"Fantastically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us, with a line of reefs a few hundred yards out against which the lazy ground swell was breaking in a line of white. The moonlit water lapped gently at our feet. The cliff rose to our right, a mass of gray-black rock, pitted and broken, fantastically indented, unreal ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... fantastically play at being ninety and permit her to lend her strength and youth to his use, but she never again could be deceived. He was assisting her for Farwell's sake. He liked her, found her entertaining, but intuitively ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... doggerel was sung the masked students danced fantastically around Gus Plum, slapping him with their swords and clubs. Then of a sudden he was tripped up, bound hands and feet, and marched out of the boathouse. Here a bag was tied over his head, so that he could not see a thing, although the ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long—then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression. The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... long West Indies sea road. There was time enough for talking, wondering, considering the past, fantastically building up the future. Meeting in the ships' cabins over ale tankards, pacing up and down the small high-raised poop-decks, leaning idle over the side, watching the swirling dark-blue waters or the ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... ravisher of cakes, was almost shocked by this unexpected light. He watched it dancing fantastically on the discoloured wall of the house; he wondered—ill at ease—if it would flash in his face. His surmise was realized, for a streak of illumination reached the narrow chamber in which he cowered, and then he was certain some one ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... where bushes encroach upon the roadside, where fallen trunks now and then intercept the traveller; and this in turn is lost in crooked by-ways, amid brambles and underbrush and tangled vines, growing fantastically athwart the path, shooting up on all sides of the bewildered wanderer, and rendering advance and retreat alike hopeless. No one who in childhood has wandered alone in the woods can help feeling all this suggested by the word smarrita in this passage. How bald in comparison is the word ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... stranger still, to be Captain Rowland's wife. Why he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had happened between them before, and whether—though it was of questionable propriety for a good citizen to espouse a young person of mysterious origin, who did her hair in fantastically elaborate plaits, and in whose appearance "figure" enjoyed such striking predominance—he would not have had a heavy weight on his conscience if he had remained an irresponsible bachelor; these questions and many others, bearing with varying degrees ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... to spend a hundred pounds in Mr. Redfern's shop than to keep the money in one's pocket; but, for my part, I contented myself with buying a little old spoon of silver-gilt, and fantastically shaped, and got it at all the more reasonable rate because there happened to be no legend attached to it. I could supply any deficiency of that kind at much less expense than ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... water—of which we have plenty aboard and you won't miss the little that I requisitioned—causing these molecules to separate and pass at high speed through these various grids, providing electrostatic potentials in their passage which can be added quite fantastically to produce the necessary D.C. ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... Indian canoe that lay at their feet. They would not have been more surprised had they come upon Deerfoot himself in a sound slumber, and not until they had stooped down and examined it closely were they certain that it was not some log fantastically shaped by ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... arrayed fantastically in all the colors of the rainbow, made a delectable sight as they paraded round the gymnasium. The prefects had shirked the difficult and delicate task of judging, and had called in Miss Rodgers and Miss Morley to decree who ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... still more brilliant, for the fireworks and illuminations then began to have their effect. The evening was soft and Italian, the air pure, and the sky without a cloud. From the water, the scene was fantastically beautiful; the huge altar erected on the shore, was now a blaze of light; the range of buildings, as they ascended from the shore, glittered like diamonds in the distance. Fireworks, in great abundance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... provinces of France, with the most melodious music possible; and after having made, in this grotto, the round of the hall like a review of troops, giving an opportunity for all to see them, they descended from the grotto and formed themselves into a little company fantastically arranged, while an orchestra of thirty violins discoursed sweet music, and marched to the melody of these violins by a beautiful dance step, approaching and halting before their majesties. After this ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... are of great size, and their edges are cut and scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady's lace collar. As they annually tend towards decay, they almost rival in brilliant variety of their gradually changing hues the fleeting shades of the expiring dolphin. The autumnal tints of our American ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... all these changes of dynasty was that Ahmedabad became the meeting-place of Hindu, Mahommedan and Jain architecture. Ahmad Shah pulled down Hindu temples in order to build his mosques with the material. The Jama Masjid itself, which he built in A.D. 1424, with its three hundred pillars fantastically carved, is a Hindu temple converted into a mosque (see INDIAN ARCHITECTURE, Plate III., fig. 15). One of the finest buildings is the modern Jain temple of Hathi Singh outside the Delhi gate, which was built only in 1848, and is a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... may I have that piece of cold toast?" she asked plaintively. No professional actress on the stage could have spoken the words more deliciously. Even to the actual crunching of the toast in her little shining white teeth, she sought to illustrate as fantastically as possible the ultimate misery of a bankrupt person starving for ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself,—the very tongs upon the hearth, a ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... sea, and white clouds above sailed along over the blue sky. The wildness of the region was, as it were, tamed by its uniformity and the simplicity of its elements. Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions. Clouds, however fantastically formed they may at times appear, still have a white, or at least a subdued hue, harmoniously corresponding with the blue heaven and the green earth; so that all the colors of a landscape blend into one another like soft ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... entirely sportive, and in that respect formed the most complete contrast to their tragedy. Not only were the characters and situations of individuals worked up into a comic picture of real life, but the whole frame of society, the constitution, nature, and the gods, were all fantastically painted in the most ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... ignorance and carelessness and sin— An indignation which is promptly curbed: As when in certain travel I have feigned To be an ignoramus in our art According to some preconceived design, And happed to hear the land's practitioners Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, {240} Prattle fantastically on disease, Its cause and cure—and I must ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... otherwise by the plaintive cries of wild-fowl or the occasional puffing of a whale. There was a peculiar brilliancy, too, in the atmosphere, caused by the presence of so many fields and hummocks of white ice, looming fantastically through a thin, dry, gauze-like haze, which, while it did not dim the brightness of the solar rays, lent an additional charm to every object by shrouding it in ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... the glass, melting and running down; and over the watery panes yellow light from shop windows played fantastically, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... old, the other young—a pretty, fashionably-dressed girl, who appeared abundantly content with her escort. All three were watching with amusement the movements of a stout elderly dame, who sauntered immediately ahead, leading by a leash a French poodle, fantastically shaved, and decorated with ribbon bows. The stout dame was evidently extravagantly devoted to her pet, and viewed with alarm the approach of a ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... spoke for a while of other recollections, and then Coningsby appealing to Lady Wallinger for her influence, Edith rose and took up her guitar. Her voice was rich and sweet; the air she sang gay, even fantastically frolic, such as the girls of Granada chaunt trooping home from some country festival; her soft, dark eye brightened with joyous sympathy; and ever and anon, with an arch grace, she beat the guitar, in chorus, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... just dispelling the diaphanous mists of early morning, making them hang luminous a moment and then disperse, like tinted gauze that flutters slowly upward in a breeze and vanishes. Great white clouds, foam-like and crisp, piled themselves up fantastically and floated off also, leaving the deep blue vault to mirror itself in the answering azure of the sea; the eternal calm above, awful in its intensity of stillness; the ceaseless movement below, a type of life, throbbing, murmurous, changeful, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... huge mingled procession of the church and the army—priests with relics, and soldiers with weapons, an obese and aged archbishop, habited in cambric and lace, looking strangely like a grey daw in bird-of- paradise plumage, and a band of young girls fantastically robed and garlanded—then I spoke ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... inhabitants had fled; their plantations were in a most luxuriant state; fields which I had left bare and uncultivated were now covered with Indian corn standing higher than my head, the ripe ears hanging fantastically in all directions, and none to gather in the harvest; the crops of kumara and potatoes were equally abundant. I could not help thinking that, if they expected an invasion of their enemies, they had left an ample supply of forage ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... Autumn morning, fresh and dew-washed. The sun was just rising, and a cool clear breeze was blowing across the land. The blue smoke from the "house," where the fire was already going, whirled fantastically over the roofs like a belated ghost. It was just the morning to doze in comfort, and so thought all of Berry's household except himself. Loud was the complaining as they threw themselves out of bed. They maintained that ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... seen her! She was dressed in a white brocade trimmed with a piece of red silk around the bottom, a red, blousy waist covered with gold heads sewed fantastically over it, perhaps odds and ends of old finery, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... her books, comes, day by day, Fantastically clad, To read them near the poor; and all Who meet her, look so sad— That even to herself it is Quite plain that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... observation by the dense foliage, the reserve Companies of the Brigade, lived in canvas tents fantastically daubed or in log huts. Some of the more elaborate of these latter served the double purpose of mess and bedroom for the Company Officers, the sides being taken up by two tiers of bunks made of wire and filled with straw. Outside the devices of the various ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... to read." He put out a couple of volumes from the thinly-furnished shelves that hung on the wall, and went back to his work. Huerlin had no inclination to read, but he took one of the books in his hand and opened it. It was an almanac, and he began to look at the pictures. The first was a fantastically dressed ideal woman's figure depicted as an ornament for the title-page, with bare feet and flowing locks. Huerlin remembered that he had a stump of lead-pencil in his pocket. He took it out, wet it in his mouth, and drew two large round ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... in wide-open countries all my life," said the latter, "but this beats anything I ever saw. Why, the crooks outnumber the honest men and they're running things to suit themselves. One of 'em tried to lay me. ME!" He chuckled as if the mere idea was fantastically humorous. "Have you heard about this Soapy Smith? He's the boss, the bell-cow, and he's made himself mayor of Skagway. Can you beat it? I'll bet some of his men are on our Citizens' Committee at Sheep Camp. They need a lot of killing, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... Mr. J. A. Symonds always called him Sprite; qualifying the name, however, by the epithets "most fantastic, but most human." To me the essential humanity was always the thing most apparent. In a fire well nourished of seasoned ship-timber, the flames glance fantastically and of many colours, but the glow at heart is ever deep and strong; it was at such a glow that the friends of Stevenson were accustomed to warm their hands, while they admired and were entertained by the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... controversial of the larger problems of history is the Reformation; and here Protestants of all schools are ranged in a solid phalanx against Catholics. That the Church was in need of reform is agreed by both sides; but the Catholic contends that the evils to be remedied have been fantastically exaggerated, that there was no need for a revolt, and that the revolution inaugurated by Luther left Germany far worse than it found her. Realizing that the Protestant view most authoritatively presented in Ranke's classical work on the Reformation held the field, Janssen ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... his breast. His forehead was wrinkled in dried- up folds, his brows bristled fantastically into shaggy, dirty tufts. His heavy, blunt nose, powdered with hairs at the tip, stood out obstinately between two deep folds on either side. These folds overhung the corners of his mouth, and were joined below ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... degrees Sidonie sank to her former level, yes, even lower. From the rich, well-considered bourgeoise to which her marriage had raised her, she descended the ladder to the rank of a mere toy. By dint of travelling in railway carriages with fantastically dressed courtesans, with their hair worn over their eyes like a terrier's, or falling over the back 'a la Genevieve de Brabant', she came at last to resemble them. She transformed herself into a blonde for two months, to the unbounded amazement of Rizer, who could not understand ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... air balloon borne by the wind over some prairie on land; but it would be more accurate to say that we sat in the lounge as if we were riding in a coach on an express train. As for the foregrounds passing before our eyes, they were fantastically carved rocks, forests of trees that had crossed over from the vegetable kingdom into the mineral kingdom, their motionless silhouettes sprawling beneath the waves. There also were stony masses buried beneath carpets of ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... through the flames as the crowd fought to get free. Shrieks and gasps and curses cut through the air: the worshippers were caught up in a mob panic caused more by their superstitious frenzy than by the understandable fire. The flames pierced fantastically into the blackness, throwing a vivid glow on the frantic faces of the people who struggled to get out of their reach. The altar was deserted, save for the girl who still lay on the hand of ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... the Place was exactly like a setting for the stage. The great white Casino, with the constant va et vient to and from the open doorway; the bubbly domes of the fantastically Moorish cafe across the way; the velvet grass, unnaturally green in the electric light; the flower beds in the garden a mosaic floor of coloured jewels; the air blue as a gauze veil, with diamonds shining through its meshes; and over all a serene arch of hyacinth sky, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Phete where the natives had assured us we would find good hunters with dogs. For almost the entire distance the road skirted the rim of the Yangtze gorge and there the view of the great chasm was even more magnificent than that we had left. While its sides are not fantastically sculptured and the colors are softer than those of the Grand Canon of the Colorado, nevertheless its grandeur is hardly less imposing and awe-inspiring. If Yuen-nan is ever made accessible by railroads this gorge should become a Mecca ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... and a little farther on stopped in front of the Hotel de Paris. It too was fantastically ornate, surely the most extraordinary hotel on earth, with a high roof of a gray severity which ironically frowned down upon gilded balconies and nude plaster women who supported them, robustly voluptuous creatures who faded into foliage below the waist, like plump nymphs escaping the rude pursuit ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the farmers were well-to-do, and in hamlets and villages, young men used to go about fantastically dressed, and with fifes and drums serenade and salute the inhabitants, for which they were generally rewarded with eggs, butter, and bacon. These they would afterwards dispose of for money, and then have a 'batter,' which, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Sophomores, assisted by the other classes, must perform duly the funeral rites of their friend of Freshman-days, by nocturnal services at the 'Temple.' Wherefore, toward midnight of some dark Wednesday evening in October, you may see masked and fantastically-dressed students by twos and threes stealing through the darkness to the common rendezvous. An Indian chief of gray leggins and grave demeanor goes down arm in arm with the prince of darkness, and a portly squire of the old English school communes sociably ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... could reach in one long, bold, monotonous line. Like the whole coast of Flanders and of Holland, it seemed drawn by a geometrical rule, not a cape, cove, or estuary breaking the perfect straightness of the design. On the right, just beyond high-water mark, the downs, fantastically heaped together like a mimic mountain chain, or like tempestuous ocean-waves suddenly changed to sand, rolled wild and confused, but still in a regularly parallel course with the line of the beach. They seemed a barrier thrown up to protect the land from being bitten quite away ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... bright-colored stamping, as well as gay-lined envelopes. Places with easily illustrated names quite often have them pictured; the "Bird-cage," for instance, may have a bright blue paper with a bird-cage in supposed red lacquer; the "Bandbox," a fantastically decorated milliner's box on oyster gray paper, the envelope lining of black and gray pin stripes, and the "Doll's House" might use the outline of a doll's house in grass green on green-bordered white paper, and white envelopes lined with grass green. Each of ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... moment he beheld the crowd give way. A young girl, fantastically dressed, emerged from the throng. She was accompanied by a little white goat with gilded horns, and carried a ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... forty-five who had lived the peaceful life of a farmer until he reached his fortieth year. Only then, belatedly, did the authorities find he was telepathic and agree to let him late in life enter upon the career of pinlighter. He did well at it, but he was fantastically old ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... made his appearance, was a tall good-looking young man about thirty, dressed rather fantastically, as I thought, having a laced cap on his head and a party-colored silk sash round his waist, such as they ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... time to reach them. Windows melted in their frames, pillars fell to the ground, ironwork bent as wax; nay, the very pavements around glowed so that neither man nor horse dared tread upon them. And the flames, gradually gaining ground, danced fantastically up and down the scaffolding, and covered the edifice as with one blaze; whilst inside transom beams were snapped asunder, rafters fell with destruction, and the fire roaring through chapels and aisles as in a great furnace, could be heard afar. And that which had been a ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... cried herself asleep, and lay in an unquiet and fitful slumber. As she thought of him alway by day, so now in her dreams the image of Jason Fletcher was fantastically and singularly busy. It seemed to her that she stood upon an eminence overlooking a peaceful valley of that charming sort only to be seen in dreams. Afar off, and still, in some strange way, very near, she beheld the youth of her love, who reclined upon a bank beside a quiet stream. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... always congenial. It's never the sort that hurts. The only kind of generosity that will help in this crisis is the kind that hurts. It's up to you, Kenny, to do some mental house-cleaning, admit the cobwebs and brush them away, instead of using them fantastically for drapery." ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... double the guard about Rosamund, for at nights boats appeared that cruised round them. In the daytime also bands of men, fantastically dressed in silks, and with them women, could be seen riding to and fro upon the shore and staring at them, as though they were striving to make up their minds to ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... Cally was now fully accoutred, in a small, queer hat, and a short queer wrap, draping in fantastically above the knee and made of a strange filmy material which might have been stamped chiffon. She turned, laughing, at the bedroom door, and her mother, no sentimentalist, thought that ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... perform a serious act of disenchantment. The ideal Gipsy is destined to be scattered to the winds by the unvarnished picture which Mr. Smith will cause to be presented to our vision. He does not pretend to show us the romantic, fantastically-dressed creature whose prototypes have long been in the imaginations of many of us as types of the Gipsy species. Those of our readers who have formed their notions of Gipsy life upon the strength of the assurances which have ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Ministerial, the Opposition Benches—infandum! infandum! And yet why is the thing impossible? Was not every soul, or rather every body, of these Guardians of our Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night; 'a forked Radish with a head fantastically carved'? And why might he not, did our stern fate so order it, walk out to St Stephen's, as well as into bed, in that no-fashion; and there, with other similar Radishes, hold a Bed of Justice? 'Solace of those afflicted with the like!' Unhappy Teufelsdroeckh, had man ever such a 'physical or ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the sun were beating straight on the colossal figure, which glittered fantastically, like a huge splintered ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... profoundly true, though often enough not in the way that they are generally accepted. Had he possessed any powers of definition at that age, probably he would have described our accepted beliefs as shadows of the Truth, distorted and fantastically shaped, like those thrown by changeful, ragged clouds behind which the eternal sun is shining, shadows that vary in length and character according to the hour and weather ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... figure, bent double with the weight of years, hobbled its weird way toward the diners. From a voluminous sable sleeve, a long thin hand projected itself, the wiry fingers clutching a tall staff. The shifting glow of the lanterns played fantastically upon the apparition's veiled head as, step by step, it drew slowly nearer. An audible sigh of amazement, mingled with dread of the unknown, swept the little company. Added to the unexpected materialization of the seeress was the surprise of her ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... in the same bedroom—a chamber in a projecting tower—which on their arrival, when poor Una was so merry, they had hung round with old tapestry, and decorated fantastically according to their skill and frolic. One night, as they went to bed, Una said, as if speaking ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... beech-tree. For the most part the bottom of the glen was overgrown with brushwood, and, where its sides were too abrupt to admit the growth of larger trees, they were matted with woodbine and brambles. Out of these would sometimes start a sharp pinnacle, or fantastically-formed crag, adding greatly to the picturesque beauty of the scene. On such points were not unfrequently found perched a hawk, a falcon, or some large bird of prey; for the gully, with its brakes and thickets, was a favourite haunt of ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... be careful! I had a long talk with—but I don't believe you have seen them. One of them is a fantastically thin, long person, apparently ailing; I shouldn't wonder if he were really so. He makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner. I imagine he must have suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much as he tries to make out. He's what people would call a gentleman. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... road that led in the direction of the mountains. The party consisted of three individuals. One, closely wrapped, and mounted upon a mule, appeared to be a female. The other two, oddly attired, and fantastically adorned with paint and feathers, might have been taken for a brace of Indian warriors. But they were not Indians. They were Spanish soldiers in Indian disguise. They were Sergeant Gomez and the soldier Jose in charge of ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... the shape of the atoms; for earth it is cubical and for fire it is pyramidal. To-day physicists are again discussing the structure of the atom, and its shape is no slight factor in that structure. Plato's guesses read much more fantastically than does Aristotle's systematic analysis; but in some ways they are more valuable. The main outline of his ideas is comparable with that of modern science. It embodies concepts which any theory of natural philosophy must retain and in some sense must explain. Aristotle ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... wildly upon the mass; it was like a battle and through the smoke I caught sight of the riverside natives who were acting as beaters, advancing far away, fantastically dressed, screaming with excitement and waving spears, or sometimes torches of flaming reeds. Most of these were scrambling along the banks, but some of the bolder spirits advanced over the lagoon in canoes, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... on brighter fields afar Has walked among the daisies, and has breathed The glory of the mountain winds, and sheathed The stubborn sword of Night's last-shining star. In Bathrolaire when Day's old doors unbar The motley mask, fantastically wreathed, Pass through a strong portcullis brazen teethed, And enter glowing mines of cinnabar. Stupendous prisons shut them out from day, Gratings and caves and rayless catacombs, And the unrelenting rack and tourniquet Grind death in cells where jetting gaslight gloams, And iron ladders ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... anyhow on the trodden grass, dappled with blood, his head curved fantastically beneath his shoulders. Another had gone down with him and lay half over him, a long arm locked about him in a curious gesture that oddly suggested protection. This one lay face downward, but Varney, as it happened, was on his back, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... block, glittering like crystal, spread a stream of delicious freshness. When we had kindled a large fire with branches of juniper, accumulated by the hunter who most frequented the retreat, the ice shone with a myriad diamond tints; everything seemed to assume an extraordinary form and life. The fantastically carved walls of rock sparkled with capricious gleams. From the sides of black granite hung pendent icicles, sometimes slender and isolated, sometimes grouped in fanciful clusters. In the hollows, where damp and darkness for ever reign, climbed a bluish-grey moss, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... is dotted over with tents and green bush arbours, and there is hardly a watercourse but which is sprinkled with miners, digging, sifting, and washing. About half of the people work together in companies—the other half shift each for himself. There are hundreds of Indians, many of them fantastically dressed, for they can purchase fine clothing now, even at the extravagant rates at which all articles are charged at Weber's store. They labour one day, and get drunk on pisco or the "strong water" on another. One of them rolled down a rocky ravine ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... were two windows, carefully closed by gray shutters in which were heart-shaped openings cut to admit the light; these windows seemed to be those of the dining-room. In the elevation gained by the three steps were vent-holes to the cellar, closed by painted iron shutters fantastically cut in open-work. Everything was new. In this repaired and restored house, the fresh-colored look of which contrasted with the time-worn exteriors of all the other houses, an observer would instantly perceive the paltry taste and perfect self-satisfaction ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... as another Mrs. Orgreave, a strenuous and passionate past behind her, honoured, beloved, teased, adored. But she could not quite see herself thus. Impossible that she, with her temperament so feverish, restive, and peculiar, should ever reach such a haven! It was fantastically too much to expect! And yet, if not with Edwin Clayhanger, then with another, with some mysterious being whom she had never seen!... Did not everything happen?... But then, equally, strange and terrible misfortunes might be lying in wait for her!... The indescribable sharp ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... I see!" And he bent and twisted the osiers in his hands with a sudden vigour that almost snapped them. He was thinking of certain women he had known in London—women whose tresses, dyed, waved, crimped and rolled over fantastically shaped "frames," had moved him to positive repulsion,—so much so that he would rather have touched the skin of a dead rat than laid a finger on the tinted stuff called "hair" by these feminine hypocrites of fashion. He ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides, and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the kitchen, save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls and ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and pans. The rain pattered lustily without; the wind wailed in the chimney; the lightning flashed, the thunder volleyed. And Peter looked at the Duchessa—and blessed ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... up under his lee, the breakers dashing furiously against its base; then Kynance Cove, with its fantastically-shaped cliffs, opened out, but the sea roared and foamed at their base, and not a spot of sand could he discover on which he could hope to beach his boat, even should he pass through the raging surf unharmed. Meantale Point, Pradanack, ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the fashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in 'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in 'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is superannuated. . . . Our emotions ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... any considerable seed-bed of human possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. He remembered that he had said of her fantastically, to a fellow in the pension, that she reminded him of a spool of silk thread. And now the silk thread had all been wound off, and there was only ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... hundred persons have collected near a clump of trees on the lawn, and are divided into knots intermixed with ruffian-looking desperadoes, dressed most coarsely and fantastically. They are pitting their men, after the fashion of good horses; then they boldly draw forth and expose the minor delinquencies of opposing candidates. Among them are the "Saw- piters," who affect an air of dignity, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... compare the Caesar of Rome or the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of the Thebaid, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul fixed on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit, and not the Caesar, is the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the floor of the plaisance appeared to be a great mirror that caught our reflections and distorted them fantastically and horribly. We saw then that it was a form of living mold, composed of millions of tiny plants, each with an eye-like iris at its center. Those eyes seemed to be watching us, and as we strode forward, a great sigh rose up, as if in resentment ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... You know I saw very little of your hive, except indeed the storekeeper's son, who was dressed so fantastically, and who would come offering his help in ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... weather, indeed! here, in early spring, with drift-ice still coming in vast floes from the north, queer weather to draw the sweat from us, while a midsummer blue loom of the main-land hung high and fantastically shaped in the thick air. Breathless, ominously colored weather! Why, the like, for stillness and beggarly expression of intention, had never been known to Twist Tickle: they talked with indignation of it on Eli Flack's stage; 'twas a day that bred wrecks, said they. Ay, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... early morning of which he had arrived in Washington. It was a Saturday, I think. He came to the capitol under Mr. Seward's escort, and, among the rest, I was presented to him. His appearance did not impress me as fantastically as it had impressed Colonel McClure. I was more familiar with the Western type than Colonel McClure, and, whilst Mr. Lincoln was certainly not an Adonis, even after prairie ideals, there was about him a dignity ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... lowing, were rounded up below us, and away on the horizon the sun was setting with the glory one never sees better elsewhere than over a plain, leaving, as it rapidly sank from sight, marvellous shades of gold and crimson on the fantastically shaped clouds. Save for the animals and their drivers just around us, the whole vast space seemed so still and empty, yet on every hand were traces of man's labour and skill, conquering a tract of land which was almost valueless a ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... Park Avenue on the north. Besides the fine elms bordering the avenue, there are a variety of other trees in the grounds, among them many cedars, still flourishing, though beginning to show the effects of the London smoke. Excepting for the Dutch Garden, with its prim, though fantastically-designed flower-beds, there is little attempt at formal gardening. Here stands the seat used by the poet Rogers, on which is ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... young Nigel, arrayed plainly, but in a dress, nevertheless, more suitable to his age and quality than he had formerly worn, accompanied by his servant Moniplies, whose outside also was considerably improved. His solemn and stern features glared forth from under a blue velvet bonnet, fantastically placed sideways on his head—he had a sound and tough coat of English blue broad-cloth, which, unlike his former vestment, would have stood the tug of all the apprentices in Fleet Street. The buckler and broadsword he wore as the arms of his condition, and a neat ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar silence, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... The snow was piled fantastically in huge mounds over the fields, and the railway cuts would be drifted full, so no train would run for days. But Peter felt that he could walk the distance ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... yonder queer person in the high headdress of my grandmother's time, who stops and speaks to Mr. Richardson?" asked Harry, as a fantastically dressed lady came up, and performed a curtsey and a compliment to the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... work," Dennis began unsteadily. But then, as his eyes began to get accustomed to his fantastically new, though intrinsically unchanged ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... Lady Holme herself did not understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme's singing, sometimes in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not speak to him in Lady Holme's conversation. He really thought this hidden woman was obscured by the lovely window—he ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... the morning, as Gaspe tells us, the whole neighbourhood appeared, decked out fantastically, and greeted the manor-house with a salvo of blank musketry. With them they bore a tall fir-tree, its branches cut and its bark peeled to within a few feet of the top. There the tuft of greenery remained. ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... "Herein the rich people have defrauded themselves as well as the poor. You will see a refined and highly educated man nowadays, who has been to Italy and Egypt and where not, who can talk learnedly enough (and fantastically enough sometimes) about art and literature of past days, sitting down without signs of discomfort in a house that, with all its surroundings, is just brutally vulgar and hideous. All his education has done for him no ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Fantastically tangled; the green hills Are clothed with early blossoms, through the grass The quick-eyed lizard rustles, and the bills Of summer birds sing welcome as ye pass; Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class, Implore the pausing step, and ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... promptly curbed: As when in certain travel I have feigned To be an ignoramus in our art According to some preconceived design, And happed to hear the land's practitioners Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, 240 Prattle fantastically on disease, Its cause and cure—and ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... manual controls, and were soon standing on the hull of the ship. For several seconds they remained motionless and silent, grimly surveying their awesome surroundings. The billions of stars above were terrifyingly vivid against the dark emptiness of space. The ship's hull was fantastically twisted and pitted, and the enemy ship—it hovered a few miles distant—had been transformed into a brilliantly burning star by ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... She had a pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon, in her hand. She held it a moment; then, looking deliberately at Penelope, she went up to her, and dropped it in her lap without a word. She turned, and, advancing a few steps, tottered and seemed about ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... such a scene as the one now presented to her eyes. It was as if she had been suddenly transported to fairyland, and was treading among the colossal habitations of giants. On all sides were stupendous masses of rock, huge boulders of all colors—white, yellow and red—most fantastically shaped. There were lofty towers, strange, wind-wrought obelisks, pointed pinnacles, bizarre in shape as one sees in nightmares. It reminded her of the settings of Wagner's music dramas and the weird pictures of Gustave Dore. She admired ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... very gay and pretty. The rooms had been fantastically decorated with red berries and snowballs, pine, and cedar. The leader of the band was in that stage of intoxication which promised music to make the soles of the dado tingle. All the girls had brought their prettiest frocks, and ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... cannon-boots, would lead one to suppose that German student-life was one round of beer-drinking, sword-slashing, and jolly existence, as represented, or rather, misrepresented, by William Howitt, in the halo of poetry he throws around it. No,—the fantastically dressed fellows whom the tourist may notice at Jena, and the groups of starers who stop every narrow passageway in front of the confectionery-shops of Heidelberg, or amuse themselves of summer-afternoons with their trained dogs, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... He would willingly have gone into a beer-house to warm himself at the fire. As he was pacing through a lonely by-street, he met a man with a black half- mask on his face, enveloped in a fire-colored silken mantle, and wearing on his head a magnificent hat turned up at one side, and fantastically ornamented with a number of high and ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... the true horrors of sleep-fighting. It was bitterly cold—cold as the Free State night on the veld knows how to be. And we could not smoke, could not talk above a faint murmur, and nodded in our saddles. The clear stars danced fantastically in the sky ahead of us, and the ground seemed to be falling away from us into vast hollows, then rising to our horses' noses ready to smash into us like an impalpable wall. After midnight, outspanning in a piercing ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... Paul wrote about Religion "in a vivid and figured way"—not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, "he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion"; quoting them at haphazard and applying them fantastically. ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... a negress—coal black and so enormously fat that she moved about with evident difficulty. She was dressed in a loosely hanging purple calico garment of the mother Hubbard type—known as a volante amongst Louisiana Creoles; and on her head was knotted and fantastically twisted a bright tignon. Her glistening good-natured countenance illumined ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... Nautilus we had crossed the line of trees, and a hundred feet above our heads rose the top of the mountain, which cast a shadow on the brilliant irradiation of the opposite slope. Some petrified shrubs ran fantastically here and there. Fishes got up under our feet like birds in the long grass. The massive rocks were rent with impenetrable fractures, deep grottos, and unfathomable holes, at the bottom of which formidable ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... most complete, he habitually keeping upward of a hundred officers in his private uniform. It paid off, for with such a skeleton force of highly skilled professionals as a cadre, the marshal could enlist veterans for his rank and file and whip together a trained fighting force in a fantastically ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... that Nettie had been at Miss Wodehouse's, where the curate of St Roque's was a perpetual visitor. With a mortified and jealous pang, totally unreasonable and totally irresistible, Edward Rider, only a moment before so fantastically extreme in Nettie's defence—in the defence of Nettie's very "image" from all vulgar contact and desecration—strode past Nettie now without word or sign of recognition. She did not see him, as he observed with a throbbing heart; she was talking to young Mr ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... unlucky false quantity of Janua, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey, Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately gifted. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... The troubadour rode a mustang the color of a dry chili pepper, but with none of its spirit. It came in with drooping head, the reins lying untouched on its neck, its mane and forelock platted and adorned fantastically with vari-colored ribbons. Rosettes were on the bridle, a fringe of ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... a poetical essay, fantastically conceived and executed with the sans gene of an improvisatore. For those who admire the genius of George Sand its interest as a psychological revelation remains unabated. Into Lelia, she owns, she put more of her real self than into ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... oak, dark and rugged. My bed was unexceptionably comfortable, but, in my then mood, I could have wished it a great deal more modern. Its four posts were, like the rest of it, oak, well-nigh black, fantastically turned and carved, with a great urn-like capital and base, and shaped midway, like a gigantic lance-handle. Its curtains were of thick and faded tapestry. I was always a lover of such antiquities, but I confess ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Iberian, Hill 35, and Gallipoli provided a striking example of German stubbornness and skill, but added an object-lesson in the squandering of our efforts in attack. Operations upon a general scale having failed to capture all three, it was fantastically hoped that each could be reduced separately. Iberian, Hill 35, and Gallipoli supported one another, nor was it feasible to hold any without holding all. Yet to take Hill 35 on September 9 the 2/4th Oxfords were specially selected. The spirit of A and D Companies, chosen by Colonel ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... and on its eastern margin was an etching of spiry spruce. A dead and broken tree on the edge of the grass-plot looked like a weird prowler just out of the woods, and seemed half-inclined to come out into the light and speak to me. All was still. The moonlit mist clung fantastically to the mossy festoons of the fir trees. I was miles from the nearest human soul, and as I stood in the enchanting scene, amid the beautiful mellow light, I seemed to have been wafted back into the legend-weaving age. The silence ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, 195 Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar's plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set 200 With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; 205 For, from their shivered brows displayed, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... balance in our favor. Against this, the possibility of a scouting party stumbling over the remains of a colony the location of which is almost completely problematical, and which by analogy with all of the earlier colonial attempts has at best managed to survive as a marginal foothold, is so fantastically remote ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... Whose wild, green margin, now no more erase Art's works; no more its sparkling waters sleep, Prisoned in marble; bubbling from the base Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap, The rill runs o'er, and 'round, fern, flowers and ivy creep, Fantastically tangled." ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... here and he rather forgot Dick in fantastically thinking how you might have to climb to the shoulders of a man (Old Crow's, for instance) to make your leap to God. You couldn't do it from the ground. Dick had taken off his glasses to wipe them and Raven, recalling himself and glancing up, found ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... ringing his death-knell around the tomb of his mother. How often has the mountain bandit, whose hand trembled not at murder, shuddered with fear, as he hastened through the forest, at the sound of a branch waving in the wind, or felt his hair stand erect with terror on beholding a distant bush fantastically enlightened by the moon! Conscience has made cowards of the most sanguinary freebooters and the most shameless oppressors. The dreadful "worm that dieth not," and banishes every cheerful thought from the guilty soul, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... close to him. He therefore stopped his exciting occupation, and looked round. The horseman was tall, and of a very sinister expression of countenance, with piercing black eyes. He was also rather fantastically ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson |
