"Fantastical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... They had gained, by visiting the capitals of all Europe, only a due acquaintance with the follies of each; and the only difference that could be observed in their conduct on their return was, that their affectation was rather more fantastical, and therefore more amusing. ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... his way on to the stage under the 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 their waistcoats more important than the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... ye will not sourly your brows bend At such a fantastical conceit as this, But can be content to hear and see the end, I woll go show the Players what your pleasure is; Which to wait upon you I know be ready ere this. I woll go send them hither into your presence, Desiring that ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... trained with so great subteltie, that she was not able to escape without daunger of her 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 ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... many a fantastical adventure was Banks, the vintner of Cheapside, that same Banks who taught his horse to dance and shod him with silver. Now once upon a time a right witty sport was devised between them. The vintner bet Moll L20 that she would not ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Antinomians.' One of the first leaders of this sect is said by Wood to have been John Eaton, who was a minister and preacher at Wickham Market, in which situation and capacity Smith succeeded him. This Smith published many other tracts and sermons, chiefly fanatical and with fantastical titles. One is described by Wood, and is called 'Directions for Seekers and Expectants, or a Guide for Weak Christians in these discontented times.' 'I shall not give an extract from these sermons,' writes Beloe, who is clearly, like Wood, by no ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... 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 from ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... within a closet, on the flags Were two grim shapes which, vaguely seen at first In the half light, grew presently distinct— Two gnomes or vampires seemed they, or dire imps Straight from the Pit, in guise fantastical Of hose and doublet: one stretched out full length Supine, and one in terror-stricken sort Half toppled forward on the bended knee, Grasping with vise-like grip the other's wrist, As who should say, Arouse thee, sleep no more! ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... 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 ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... be suggested is, that the highest, holiest life needs specific acts and times of prayer. A certain fantastical and overstrained spirituality is not rare, which professes to have got beyond the need of such beggarly elements. Some tinge of this colours the habits of many people who are scarcely conscious of its presence, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... spirit of self-love. He must indeed be ingenious 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 where it is essential in proving a descent, I cannot conceive that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Nuremberg, the spirit of the Italian and French operas and academies prevailed, and pastoral poetry, in which the god of Love was represented wearing an immense allonge peruke, and the coquettish immorality of the courts was glowingly described in Arcadian scenes of delight, was cultivated. The fantastical romances of Spain were also imitated, and the invention of novel terms was deemed the highest triumph of the poet. Every third word was either Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, or English. Francisci of Luebeck, who described all the discoveries of the New World in a ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... the shape of classic thanks or compliment: but in Bordeaux he began to produce works of more apparent importance, "four tragedies" intended primarily for the use of his college, where it was the custom to represent yearly a play, generally of an allegorical character—one of the fantastical miracle plays which delighted the time, and which were often as profane in reality as they were religious in pretence. The great classicist considered his boys to be wasting their faculties in representing such inferior performances, but humoured the prevailing taste ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... believe it, is a hump on the west coast 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 ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... their opinion who should win; and I have seen those who reproached them do the very same thing the instant their own vanity or prejudices are concerned. The most mechanical people, once thrown off their balance, are the most extravagant and fantastical. What passion is there so unmeaning and irrational as avarice itself? The Dutch went mad for tulips, and —— —— for love! To return to what was said a little way back, a question might be started, whether as thought relates to the whole circumference of things and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the floor was fashioned entirely of mother-o'-pearl—he who set his foot thereon might fancy he was walking on rainbows. Moreover, cunning artificers had wrought upon this mother-o'-pearl floor flowers and birds and other most wondrous fantastical figures, so that it was a joy to look thereon, for no carpet, however precious, was suffered to cover all this splendour. Yet lest the cold surface of the pavement should chill the feet of the damsels, rows of tiny sandals stood ready there that they might bind them upon their feet and so walk from ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... yellow jerkined pikemen of Spain and Italy, with the axe and the faggot and the rack of the Holy Inquisition distinctly visible behind them. Such were the realities which occupied the Netherlanders in those days, not watery beams of theological moonshine, fantastical catechism-making, intermingled with scenes of riot and wantonness, which drove old John of Nassau half frantic; with banquetting and guzzling, drinking and devouring, with unchristian flaunting and wastefulness of apparel, with extravagant and wanton dancing, and other ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... little suitable, he continued, to the grave march of criticism to follow this fantastical Peri of whom they had just heard, through all her flights and adventures between earth and heaven, but he could not help adverting to the puerile conceitedness of the Three Gifts which she is supposed to carry to the skies,—a drop of blood, forsooth, a sigh, and a tear! How the first of these articles ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and afterward, that 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 ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... 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
... with 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 effects visible in their external form. They have the large black eyes of ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... is not devoid 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 to local details, Louis acted ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... wish to proffer in this essay may sound fantastical; most explanations that explain anything usually do— at first. I believe that this vast rush of nature into American literature is more than a mere reflection of a liking for the woods. It represents a search for ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... a 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 their toes, with broad blue ribbons to tie up their crooks ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 leaves of a certain tree. The meat of the king consists of rice and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... but foolish and fantastical," she said, "or she should wed with Jack's old friend Mr Monke, that would fain have her. My Lady my mother desireth the same much. It should ease her vastly as matter of money. This very winter doth she sell two parcels of the Frithelstoke ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... three o'clock, when you can meet him. You will meet him, I doubt not, like a man of sense,' added Lord Monmouth, looking at Coningsby with a glance such as he had never before encountered, 'who is not prepared to sacrifice all the objects of life for the pursuit of some fantastical puerilities.' ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Fantastical and strange, Their purple sails go floating o'er the deep, Like shadows through the summer land of ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... those persons who 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... currents 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 ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... was draped in a fantastical costume, grinned broadly, and did justice to the host's invitation. The sharply curved nose and the large mouth with dazzling teeth, the full blond hair, and the broad, muscular shoulders, were on a colossal scale. The tight-fitting coat of the athlete was dark red, the trousers ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... of country, with its poor communications, we can only know in part. When one sets out to generalize he does so at his own peril. The only consolation is that it is almost impossible to disprove any statement; for, however fantastical, it is probably in accord with the facts in some part ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... venerable white hairs in full view. The dress of old women and young girls in this country is detestable, to speak in the French style; the latter at the age of seven being clothed exactly like a woman of twenty, and the former have such a fantastical appearance that I cannot endure it. The old lady has all the vivacity of a young one. She is the most learned woman in France; her house is the resort of all men of literature, with whom she converses upon the most abstruse subjects. She is of one of the most ancient, as well as the richest families ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... nine-days' wonder, through the countryside Was hawked by every ballad-monger. Kemp Raged at their shake-rag Muses. None but I Guessed ever for what reason, since he chose His anticks for himself and, in his games, Was more than most May-fools fantastical. I watched his thin face, as he rocked and crooned, Shaking the squirrels' tails around his ears; And, out of all the players I had seen, His face was quickest through its clay to flash The passing mood. Though not a muscle stirred, The very skin of it seemed to flicker ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... could a 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
... woman, and a splendid singer. She is so handsome that she might sing as much out of tune as Miss Ligonier, and the public would forgive her; and sings so well, that were she as ugly as the aforesaid Ligonier, the audience would listen to her. The Ravenswing, that is her fantastical theatrical name (her real name is the same with that of a notorious scoundrel in the Fleet, who invented the Panama swindle, the Pontine Marshes' swindle, the Soap swindle—HOW ARE YOU OFF FOR SOAP NOW, Mr. W-lk-r?)—the Ravenswing, we say, will do. Slang has engaged her ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... whom confession of sin doth belong. Alas! it is easy for men to entertain such apprehensions of God as shall please their own humours, to bear up under the sense of sin, and that shall make their confession rather facile and fantastical, than solid and heartbreaking. The sight and knowledge of the great God is, to sinful man, the most dreadful thing in the world; which makes confession of sin so rare. Most men confess their sins behind God's back, but few to his ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... 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 lake and Swiss village are pretty little toys, moreover; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery or the black race, and this is the whole of it: anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastical arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution in the States where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so. I have no inclination ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... seem fantastical or exaggerated to those who have never seen an Oriental or an Italian sky; yet it is but a literal and hardly sufficient delineation of an August evening (the eighteenth), as contemplated in one of many rides along the banks of the Brenta, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Anthropophagi, Spectra, Diaboli, What scared St. Anthony, Hobgoblins, Lemures, Dreams of Antipodes, Night-riding Incubi, Troubling the fantasy, All dire illusions Causing confusions; Figments heretical, Scruples fantastical, Doubts diabolical; Abaddon vexeth me, Mahu perplexeth me, Lucifer ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... appeared actually to float on the surface. We had to row our boats through a dense aquatic forest of mangroves for nearly a mile, along a narrow lane cut through the wood expressly for us the day before by the natives. These fantastical trees, which grow actually in the water, often recall to the imagination those villages one sees in countries liable to frequent inundation, where each house is perched on the top of piles. We saw with astonishment clusters of oysters and ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... as usual. He has a library bigger than the cathedral; and he roots up the earth, besides, searching for stones covered with fantastical scrawls, that were written, they ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... cause to make her uneasy on this very subject of the violent Loveday. The thing was ridiculous, of course ... she, Miss Le Pettit, could not conceivably have been even remotely to blame for such a fantastical happening, and yet ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... philosophy, which is essentially progress, outgrew its first acquisitions, that religion became a thing apart, cherishing as unalterable dogmas the notions which philosophy had abandoned. Separated from philosophy, it became arrogant and fantastical, professing to have already attained what its more authentic representative was ever pursuing in vain; and discovering, through its initiations and Mysteries, all that to its contracted view seemed wanting to restore the well-being ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... was an Italian. Now, whenever human nature is truly fine in the lands of the South, it is really sublime. I do not know whether you have ever observed the extreme fairness of Italians when they are fair. It is exquisite, especially under an artificial light. When I read the fantastical portrait of Colonel Oudet sketched by Charles Nodier, I found my own sensations in every one of his elegant phrases. Italian, then, as were most of the officers of his regiment, which had, in fact, been ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... in the middle of the room stood table, on which, besides printed volumes, were strewn manuscript sermons, historical tracts, and political pamphlets, all written in such a queer, blind, crabbed, fantastical hand, that a writing-master would have gone raving mad at the sight of them. By this table stood Grandfather's chair, which seemed to have contracted an air of deep erudition, as if its cushion were stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and other ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... style. He never beats about the bush—he never employs language which a plain 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... shrubs; and before us, seen more distinctly, are the statues of Hercules and Antaeus, and a Dying Gladiator—the Temple of Piety, in which are bronze busts of Titus Vespasian and Nero, and a fine bas-relief of the Grecian Daughter. In front of this temple the water assumes a variety of fantastical forms, ornamented at different points by statues of Neptune, Bacchus, Roman Wrestlers, Galatea, &c. The banqueting-house contains a Venus de Medicis, and a painting of the Governor of Surat, on horseback, in a Turkish habit; on the front of this building are spirited figures of Envy, Hatred, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... schools) even on that side, on which it did not settle. This image, or faint motion, we persuade ourselves, could, at that time, have been compleated into the thing itself; because, should that be denied, we find, upon a second trial, that, at present, it can. We consider not, that the fantastical desire of shewing liberty, is here the motive of our actions. And it seems certain, that, however we may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves, a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even where he cannot, he concludes ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... The law of our country has given an ample and generous provision for the wife, even the third of her husband's estate, and left to her good-humour and his gratitude the expectation of farther provision, but the fantastical method of going farther, with relation to the heirs, has a foundation in nothing but pride, and folly: for as all men with their children as like themselves, and as much better as they can possibly, ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... I, in truth, fantastical?" she sighed, "or, if Heaven is witness to the sober truth of that which I conceive, am I so weak as to need other sympathy?" This was the tenor, not the words, of her thought. Yet all the way home, as they talked and walked through the glowing autumn ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... some forty feet above the wave-worn base, had received a tiny branch of the fresh-water stream, at some time long previous, and its course could still be traced by the immense icicle formation, which, in fantastical imagery of a lofty cascade, seemed still to fall from base to summit. Between the ledge and the water were formed huge irregular pillars and buttresses of opaline ice whose semi-transparency seemed to indicate the presence of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... clue to guide them out of the labyrinth into which he had led them. He understood, in its perfection, the great art of throwing the onus probandi on his adversary; and so could maintain almost any opinion, however absurd or fantastical, with fearless impunity. I have heard a sensible and well-informed man say, that he never was in company with Mr. Tooke without being delighted and surprised, or without feeling the conversation of every other person to be flat in the comparison; ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... especially in times of deep and earnest spiritual feeling. But in the case of the Quaker revival it was attended most conspicuously by its evil consequences. Half-crazy or more than half-crazy adventurers and hysterical women, taking up fantastical missions in the name of the Lord, and never so happy as when they felt called of God to some peculiarly outrageous course of behavior, associated themselves with sincere and conscientious reformers, adding to the unpopularity of the new opinions the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... occupied to give her society or conversation to Dr Rider. She 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 even been grandly ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... and poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what freedom means in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical persons to start some new, fantastical quirk of scriptural interpretation, to build a new cult around it, and earn a ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... 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 to understand it, and yet he did ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... relates to infectious diseases, for example, this kingdom is now in a less civilised state than it was in my days, three centuries ago, when the leper was separated from general society; and when, although the science of medicine was at once barbarous and fantastical, the existence of pesthouses showed at least some approaches towards ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... of the little woman with the muff. His cadaverous emaciated face, his tragic wrinkles intensified by the upward glow from the hearth, his distorted moustache, his extraordinary gravity and a certain fantastical air as the red light flickered over him, all re-enforced his fine likeness to the vision-haunted knight of La Mancha when laid up after some grand exploit. The night passed wholly without speech. Toward its close I slept for half an hour. ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... of the cliff they gained, Above the vast expanse the eye is bent, Where Beauty's finger wanders unrestrained With its fantastical embellishment; The mind is riveted, the gaze is spent Where lavish Nature pours her richest spoil, The tongue is voiceless with bewilderment, Far, far below the ocean's ceaseless toil Makes bosoms inly ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... considered as a place, is, to speak geologically, a most fantastical formation. It descends from beneath Jerusalem to the centre of the earth, and is a funnel graduated in circles, each circle being a separate place of torment for a different vice or its co-ordinates, and the point of the funnel terminating with Satan stuck into ice. Purgatory is a ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... very well be," I assented, though I did not believe it, and I found something almost too fantastical in my friend's scheme. "But when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to become of our tender and sacred associations ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... see us in this world outside here, he counselled sundry of us 'never to write a letter,—and never to burn one'—do you know that? But I never mind what I am told! Seriously, I am ashamed.... I shall next ask a servant for my paste in the 'high fantastical' style of my ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... and in my aunt Claire's room, near the china bon-bon bear, I underwent with as much resignation as possible, the torture that the preparing of my tasks imposed. On the wainscoting of the wall, in a hidden recess of the room, there is still visible, among the other fantastical sketches, a pen-portrait of the "Big Ape"; the ink has faded to a light yellow, but the drawing has endured, and when I look at it I again feel a sort of deadly weariness, and a sensation of suffocation ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... 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 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... riddle. As quick to anger as his sons, as full of mirth as his daughter; open-hearted, wrong-headed, generous, tyrannous, valorous, contemptuous of all book wisdom yet an incessant, keen inquirer with a fantastical explanation of his own for everything in nature, science, politics, or religion. Implacable in his ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... 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 its share of oxygen likewise, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... 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 of things rather than by the Truth, which is ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... don't much like it; she always talks of myself or herself, and I am not (except in soliloquy, as now,) much enamoured of either subject—especially one's works. What the devil shall I say about 'De l'Allemagne?' I like it prodigiously; but unless I can twist my admiration into some fantastical expression, she won't believe me; and I know, by experience, I shall be overwhelmed with fine things about rhyme, &c. &c. The lover, Mr. * *, was there to-night, and C * * said 'it was the only proof he had seen of her good taste.' Monsieur L'Amant is remarkably ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... excitedly, "that stout young gentleman with the black face and eyebrows, and the blacker heart, I may say,—the one dressed in the fantastical costume called by a French name,—is Mr. Charles Fox. He has been sent by the devil himself, I believe, to ruin this country. 'Ods, sir, that devil Lord Holland begot him. He is but one and twenty, but his detestable arts have saved ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... a while, even after he had gained the street and made his way again to the subway, that nothing was concrete around him, that he was living through some fantastical dream. His head whirled, and he could not think rationally—and then slowly, little by little, his grip upon himself came back. She had come—and gone! With the roar of the subway in his ears, its raucous note seeming ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... his 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 have taken place ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... impetuous, imperious, but in that she was her father's daughter, not saved by her wonderful intelligence from being fantastical. There must inevitably have been an element of broad farce in the veriest tragedy into which she might have been brought at that time, an element which was rendered all the more conspicuous by her own inability to perceive at the moment that she was behaving ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... censure all the vain Talk of Jansenius, and of them who preach That earthly joys are damnable! 'Tis plain We need not charge at Heaven as at a breach; No, amble on! We'll gain it, one and all; The narrow path's a dream fantastical, And Arnauld's quite superfluously driven Mirth from the world. We'll scale the heavenly wall, Escobar makes ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... part of Hawthorne 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," ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... story 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 Europe, and that the adornments of the altar ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... have a chapter of the wisdom of Paragot before bed?" I said, and, going to our small, carefully selected knapsack library, I found the gay-hearted fantastical book we had promised to read together on our wayfaring; and so the day drew ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... in India by a native monarch; and that General Simon: (whom they have created a marshal) had entered into his service." Then interrupting herself to indulge in a smile, she added, "Gracious! this affair will be quite odd and fantastical! Such things happen to nobody but me; and then people say that I am the uncommon creature! But it seems to me that it is not I, but Providence, which, in truth, sometimes shows itself very eccentric! But let us see if worthy Dupont gives the name ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... those natural borders, which, besides the affinity of language, God himself has drawn between the nations. But he forgot that he might be no longer able to master the spirits which he would raise, and that an undesired fanaticism might force sundry fantastical shapes into his framework, by which the frame itself must burst in pieces. He forgot that Russian preponderance cannot be propitious to liberty; he forgot that it cannot be favourable even to the development of the Sclave nationality, because Sclavonic nations would by this idea be ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... substantial ones seen in England, and the dresses of the people, all seemed strange to me. The habiliments of one or two in particular rivetted my attention. The first was a Kentuckian, who was dressed in a suit of grey home-spun cloth, and wore on his head a fantastical cap, formed of a racoon-skin, beautifully striped, the ears projecting just above his forehead on each side, while the forefeet of the animal, decorated with red cloth, formed the ear-laps, and the tail depended ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... There is, there must be, something better in this world than power and wealth and rank; and surely there must be felicity more rapturous even than securing the happiness of a parent. Ah! dreams in which I have so oft and so fondly indulged, are ye, indeed, after all, but fantastical and airy visions? Is love indeed a delusion, or am I marked out from men alone to be exempted from its delicious bondage? It must be a delusion. All laugh at it, all jest about it, all agree in stigmatising it the vanity of vanities. And does ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Aline Gorren. Mr. Moore introduced Laforgue in company with Rimbaud to the English reading world and Mr. Symons devoted to him one of his sensitive studies in The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Mr. Hale did the same years ago for American readers in a sympathetic article, The Fantastical Jules Laforgue. He also translated with astonishing fidelity to the letter and spirit of the author, his incomparable Lohengrin, Fils de Parsifal. I regret having it no longer in my possession so that I might quote from its delicious prose. As to the verse, I know of few attempts to translate the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... writer implores the justice of Apollo on the heads of the swarm of traitor poets, who have deserted the ancient themes of song, the Cids, the Laras, the Gonzalez, to celebrate the Ganzuls and Abderrahmans and the fantastical ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... responded Brentwick briefly. His gaze, weary and wistful behind his glasses, rested on the face of the girl on the threshold of his home; and the faint, sensitive flush of her face deepened. He stopped and honored her with a bow that, for all his fantastical attire, would have graced a beau of an earlier decade. "Will you be pleased to enter?" he suggested punctiliously. "My house, such as it is, is quite at your disposal. And," he added, with a glance over his shoulder, "I fancy that a word or two may presently be passed ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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
... the due allowance of pipe-clay, would have been somewhat scandalised, could they have beheld the equipment of Wellington's army in the Peninsula. Mr Grattan gives a comical account of the various fantastical fashions and conceits prevalent amongst the officers. "Provided," he says, "we brought our men into the field well-appointed, and with sixty rounds of good ammunition each, he (the Duke) never looked to see whether their trousers were black, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of advertisement which feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to which your modern restaurant almost always has recourse. Here you beheld no piles of straw-stuffed game never destined to make the acquaintance of the spit, no fantastical fish to justify the mountebank's remark, "I saw a fine carp to-day; I expect to buy it this day week." Instead of the prime vegetables more fittingly described by the word primeval, artfully displayed in the window for the delectation ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... made on earth, and cracked hearts can be mended like any other cracked ware. 'A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste,' with a woman's name—and it has power to turn the sunshine black! Let him play the man and put her ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... taken notice of a Difference betwixt these Apparent colours, and those that are wont to be esteem'd Genuine, as to the Duration, which has induc'd some Learned Men to call the former rather Evanid than Fantastical. But as the Ingenious Gassendus does somewhere Judiciously observe, if this way of Arguing were Good, the Greeness of a Leaf ought to pass for Apparent, because, soon Fading into a Yellow, it Scarce lasts at all, in comparison of the Greeness of an Emerauld. I ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... that luxury. While going through the several rooms opened to the public, Asmodeus called my attention to their costly furniture. Some of these rooms were lined with fine brocatelle, imported from France, Italy, China, and Japan, the latter conspicuous for their fantastical drawing and patterns; others with Persian and Indian cloths; and the several pieces of furniture were of unexceptionable taste. Some were inlaid with gold, bronze, or china; some were made up of rosewood, artistically carved. Gems of art and curiosities of every description ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... me in your Friendship to me, a Person so much above me in Title and Birth, makes me think it my Duty to conceal no part of my Heart to you,—Know then this Isabella, Daughter to old Francisco, and your Cuckold that shall be I hope, is, though fair, most ridiculously proud, vain and fantastical; as all of her Birth and Education, grown ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... 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 and ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... might stand for the speaker himself, and thus establishes a dual-identity. Thus, Armado, describing Holofernes, says, "That's all one, my fair, sweet, honey monarch; for I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical,—too, too vain,—too, too vain; but we will put it, as they say, to fortuna della guerra";—whilst Holofernes, not behind his counterpart in self-esteem, sees in the other the defects which he cannot detect in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... transmutation of species in itself disproved by the best physiological reasonings, but the additional assumptions which are requisite to enable its advocates to apply it to the explanation of the geological and other phenomena of the earth, are altogether gratuitous and fantastical[27]. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... "these vain and superficial distinctions? Do you not dance in public? What renders you more conspicuous? Do you not dress to be admired, and walk to be observed? Why then this fantastical scruple, unjustified by reason, unsupported by analogy? Is folly only to be published? Is vanity alone to be exhibited? Oh slaves of senseless contradiction! Oh feeble followers of yet feebler prejudice! daring to be wicked, yet fearing to be wise; dauntless in levity, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterflies—in short, send him adrift after ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... little birds brains, phenicopter's tongues, &c. and of the actor who regaled his guests with nightingale-pie, with just detestation of such curiosity and expence: but thrushes, larks, and blackbirds, are so very frequent between Turin and Novi, I think they might serve to feed all the fantastical appetites to which Vitellius himself could ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... his own chamber 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
... 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 of argument with the learned Surius, "that ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... challenge. She was decidedly a 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 the very flesh of a man, and he thirsted ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... peaceful seasons glide serenely by, Fulfill their missions, and as calmly die, As waves on quiet shores when winds are low. Fields, lonely paths, the one small glimmering rill That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye, Under moist bay leaves, clouds fantastical That float and change at the light breeze's will,— To me, thus lapped in sylvan luxury, Are more than death of kings, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... 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
... the most heterogeneous mass of trumpery novels, French translations, and the best English authors, provided only they were unworldly or sentimental. Neither did he know how far to take what he read and use it in his daily life. He often selected some fantastical motive which he had found set forth as operative in one of his heroes, and he brought it into his business, much to the astonishment of his masters and customers. For this reason he was not stable. He ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... go to the root of that error which encourages our curiosity, sustains our pride, fortifies our prejudices, and gives pretense to delusion; to discover the true nature of human knowledge, how far it extends, how far it is real, and where and how it begins to be fantastical; that, the gaudy visions of error being dispelled, men may be accustomed to the simplicity of truth."[131] The Scriptures, according to Bolingbroke, are unworthy of our credence. They degrade the Deity ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... a 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 ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... features of any remarkable face, and afterward reproducing them on paper; but if any singularly fantastic form or odd face came in his way, he would make a sketch of it on the spot upon his thumbnail, 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 afterward enabled to crowd an immense amount of thought ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... [111] FOR the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor Marcus Aurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in his train, among the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive. People actually sickened at a sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as they watched in dense crowds ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard, while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised a harvest of new plants in the garden; ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... strange-looking hill beyond it, below which, with a wood on either side, stood a white farm-house—sending from a tall chimney a thin misty reek up to the sky. I crossed the bridge, which, however diabolically fantastical it looked at a distance, seemed when one was upon it, capable of bearing any weight, and soon found myself by the farm-house past which the way led. An aged woman sat on ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... man and an exalted 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 ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... from the isolation. In addition, the various torments of the region are worse at this season. Sitting beside the muddy banks of the Itecoahy at sunset, when the vapours arose from the immense swamps and the sky was coloured in fantastical designs across the western horizon, was the only relief from the sweltering heat of the day, for a brief time before the night and its tortures began. Soon the chorus of a million frogs would start. At first is heard ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... 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
... 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 ...
— 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
... the passion of political life. That great betrayal seems to have stung him to a frenzied resistance and put poison in his veins. His country was cheated and betrayed; the liberty for which she had made so many exertions, both heroic and fantastical, taken from her; and his own personal liberty and safety threatened. Victor Hugo's soul then burst into feu et flamme. He caught fire like a volcano long silent, a burning mountain that had simulated quiet unawares, and clothed itself with vineyards and villages. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... suggestive rather of another poetical 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 ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... if Andrew can manage it with my father, we may even take a trip to Paris. The Doctor himself is not averse to it, but my mother is afraid that a new war may break out, and that we may be detained prisoners. This fantastical fear we shall, however, try to overcome. But I am interrupted. Sir Marmaduke is in the drawing-room, and I ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... the knight 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 ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... was, the climber was not her father. Then she sighed a little sigh and turned and entered her dwelling and drew the door behind her, and the mountain-top was lonely for a time. Only for a time. Up the hill came a fantastical fellow, alternately singing and sighing, for it seemed that the fierce heat vexed him despite of his melody. He was a strange ape, tall and lean and withered, with a wry shoulder like a gibbous moon and a wry leg like a stricken tree, and his face was as the face of a goblin, with a long, peaked ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... his capacity for induing he skin and the soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... I laid down no conditions of secrecy. I might have known it." He stared at the 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
... present generation an Art movement has sprung up called AEstheticism, which has been defined as the "Science of the Beautiful and the Philosophy of the Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule about ten years ago, and the pages of Punch of that time will be found to happily travesty its more amusing and ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... atmosphere, which became an obstacle to the disclosure of truth as the clouds are to the rays of the sun, his image only appeared in fantastical outlines borrowed from "Conrad the Corsair," or "Childe Harold," or "Lara," or "Manfred," or indeed "Don Juan." Analogies were sought which do not exist, and to the poet were attributed the sentiments, and even the acts, of these imaginary beings, albeit without any of the great qualities ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... acqaintance with the Eskimo during his years with the Hudson Bay Company, this book runs a little into the fantastical. The head of the family who are the heroes of the book has the belief that there is a sea of ever-warm water surrounding the North Pole, and that there are islands there abounding in animal life, and colonised by the Eskimos. The plan ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... put up at the hotel Zur goldenen Gans, changed his dress, and taken some refreshments, than he rushed off to the theatre. During his stay in Breslau he was present at three performances—at Raimund's fantastical comedy "Der Alpenkonig und der Menschenfeind", Auber's "Maurer und Schlosser (Le Macon)," and Winter's "Das unterbrochene Opferfest", a now superannuated but then still popular opera. The players ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... meeting was not held for counsel, but merely for state. These assumed such an appearance of mingled displeasure and confusion as might best suit with the perplexity of Alexius, while the wily features of the Norman-Italian, Bohemond of Tarentum, who was also present, had a singular mixture of fantastical glee and derision. It is the misfortune of the weaker on such occasions, or at least the more timid, to be obliged to take the petty part of winking hard, as if not able to see what they ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... concern 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
... the rising mirror is not to be disregarded. It is regarded of especial moment that the mirror, taken as a whole, be symmetrical, and especially that the mammary mirror be so; yet it often occurs that it is far otherwise, its outline being often very fantastical—exhibiting deep bays, so to speak, and islands of downward growing hair. There are also certain "ovals," never very large, yet distinct, which do not detract from the estimated value of an escutcheon; notably those occurring on the lobes of the udder just above ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... to receive the soul, and the soul to master the 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 ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... hereditary gift of veracity, honesty and good sense. So it was with Johnson himself. Behind all his learning lay something which no learned language could conceal. "On s'attend a voir un auteur et on trouve un homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical, namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities, indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody could ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... other day, In a bight within a bay, I espied amid the rocks, Bruis'd and jamm'd, the daintiest box, That the waves had flung and left High upon an ivied cleft. Striped it was with white and red, Satin-lined and carpeted, Hung with bells, and shaped withal Like the queer, fantastical Chinese temples you'll have seen Pictured upon white Nankin, Where, assembled in effective Head-dresses and odd perspective, Tiny dames and mandarins Expiate their egg-shell sins By reclining on their drumsticks, Waving ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... it, in its sparing goodness, to leave me that proof of attachment to duty and to principle. It may draw around it, over it, or through it, black lines, or red lines, or any lines; it may mark it in any way which either the most prostrate and fantastical spirit of man-worship, or the most ingenious and elaborate study of self-degradation, may devise, if only it will leave it so that those who inherit my blood, or who may hereafter care for my reputation, shall be able to behold ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... on her way; hearing all the time Harald's footsteps a little behind her, and yet not venturing to turn round to look at him. As by chance she cast her eyes to heaven, she perceived a little white cloud, which took the fantastical shape of a dragon, and which, with the speed of an arrow, came hastening over the valley. Immediately afterwards was heard a loud noise, which turned Susanna's glance to the heights, where she saw, as it were, a pillar of smoke ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... earliest epochs, it was impossible for the first cultivators of geology to come to such a conclusion, so long as they were under a delusion as to the age of the world, and the date of the first creation of animate beings. However fantastical some theories of the sixteenth century may now appear to us,—however unworthy of men of great talent and sound judgment,—we may rest assured that, if the same misconception now prevailed in regard to the memorials of human transactions, it would give rise to a similar train of absurdities. ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... wrath Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women Fantastical Finishing touches to the negligence Gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble Gradations appear to be unknown to you He had to go, he must, he has to be always going He stormed her and consented to be beaten His violent ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... Strange, fantastical, granite kopjes like mighty mausoleums adorned with ilex trees barred their path, and Diana was convinced some of the bones of her ancestors lay buried there, because she felt so weirdly ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... knowing that for one 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 ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... and he gave himself up to an 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 ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Sheridans. I recollect Lady Dufferin at the Easter ceremonies at St. Peter's, in her widow's cap, with a large black crape veil thrown over it, creating quite a sensation. With her exquisite features, oval face, and somewhat fantastical head-dress, anything more lovely could not be conceived; and the Roman people crowded round her in undisguised admiration of "la bella monaca Inglese." Her charm of manner and her brilliant conversation will never be forgotten ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... hour when there is something indescribably sombre about the country; day was declining, the outlines of the larger objects in the landscape were becoming less distinct, and the trees were assuming any sort of fantastical shape that the mind chose to assign to them. Here and there a bird rustled in the foliage, but otherwise the silence was only broken by footsteps ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... 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, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... heart, to see thine eyes so red: thou must be patient; I am faine to dine and sup with water and bran: I dare not for my head fill my belly. One fruitful Meale would set mee too't: but they say the Duke will be heere to Morrow. By my troth Isabell I lou'd thy brother, if the olde fantastical Duke of darke corners had bene at ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the shadow, listening to the whisper and rustle of its multitudinous leaves. It is curious the unearthly glamour which moonlight seems to throw over everything, and though Madge knew every flower, tree, and shrub in the garden, yet they all looked weird and fantastical in the cold, white light. She went up to the fountain, and seating herself on the edge, amused herself by dipping her hand into the chilly water, and letting it fall, like silver rain, back into the basin. Then she heard the iron gate open and shut ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume |
