasses, and the merry sun In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide, Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide, Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon. All these fair sounds and sights I made ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of intelligence, and has a good heart, but even with these qualifications a man may commit many errors, and do a great deal of mischief. Louis is naturally inclined to be capricious and fantastical, and the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau have contributed to increase this disposition. Seeking to obtain a reputation for sensibility and beneficence, incapable by himself of enlarged views, and, at most, competent ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... experience. He doubts whether Mrs. Hemans, whom he is reviewing at the time, will be immortal. 'The tuneful quartos of Southey,' he says, 'are already little better than lumber; and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance and dimness, except where they have been married to immortal music; ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... that nothing? You have the approximate cause—causa causans. Was it Cupid? No, for like Bacon, your sex's 'fantastical' charms move me not." ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... that, in Asia, a Sultan reigned, full of fantastical ideas, and very absolute in his whims. By a strange madness, this prince spent his time seated at a table, upon which were placed three dice and a dice-box. One end of the table was covered with pieces of silver, designed to excite the avarice of his ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... only stopping on their course to celebrate the feasts of Christmas and Easter on the back of the king of fishes, Jasconius. Every step of this monastic Odyssey is a miracle, on every isle is a monastery, where the wonders of a fantastical universe respond to the extravagances of a wholly ideal life. Here is the Isle of Sheep, where these animals govern themselves according to their own laws; elsewhere the Paradise of Birds, where the winged race lives after the fashion of monks, singing matins and ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... will now go indoors, and you'll perhaps be kind enough to show this young lady her room, and tell her when we dine and so forth. I forget your name," (turning sharply to Iris). "Something tiresome and fantastical, I know. Ah! Iris. Well, Iris, when you want to know anything, or do anything, or go anywhere, you are to ask Miss Munnion. Never come to me with questions, or ask me 'why.' Miss Munnion doesn't mind being asked 'why.' ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... Craft', categorised by modern critics as citizen comedy, it reflects his concerns with the daily lives of ordinary Londoners. This play exemplifies his vivid use of language and the intermingling of everyday subjects with the fantastical, embodied in this case by the rise of a craftsman to Mayor and the involvement of an unnamed but idealised king in the ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... blue-lined face and squat figure together with the obtrusively golden halo, rather worried Mrs. Jasher. And, indeed, in spite of custom, Lucy also felt uncomfortable when this gnome hovered at her elbow. It looked as though one of the fantastical idols from the museum below had ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... came and went while he was there, busy about a thousand things, always alert, decided, uncompromising—not disinclined to snub either Fred or Susan when opportunity offered, totally unconscious even of that delicacy with which a high fantastical heroine of romance would have found it necessary to treat her dependants. It was this unconsciousness, above all, that irritated the doctor. If she had shown any feeling, he said to himself—if she had ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... air; and this time I recognized that the song was in the Greek language. I remained looking intently in that direction, until the form faded into a mere shadow; and then, as darkness increased, seemed to multiply before my aching eyes, and assume all sorts of fantastical shapes. Every now and then, a couplet, or a stanza, came sweeping up. It was evident the lady, whoever she might be, was not singing merely to amuse the child. The notes were sometimes lively, but, in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... whole range of the pantomimic dance. The conditions under which Wilde and Strauss introduce it in their drama spare one all need of thought; there is sufficient commentary in the. doddering debility of the pleading Herod and the lustful attitude of his protruding eyes. There are fantastical persons who like to talk about religious symbolism in connection with this dance, and of forms of worship of vast antiquity. The dance is old. It was probably danced in Egypt before the Exodus; in Greece probably before ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... had. I have not yet forsaken wife and children; neighbours and kinsmen; home, ease, and tenderness, for a whim, a dream, a passing qualm. No, sir; 'tis this Christian's ignorant hardness-of-heart that is his bane. Knowing little, he prateth much. He would pinch and contract the Universe to his own fantastical pattern. He is tedious, he is pragmatical, and—I affirm it in all sympathy and sorrow—he is crazed. Malice, haply, is a little sharp at times. And neighbour Obstinate dealeth full weight with his opinions. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... Now will I be Spitchcockt, if she han't an Inclination for the Collonel, to coquet, and flirt and fleer, and plague half Mankind, only because they like her, may be what you call a fine Lady, but in my mind she has more fantastical ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... suggested skill rather than feeling. He had nothing of the ardour of youth; his poise and deliberation were quite in keeping with the two score years that subtly graved his visage; the passions in him were sportive, half-fantastical, as though, together with his brain, they had grown to a ripe worldliness. He inspired no distrust; his good nature seemed all-pervading; he had the air of one who lavishes disinterested counsel, and ever so little exalts himself with ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... prejudiced against common-sense; and, for my own part, I confess that I am often tempted to think that a common-sense view is necessarily a wrong one. It was common-sense to see that the world must be flat and that the sun must go round it; only when those fantastical people made themselves heard who thought that the solar system could not be quite so simple an affair as common-sense knew it must be were these opinions knocked on the head. Dr. Johnson, the great exemplar of British common-sense, observing in ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the ignorant you say The thing that's not, elated still to sway The crass credulity of gaping fools And women by fantastical display,— ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... who can make out the words her hrilir from any characters in the inscription in question, which, whatever else it may be, is certainly not mortuary. And even should the reverend gentleman succeed in persuading some fantastical wits of the soundness of his views, I do not see what useful end he will have gained. For if the English Courts of Law hold the testimony of grave-stones from the burial-grounds of Protestant dissenters to be questionable, even ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... powerful sway over the people of the South. The mystery which surrounded this personage, his dignified and polished manners, the important succour he brought, and even the fantastical and semi-Oriental cast of his dress, all contributed to produce a great influence on ardent minds naturally inclined to the marvellous. This ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... is not attempted in our music (the 2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended fragment" trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms. It may have something to do with the children's excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and the frost imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with "Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... took my leave of a very winsome and delicious creature, and went my ways wishing with all my heart that it might be my privilege to woo such a lady daily, either for my own safety or the safety of another. Which shows that the fates are very fantastical in their favors, for this exquisite occasion of felicity was offered, not to me who would have appreciated it at its right value, but to Messer Dante, who would not value it at the worth of a single ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... heavier in appearance than so many huge sponges. A priest, however tall or stout, must be lost in the midst of all these queer gimcracks; in order to be consistent, they ought to dress him up, too, in some odd fantastical suit. I can fancy the Cure of Meudon preaching out of such a place, or the Rev. Sydney Smith, or that famous clergyman of the time of the League, who brought all Paris to laugh ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... these nations. Here the hordes of Tartars adore, in the forms of beasts, birds, and insects, the good and evil Genii; who, under a principal, but indolent god, govern the universe. In their idolatry they call to mind the ancient paganism of the West. You observe the fantastical dress of the Chamans; who, under a robe of leather, hung round with bells and rattles, idols of iron, claws of birds, skins of snakes and heads of owls, invoke, with frantic cries and factitious convulsions, the dead to deceive the living. ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... should be called pride, but rather neatness, handsomeness, comeliness, cleanliness, &c., neither would he allow that following of fashions was anything else, but because he would not be proud, singular, and esteemed fantastical ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... man would not have employed—if he could. The sublimity of "Paradise Lost" is supported throughout by the direct force of its language—language the most elaborate, but also the most to the point, and the least fantastical, that ever fell from human lips. There are difficulties to encounter in the abstract conception of the poem. The naked argument does not at first recommend itself to our understanding. It is not till we have vanquished those difficulties,—in which step we are mainly assisted by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... whole performance is nothing but foam and glitter, he will, it is true, engage the attention for a time, but build up and confirm nothing in the understanding. His playfulness is, like the gravity of the other, thoroughly unpoetical. To string together at will fantastical images, is not to travel into the realm of the ideal; and the imitative reproduction of the actual cannot be called the representation of nature. Both requisites stand so little in contradiction to each ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... Christian raised his voice two centuries ago against this mode of applying and of often wresting the sense of the Scriptures to make them conformable to human fancies; 'from which,' says Lord Bacon, 'arise not only false and fantastical philosophies, but likewise heretical religions.' If the Scriptures are to be literally interpreted and systems of science found in them, Gallileo Gallilei merited his persecution, and we ought still to believe that the sun turns ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... absurd illusions and exaggerations of such poetical voluptuaries. In them, therefore, such a composition can work neither corruption nor deception; and it will, in general, be despised and thrown aside, as a tissue of sickly and fantastical conceits, equally remote from truth and respectability. It is upon the other sex, that we conceive its effects may be most pernicious; and it is chiefly as an insult upon their delicacy, and an attack upon their purity, that we are disposed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... cathedral, with spires and windows; then a castle, battlements and bastions, all complete; and more than one amphitheatre fit for a Caesar to have held his sports in. What could be more striking than these great ragged masses of red rock, thrown one upon another, and mounting up so high above us? Such fantastical and curious shapes the weather-worn stone had taken! Pillars, columns, domes, arches, followed one another in quick succession. Bounding a corner, a huge circle of rocks comes into sight, rising story upon story. There, perched upon the top ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... into a temporary Elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sat brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into a thousand fantastical apparitions? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... remarked, if we may so express it, the physiognomy of ages. From the Etruscans to our days, from that people, more ancient than the Romans themselves, and who resembled the Egyptians by the solidity of their works and the fantastical nature of their designs, from that people to Chevalier Bernini, an artist whose style resembles that of the Italian poets of the seventeenth century, we may observe the human mind at Rome, in the different characters of the arts, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... religion.——They saw clearly, that of all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed through the mind of man, none had ever been more extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law, which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity, reverence and right, reverend eminence, and holiness around the idea of a priest, as no mortal could deserve and as always ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... sits down to eat till four of his priests have offered his meat in this manner to the idol; lifting their hands above their heads with many fantastical gesticulations and murmuring voices, they present the meat to the idol, and after many foolish ceremonies bring back the meat to the king. The meat is offered in a wooden tray, after which it is laid on the broad ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... age of fifty-six, when objects of ambition continue to operate with full force on the mind, and are pursued with the greatest ardor, to take a resolution so singular and unexpected. But, while many authors have imputed it to motives so frivolous and fantastical as can hardly be supposed to influence any reasonable mind; while others have imagined it to be the result of some profound scheme of policy, historians more intelligent and better informed neither ascribe it to caprice, nor search for mysterious secrets ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the long chain was welded then. The whole truth of that weird document, so fantastical, so seemingly wild, so fearful, was made manifest; the dead man's words were vindicated, his every deduction was unanswerable. There on the great Atlantic waste, I had lived to see one of those terrible pictures which ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... made accusations against him have unreservedly retracted them, and that they were only extracted from such persons by the tortures employed by the Spanish officials; that the supposed introduction of arms into the Colony through an estate owned by Pedro P. Rojas is purely fantastical, and that the only arms possessed by the rebels were those taken by them in combat from the Spanish soldiers." [174] But his second cousin, Francisco L. Rojas, a shipowner, contrabandist, and merchant, was not so fortunate. He was also one of the first seized, and his trial ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... crested and bedaubed with red Lead and Oil; their Forehead being painted white, and it may be their Nose black, and a Circle of Blue round one Eye, with the Cheek red, and all the other Side of the Face yellow, or in some such fantastical Manner. These Colours they buy of us, being persuaded to despise their own, ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... beginning of our critical career, we have seen a vast deal of beautiful poetry pass into oblivion, in spite of our feeble efforts to recall or retain it in remembrance. The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber:—and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,—and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,—and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... luxurious, who are both servants of the belly; the other whom we spoke of before, the ambitious and the covetous, were [Greek text], evil wild beasts; these are [Greek text], slow bellies, as our translation renders it; but the word [Greek text] (which is a fantastical word with two directly opposite significations) will bear as well the translation of quick or diligent bellies, and both interpretations may be applied to these men. Metrodorus said, "That he had ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... prairies, yet woods are very abundant, principally near the rivers and in the low flat bottoms; while the general landscape is agreeably relieved from the monotony of too great uniformity by numerous mountains of fantastical shapes and appearance, entirely unconnected with each other, and all varying in the primitive matter ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... links and fantastical relations are mankind connected together. At the distance of half the globe, a Hindoo gains his support by groping at the bottom of the sea for the morbid concretion of a shell-fish, to decorate the throat of a London alerman's wife! It is said that the great Linnaeus had discovered the secret ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... superstition," exclaimed Edward indignantly, "which otherwise would only deserve our contempt, and which, if it did not thus deprave the understanding and the heart, might delight us by its poetical features, and furnish the imagination with much fantastical amusement. Are you not ashamed, old man, to think and prate in this way of the most virtuous, the most beneficent of men? How many human beings are fed and supplied with comforts by his extensive transactions? is he not always giving the needy ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... spells is the penal code? Break the wand of this political Prospero, and take from him the volume of his magic, and he will evoke the spirits which are now under his control no longer. But why should I have recourse to illustration, which may be accounted fantastical, in order to elucidate what is in itself so plain and obvious? Protestant gentlemen, who do me the honour to listen to me, look, I pray you, a little dispassionately at the real causes of the events which ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... mountain streams about him. By this training, the mind becomes clear and well balanced, and the whole system reaches a condition which far surpasses the finest constructed machinery. This happy state of the body does not, however, communicate itself to the fantastical appearance of the soldiers as they come marching along. Were they to enter a town belonging to a civilized community, when arrayed in this mountain costume, they would be at once judged as a band ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... is always fatal to feeling; the magical land of love was suddenly far away, and there was the sound of china, and the heavy tones of Rem's voice—dissatisfied, if not angry—and Arenta's lighter fret; and they stood once more among fetishes and forms so foreign, fabulous and fantastical, that it was difficult to pass from the land of love, and all its pure delights, into ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... were but a mechanical collocation of the events of Scripture and old legend, carried on by a sort of personal representatives; the second, a mere procession of abstract ideas rudely and inartificially personified, with something of fantastical drapery thrown around them. So that both alike stood apart from the vitalities of nature and the abiding interests of thought, being indeed quite innocent ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... often reflected with my self on this unaccountable Humour in Woman-kind, of being smitten with every thing that is showy and superficial; and on the numberless Evils that befall the Sex, from this light, fantastical Disposition. I my self remember a young Lady that was very warmly sollicited by a Couple of importunate Rivals, who, for several Months together, did all they could to recommend themselves, by Complacency of Behaviour, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... star that lighted them in their labours, there were a hundred as good behind trying to do so! . . . I have a feeling for this instrument not unlike the awe I should feel in the presence of a great magician in whom I really believed. Its powers are so enormous, and weird, and fantastical, that I should have a personal fear in being with it alone. Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that to ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Parisian, with all her intoxicating charms, that alluring, if vicious attraction that flows from the eyes of even modest girls. Some words spoken by Monsieur de Rosas reaching Vaudrey's ears—a description of the somewhat fantastical preparation of poison by the Indians, explained by the duke by way of parenthesis—suggested to Sulpice that the most subtle, the gentlest and most certainly deadly poison was, after all, the filtering of a woman's glance through ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... a fit of English thoughtfulness, bordering a little upon dulness, which many of us have inherited from the stupidity of our Saxon progenitors. But the family which charms me most, is that which proceeds from the fantastical conjunction of a Dutch male with a Greek female. As these are natures opposite in extremes, 'tis a pleasure to observe how the differing atoms are perpetually jarring together in the children, even so as to produce ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... hill-side opposite, with its zigzag path through the vines marked by the figures of zealous pedestrians, and then he said suddenly: "If I asked you not to come and see our show you would set me down as a fantastical coward." ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... would this fool break in on me, and force My art to pranks fantastical?—no matter, It was not of my seeking. My heart sickens, And weighs a fix'd foreboding on my soul; But it is calm—calm as a sullen sea After the hurricane; the winds are still, But the cold waves swell high and heavily, And there is danger in them. Such a rest Is no repose. My life hath been a ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... perfect natural goodness, which neither the uncertainties of his condition, nor the largeness of his wit could pervert. He had a firmness and strength of mind, that was of proof against the Art of Poetry it self. Nothing vain or fantastical, nothing flattering or insolent appeared in his humour. He had a great integrity, and plainness of Manners; which he preserv'd to the last, though much of his time was spent in a Nation, and way of life, that is not very famous for sincerity. But the truth ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... rather than lie idle, does after that manner forge, and create one frivolous and false; as we see that the soul in the exercise of its passions inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical subject, even contrary to its own relief, than not to have something to work upon. And after this manner brute beasts direct their fury to fall upon the stone or weapon that has hurt them, and with their teeth even execute their revenge upon ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... bookseller has the temerity to place some of the latest fiction before our chatty alien, but pays dearly for his rash act. In these words did the Italian let him have it:—"Ai du not laich nov-els et ol, bico-S e nov-el is bat e fichtiscios tel stof-T ov so menE fantastical dids end nonsensical worDs, huicc opset maind end haRt. An-heppe tho-S an-uerE jongh persons, hu spend theaR pre-scios taim in ridin nov-els! The du not no thet nov-ellists, gennerallE spichin, aR thi laitest end thi most huim-sical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... and he looked over some letters. "It seems to me it was some such fantastical name - yes, here it is. ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... life and honour, whereof she declared herselfe to be so carefull. Alas, what blindnes is that, which captiuateth the wittes and spirite of him, that feedeth himselfe of nothing els, but vpon the rage of fantastical despite and vpon the furie of dispaire. Do wee not see, that after Reason giueth place to desired reuenge of wrong thought to be receiued, man dispoyleth himselfe of that, which appertayneth to the kinde of man, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... had you done, you bandits small, With lips as red as roses all? What crime?—what wild and hapless deed? What porcelain vase by you was split To thousand pieces? Did you need For pastime, as you handled it, Some Gothic missal to enrich With your designs fantastical? Or did your tearing fingers fall On some old picture? Which, oh, which Your dreadful fault? Not one of these; Only when left yourselves to please This morning but a moment here 'Mid papers tinted ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... powerfully; said he wrote of love like a man who had never felt it: his love verses were college verses; and he repeated the song 'Alexis shunn'd his fellow swains[229],' &c., in so ludicrous a manner, as to make us all wonder how any one could have been pleased with such fantastical stuff. Mrs. Thrale stood to her gun with great courage, in defence of amorous ditties, which Johnson despised, till he at last silenced her by saying, 'My dear Lady, talk no more of this. Nonsense can be defended but ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... maxim in great favour with anchorites and recluses—"Retire, the world shut out." We cannot agree with Miss Seward, who describes this hermitage as "a retreat which breathes all the witchery of genius, taste, and sentiment." It is rather fantastical than tasteful, and savours more of eccentricity than sentiment. In the Gothic entrance, there are undoubtedly many fine specimens of carved wood-work, some of which we suspect were the plunder of despoiled convents and churches during the continental wars of the last century; but classical, ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... may not be so. She knelt down before Hatty the other day and gave her—placed on her finger—the most splendid ring you can imagine, a ruby in the form of a heart, surrounded and crowned with diamonds. Hatty is frankly delighted, and says so with all sorts of fantastical exaggerations. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... by the daughter of the deceased, and several other persons, among whom was a boy about fourteen years old, who were to assist in the ceremony. Tubourai Tamaide was to be the principal mourner; and his dress was extremely fantastical, though not unbecoming. Mr Banks was stripped of his European clothes, and a small piece of cloth being tied round his middle, his body was smeared with charcoal and water, as low as the shoulders, till it was as black as that of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... at Alexandria, he set himself to oppose and make war against the Pythagorean doctrine, and that of natural philosophy; seeking by means of his logical ratiocination to propose definitions and notions, certain fifth entities and other abortive portions of fantastical cogitations, as principles and substance of things, more anxious about the esteem of the vulgar stupid crowd, which is influenced and governed by sophisms and appearances which are found in the superficies ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno |
