"Monumental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no adequate history of the Confederacy. It is rumored that a distinguished scholar has a great work approaching completion. It is also rumored that another scholar, well equipped to do so, will soon bring out a monumental life of Davis. But the fact remains that as yet we lack a comprehensive review of the Confederate episode set in proper perspective. Standard works such as the "History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850", by J. F. Rhodes (7 vols., 1893-1908), even when otherwise ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... SUPPLEMENT No. 412 we gave several engravings and a full description of the colossal German National monument "Germania," lately unveiled on the Niederwald slope of the Rhine. We now present, as beautiful suggestions in art, engravings of the two statues, War and Peace, which adorn the corners of the monumental facade. These figures are about twenty feet high. The statue of War represents an allegorical character, partly Mercury, partly mediaeval knight, with trumpet in one hand, sword in the other. The statue of Peace represents a mild and modest maiden, holding out an olive branch ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... Church, eventually going abroad to study for the priesthood. On taking orders he returned to New York, and during the rest of his life was an earnest and influential, though somewhat independent toiler in the vineyard of Rome; gaining, unsought, fame as Father Hecker. His monumental work was the founding of the Paulist Fathers, a strong organization, influential in the religious life of New York, though the church and the home of the fraternity are located across the Hudson ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... permit me t' prognostigate yo' attention fo' de monumental contraction of impossibilitiness in de circomlocution ob attaining de maximum nutrition ob internal combustion?" asked Washington White about an hour later, as he poked his head into the workshop, where ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... said, 'Well, now, old man, what about going up to this room of yours and having a look at this monumental history?' Saw him shoot a glance in his wife's direction, and he said, 'Oh, no, not now, Hapgood. Never mind now.' And his wife said, 'Mark, what can there be for Mr. Hapgood to see up there? It's too ridiculous. I'm sure he doesn't want to be ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... importance more than two thousand years ago, is still one of the largest places in the empire, being exceeded in population probably by Canton alone. Each of its four walls, facing the cardinal points, is over six miles long and is pierced in the center by a monumental gate with lofty pavilions. It was here, among the ruins of an old Nestorian church, built several centuries before, that was found the famous tablet now sought at a high price by the British Museum. The harassing mobs gathered ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Hold fast to the truth as a refuge." This is Rhys Davids' translation and excellent both as English and as giving the meaning. But the five Pali words compel attention and inscribe themselves on the memory in virtue of a monumental simplicity which the five English sentences ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Bataille is a mighty hunter before the face of the Lord in the land of Masonry, and through the whole country of Hiram; great also is Diana of the Palladians. After their monumental revelations and confessions, those of all other seceders and penitents who have come out of the mystery of iniquity, "are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine." My readers in the two previous chapters have drunk raw spirit, and must now qualify it after the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... is surely worth making, for is it not curiously typical of the state of monumental art in England in the present day, that we are only doing what our ancestors did better? They erected useful, appropriate, and endurable monuments which are still crowning ornaments to the town of Caen. Are either of our 'memorials' likely ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the chains and locks and bars and dismal dungeon cells and flagellations and manifold tortures of the less humane and less enlightened past are justly abhorrent; an age which measures its magnificent philanthropy by munificent millions, bestowed without stint upon monumental mansions for the indwelling of the most pitiable and afflicted of the children of men, safe from the pitiless storms of adverse environment without which are so harshly violent to the morbidly sensitive ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... smiling, "if you feel that way, why that's a good way to feel. But I'm afraid art is stronger in you than you think. Just now you're tired and disillusionized. In a month you'll be making sketches for some monumental opus." ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... What a monumental work was that in the treasure-filled recesses of which the young explorer was straightway lost to the outer world! No human need but might find its contentment therein. Spread forth in its alluringly illustrated ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... interesting, well conceived in many respects, and pathetic novel, which, nevertheless, errs in this; and I even think the pathos is injured by the last page, which is too painful for tenderness, which appears the object of the able author. A monumental effigy is but the mockery of all life's doings, which are thus, with their sorrows and their joys, rendered nugatory; and all that we have been reading, and are interested about, is unnecessarily presented to us as dust and ashes. Such is ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... conscience, of the national dignity. The dignity is absent here, and I am told that the conscience is an abyss. "L'etat c'est moi" even—I like that better than the spittoons. These implements are architectural, monumental; they are the only monuments. En somme, the country is interesting, now that we too have the Republic; it is the biggest illustration, the biggest warning. It is the last word of democracy, and that word ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... Fieldfare was not in the morning-room of the club as he ought to have been. That was bound to happen. Mr. Prohack gazed around at the monumental somnolence of the great room, was ignored, and backed out into the hall, meaning to return home. But in the hall he met F.F. just arriving. It surprised and perhaps a little pained Mr. Prohack to observe that F.F. had evidently heard ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... of the yachting season, shortly after Colonel Halkett had spent his customary days of September shooting at Steynham. Beauchamp's folly was the colonel's theme, for the fellow had dragged Lord Palmet there, and driven his uncle out of patience. Mr. Romfrey's monumental patience had been exhausted by him. The colonel boiled over with accounts of Beauchamp's behaviour toward his uncle, and Palmet, and Baskelett, and Mrs. Culling: how he flew at and worried everybody who seemed to him to have had a hand in the proper ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and the determinations of their positions, as well as his measurements of double stars, and much other valuable astronomical research, were published in a splendid volume, brought out at the cost of the Duke of Northumberland. This is, indeed, a monumental work, full of interesting and instructive reading for any one who has a ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... the period is that of the brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, and the work which naturally comes to the mind, when thinking of them, is the monumental altarpiece which they painted for Jos. Vyt, lord of Pamele, to be placed in his chapel in the Cathedral of St. John in Ghent. This work, generally known as the "Mystic Lamb," is composed of ten smaller pictures, but the partitions separating the various divisions ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... followed by that of Australia published in 1867 in seven volumes octavo. At the same time the "Genera Plantarum" was being planned; it was begun, with Dr. Hooker as a collaborator, in 1862, and concluded in 1883. With this monumental work his labours ended; "his strength...suddenly gave way...his visits to Kew ended, and lingering on under increasing debility, he died of old age on September 10th last" (1883.) The amount of work that he accomplished was gigantic and of the most masterly character. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... tree, the seed of which had been planted on the occasion of his marriage. The facade of the house on the Rue Fortunee, now the Rue Balzac, was also to be embellished, and the central pavilion made to represent the novelist's apotheosis, with a monumental bass-relief and a niche. Only a small portion of these alterations was completed. On Madame de Balzac's death, in 1882, the property was bought by the Baroness Salomon de Rothschild; and, before the end of the century, it was demolished and the ground it covered was incorporated ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... other hand, in "Middlemarch," George Eliot has told three stories instead of one. She has failed to make her plot an organic whole by deftly interweaving the three strands which she has spun. And therefore this monumental novel, so great in other ways, is faulty in structure, because it violates the principle ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... does, and wine, And grief dies smothered in thy purple fold. Let one greater than I, Kiss, and more bold, Rear thee a classic, monumental line. ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... water to the people, and advertising a cheap clothing establishment. The one compensation for the violation of good taste inseparable from these constructions is to be found in the fact that they must, sooner or later, lead the public to realize the absolute unfitness of cast iron for monumental and decorative uses. With the artistic influences which are now so active in the instruction of the American people, it is not perhaps unreasonable to look forward to the day when all of these piles of pot-metal shall be relegated to the scrap-heap, and ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... symbolically solved in the Eleusinia. For us there is nothing real except as we realize it. Let it be that myriads have walked upon the earth before us,—that each race and generation has wrought its change and left its monumental record upon pillar and pyramid and obelisk; set aside the ruin which Time has wrought both upon the change and the record, levelling the cities and temples of men, diminishing the shadows of the Pyramids, and rendering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... abridged edition of Gibbon was to have heralded the 'Ruined Home' Library, as we only dealt with the decline and fall of things, and eschewed Motley in both senses of the word. 'Bad Taste in All Ages' (twelve volumes edited by myself) would have rivalled some of Mr. Sidney Lee's monumental undertakings. It was a memory of these unfulfilled designs which has turned my thoughts to an old notebook—the skeleton of what was destined never to be a book ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... the Abbey some of the most important are by Pope. Like everything else from his pen, they are carefully written, but viewed as monumental inscriptions, not distinguished for any striking excellence. Among the best of them is that on the Honourable James Craggs, a secretary of state, rather discreditably mixed up ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... objects of Mommsen's research. From jurisprudence he passed to the study of general history, and of the most interesting period of Rome he absorbed into his mind all the lore that has survived. This he digested and set forth in a monumental work, which, translated into English, has been, in the English-speaking world of scholars at least, as familiar as household words. At a still later time he was an active striver in the political agitations of ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... discussion of Scott's critical work is a sufficient reason for the undertaking of this study, the subject of which was suggested to me more than three years ago by Professor Trent of Columbia University. We still use critical essays and monumental editions prepared by the author of the Waverley novels, but the criticism has been so overshadowed by the romances that its importance is scarcely recognized. It is valuable in itself, as well ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... the temples, and besides grass was growing and trees would grow where grass would grow in such dry weather, and they would say the same things over. It made the little forestry station in Nanking seem like a monumental advance, while that fearful sun was beating up the dust under the stones as the men gave us the Swedish massage in the motion of the chairs. Fifty men and more stood around as we got in and out of the car and five men apiece stood and waited ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... some monumental relics of Meroe, and if anything confirmatory of sacred history does remain, I pray to be guided thereunto. If the sacred chronology would thereby be confirmed, I would not grudge the toil and hardships, hunger ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... best one yet. He is on his way (1265) to have a look at the first House of Commons in English history. It was a monumental event, the situation in the House, and was the second great liberty landmark which the century had set up. I have made Henry looking glad, but this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sculptors. In spite of difficulties not of their own making, they were able to create, with a coarser material and in a less favourable climate, what was perhaps the highest achievement ever attained by monumental sculpture. The Italians soon came to distrust Gothic architecture. It was never quite indigenous, and they were afraid of this "German" transalpine art. Vasari attacks "Questa maledizione di fabbriche," with their "tabernacolini l'un sopra l'altro, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... this: I asked myself one day this question—what if Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had not had Toulon nor Egypt nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be murdered too to get money from her trunk (for his career, you understand). Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... "And the monumental nonsense it is," said Mrs. Fairbanks, "for men of high culture and special training to lose themselves in such a country ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... its noble duties and exalted powers. We underrate the Church. We are looking elsewhere for our highest ideals, instead of claiming from the Church that spiritual guidance and inspiration which should be its right to give. One of the things that is a monumental astonishment to me, is that when we need supplication, intercession, prayer for the averting of great personal or national calamity, we flee to the Church, but we seldom think of the Church when we ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... unnecessary interference with men who were simply going their own way. The Highlanders only knew Gaelic, yet political wiseacres were to be found objecting to their having the Bible in their own tongue. Johnson flew to arms: he wrote one of his monumental letters; the opposition was quelled, and the Gael got his Bible. So too the wicked interference with Irish enterprise, so much in vogue during the last century, infuriated him. 'Sir,' he said to Sir ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... because it hung in his memory how, many years before, this same Gunterson had by rather questionable methods worsted him in a transaction affecting a schedule of cotton compresses in Georgia; Smith because he believed Mr. Gunterson to be a fraud of such monumental proportions that he deserved a place among the storied ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Garth said quickly. "Grylls is not so simple." He stuck the letter sharply with his forefinger. "I'm a newspaper reporter," he went on dryly, "you can believe me, this is a perfect, a beautiful, a monumental bluff! I'm almost inclined to take off my hat to him! But the length of it gives them away, rather; they must have spent all day yesterday ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... this ridiculous hypothesis with the remark that the gossip which attributes to the Danes our lofty monumental pyramids and cairns, our Druid altars, our dry stone caisils or keeps, and our raths or fortified enclosures for the homes or cattle of our chiefs, is equally and utterly unfounded; and is partly to be accounted for from ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... usually received with courteous incredulity. But when one of their number gravely declared that trout could there be caught and boiled in the same lake, within a radius of fifteen feet, the House of Representatives broke forth into roars of laughter, and thought the man a monumental liar. We cannot be surprised, therefore, that enthusiastic fishermen almost go crazy here. I have seen men, after a ride of forty miles, rush off to fish without a moment's rest as if their lives depended on it. Some years ago, General Wade Hampton visited the Park and came as far as Lake Yellowstone. ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... failed to interest me. Somehow I could not picture him to myself as Romeo. But I listened with every sign of encouragement. It was the price I paid him for, in turn, listening to me while I unfolded to him my ideas how monumental literature, helpful to mankind, should be ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... contains several monumental tombs of interest. Beneath the arches conducting to the side chapels are the effigies of Bishops ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... of initiative for the public good, especially where a limelight was concealed in the wing, Brannan was an able and efficient citizen. Headquarters were chosen and a formal organization was perfected. The Monumental Fire Engine Company bell was to be tolled as a summons ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... as adopted by Gibbon, and forty- five miles according to other authorities. Let him enter any of the various gates which opened into the city from the roads which radiated to all parts of Italy—they were of monumental brass covered with bass- reliefs, on which the victories of generals for a thousand years were commemorated. Let him pass up the Via Appia, or the Via Flaminia, or the Via Cabra—they were lined with temples and shops and palaces. Let him pass through any of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... such invite our architects to plan Great monumental works in steel and stone, Certain to catch the eye of any man And make our victories generally known; Let a new bridge at Charing Cross be built, In Regent Street a deathless quadrant set, And on them be inscribed in dazzling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... when to the tomb ye bore So late my royal sire; scarce in these halls Are stilled the echoes of the funeral wail; Another corpse succeeds, and in the grave Weighs down its fellow-dust—almost our torch With borrowed lustre from the last, may pierce The monumental gloom; and on the stair, Blends in one throng confused two mourning trains. Then in the sacred royal dome that guards The ashes of my sire, prepare with speed The funeral rites; unseen of mortal eye, And ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... throat, as a terrier catches a rat, and wrings from you the last drop of pity and awe. His skill in avoiding 'the inevitable word' is simply miraculous. He is the despair of the translator. Far be it from me to belittle the devoted labours of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway, whose monumental translation of the Master's complete works is now drawing to its splendid close. Their promised biography of the murdered grandmother is awaited eagerly by all who take—and which of us does not take?—a breathless interest ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the Rosetta Stone—a large black slab of stone—with an identical inscription in hieroglyphics, in demotic and in Greek, furnished to Champollion (1810) and to Young the clew to the deciphering of the Egyptian writing, and thus the key to the sense of the monumental inscriptions. The Egyptian manuscripts were made of the pith of the byblus plant, cut into strips. These were laid side by side horizontally, with another layer of strips across them; the two layers being united by ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... and, perhaps the Kilkenny Archaeological Association were right when they threatened to indite with the penalties of "misdemeanour" under that statute, any person who should wantonly and needlessly destroy the old monumental and architectural relics of his country. Many of these relics might have brought only a small price indeed in the money-market, while yet they were of a national and historical value which it would be difficult to estimate. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... mere treatises on rhetoric, in which the rhetoric is antiquated, and the problems discussed are the oddest imaginable.[10] Daunou makes merry over them, but he himself has shown good sense and nothing more in his monumental work, which at the present time seems little better, and certainly not more useful, than the earlier treatises.[11] As to the modern ones, it is true that not all have been able to escape the two dangers to which works of this character are exposed—that of being obscure on the one hand, or commonplace ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... see, that comes from making calculations on a slip of paper! It is not and it cannot come to good.' I would rather look at my seventy-five letters—there is room to breathe in them. And this is my idea (ecce!) of monumental ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... me. I was five years old at the time, and I remember the day as if it were yesterday. My nurse's abode was just over the doorway of the house, and the window was framed in the heavy and monumental door. From outside I thought it was beautiful, and I began to clap my hands on reaching the house. It was towards five o'clock in the evening, in the month of November, when everything looks grey. I was put to bed, and no doubt I went to sleep at once, for there ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Among the monumental stones for the dead are several with caps figured on them. The like are to be seen at Nimes, Avignon, and elsewhere. These are freedmen's caps. When a noble Roman died he left in his will that so many of his slaves were to be given their liberty, and then this was represented ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... the refinement of our manners, or to modern Europe; it is not the charity of Christianity alone which has hallowed this sensibility, and confessed this equality of affection, which the domestic may participate: monumental inscriptions, raised by grateful masters to the merits of their slaves, have been preserved in the great collections of Graevius ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... in pursuance of a prearranged scheme of action—"allow me to introduce my friend Professor Tybalt Smith. You, father, are of course acquainted with his scholarly work on monumental brasses." ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... when a girl has no mother to palpitate for her she must needs be on the alert for herself. Lily, therefore, had not only contrived to put herself in the young man's way, but had made the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a monumental woman with the voice of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs. Peniston and learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the kitchen-maid's smuggling groceries out of the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... spanking, whacking, whopping, walloping, thumping, thundering, hulking; overgrown; puffy &c. (swollen) 194. huge, immense, enormous, mighty; vast, vasty; amplitudinous, stupendous; monster, monstrous, humongous, monumental; elephantine, jumbo, mammoth; gigantic, gigantean, giant, giant like, titanic; prodigious, colossal, Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan; infinite &c. 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; fat as a pig, fat as a quail, fat as butter, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... extreme, finds a place in our literature. Does it not? Yes, reader, each of these biographical forms exists in favour among us, and of one it is very doubtful indeed whether it ought not to exist. The eloge is found abundantly diffused through our monumental epitaphs in the first place, and there every man will countersign Wordsworth's judgment (see 'The Excursion' and also Wordsworth's prose Essay on Epitaphs), that it is a blessing for human nature to find one place in this world sacred ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... household adornments. It was natural that the countries which were earliest and most deeply touched by the Renaissance should excel in the designing of these noble and costly pieces of furniture. The cabinets of Italy, France and the Netherlands were especially rich and monumental. Those of Italy and Flanders are often of great magnificence and of real artistic skill, though like all other furniture their style was often grievously debased, and their details incongruous and bizarre. Flanders and Burgundy were, indeed, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... exception of two rather insignificant cases, none of the passages verbally the same as the reviewer in this journal, but it would be unreasonable to attach any great weight to this fact. Eight or nine years later, when undertaking the monumental task of rendering the whole of Shandy into German, it is not likely that Bode would recall the old translations he had made in this review or concern himself about them. Abrief comparison of the two sets of translations suggests that the critic was ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... irresolute, looking at the group of bluey-white geese standing monumental under the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... tokens which oft deceive. Not all runes monumental can we believe: But an honest heart, O Helge, of pure endeavor, With Odin's runes is ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... lawless intruders, themselves, perhaps, quite as deserving of the title; but they did good work in clearing what had become an Augean stable of its worst filth and partially restoring the choicest work of the Moorish builders. To-day the Spanish government guards with jealous care a monumental treasure which cannot be equalled ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... shown in a few words to be without foundation. For no economist would admit national economy to be legitimate which proposed to itself only the building of a pyramid of gold. He would declare the gold to be wasted, were it to remain in the monumental form, and would say it ought to be employed. But to what end? Either it must be used only to gain more gold, and build a larger pyramid, or for some purpose other than the gaining of gold. And this other purpose, however at first apprehended, will be found to resolve itself ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Newton was off the beam for about two years. Faraday was in a complete breakdown for nearly five years—and after his breakdown, came back to do some monumental work. ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... William's contemporaries and rivals or predecessors, the monumental poets of Norman-English literature. Wace, whose rhymed history of the Norman dukes, which he called the "Roman de Rou," or "Rollo," is an English classic of the first rank, was a canon of Bayeux when William of Saint-Pair was writing at Mont-Saint-Michel. His rival Benoist, who ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... might have been expected, the result was a curious composition; a religious olla-podrida in which the profound wisdom of Zoroaster and the childish superstition of western barbarians, grand morality and monumental absurdity elbow each other like specters in a delirium—in which is heard both "the still small voice" of Omnipotent God and the megalophanous bray ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... published in 1800. The programme of theological studies for the new University of Berlin, Kurze Darstellung des Theologischen Studiums, 1811, shows his theological system already in large part matured. His Der christliche Glaube, published in 1821, revised three years before his death in 1834, is his monumental work. His Ethik, his lectures upon many subjects, numerous volumes of sermons, all published after his death, witness his versatility. His sermons have the rare note which one ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... "The Monumental Brasses of England," Editor and Part Author of "Arms and Armour in Antiquity and ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... although his monument cannot be older than the thirteenth century. My attachment to the bibliomanical celebrity of JOHN, DUKE OF BEDFORD, will naturally lead me to the notice of his interment and monumental inscription. The latter ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... found in the town, either alive or dead, that she should have more glory in the grave than she appeared to have enjoyed on this side of it; and, with our united exertions, we succeeded in raising a marble slab, which surmounted a monumental vault, and was beautifully embellished with armorial blazonry, and, depositing the body inside, we replaced it again carefully. If the personage to whom it belonged happened to have a tenant of his own for it soon afterwards, he must have been rather astonished at ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... the penult couplet is not uncommon, the idea of retributive justice, of others performing the last offices for the clerk who had so often done the like for his neighbours. The same notion is expressed in the epitaph of Frank Raw, clerk and monumental mason, of Selby, Yorkshire, which ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... a universal principle throughout decorative art. The decorative effect and charm of the relief of large and bold forms upon rich and delicate diapers is also an important resource of the designer. The monumental art of the Middle Ages affords multitudes of examples of this principle in ornamental treatment. The miniaturist of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries constantly relieved his groups of figures upon a diapered ground. The architectural sculptor relieved the broad masses of flowing drapery ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... sacred edifice, the ashes of these earliest Protestant French missionaries to our land repose beneath the public highway, and not a stone tells where they lie, or commemorates their usefulness, excellences, or piety. Their silent graves ought not thus to remain neglected and unhonored: some monumental record should mark the spot where these early Huguenot preachers in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in kind, only two English poets can challenge Spenser for the primacy. These are Milton and Shelley. The poet of The Faerie Queene is generally inferior to Milton in the faculty of concentration, and in the minting of those monumental phrases, impressive of themselves and quite apart from the context, which often count highest in the estimation of poetry. His vocabulary and general style, if not more remote from the vernacular, have sometimes a touch of deliberate estrangement from that vernacular ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... shone, supported the bed, looking as though they were its guardians. The sides were decorated with two large garlands of carved flowers and fruit; and the four bed-posts, finely fluted and crowned with Corinthian capitals, supported a cornice of entwined roses and cupids. It was a monumental couch, and yet was very graceful, despite the somber appearance of the wood darkened by age. The counterpane and canopy, made of old dark blue silk, starred here and there with great fleurs de lis embroidered in gold, sparkled like ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... further give me strength to carry out the will so to serve your Majesty that I obtain the sovereign satisfaction, of which such a gracious testimony lies before me today in the form of the autograph letter of the 26th. The vase, which arrived in good time, is a truly monumental expression of Royal favor, and at the same time so substantial that I may hope not the "fragments" but the whole will be evidence to my descendants of the gracious sympathy evinced by your majesty on the occasion of our ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... word flung himself on the divan and, propped on his arm, gazed thoughtfully at a distant corner where in the shadow of a monumental carved wardrobe an articulated dummy without head or hands but with beautifully shaped limbs composed in a shrinking attitude, seemed to be embarrassed ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... [another of the cited cases], is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of divine opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazons to man is ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... of these findings of fact we have the testimony of the Rev. John Eliot, than whom no one is better known for his labors in behalf of the spiritual welfare of the Indians of eastern Massachusetts, and for his works in their language, including that monumental work which went through two editions, Eliot's Indian Bible. It is thought that Eliot began his study of the Indian language about 1643, but it is possible that he began much earlier. In a letter dated February 12, 1649 ...
— John Eliot's First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de-Long Island and The Story of His Career from the Early Records • William Wallace Tooker
... is not another Roman city, not even excepting York, where so many antiquities have been discovered. The opening of ancient baths, burial vaults, &c. has led to the finding of tesselated pavements, coins, urns, rings, lachrymatories, seals, monumental inscriptions, medals, statues, chains, sacrificing vessels, &c. It is to be lamented that modern ignorance and barbarity are fast obliterating all traces of the Roman walls of Isurium; their foundations having been dug up for the mercenary purpose of obtaining their materials. We cannot ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... of life, They cry, 'Behold the mighty Hector's wife!' Some haughty Greek, who lives thy tears to see, Imbitters all thy woes, by naming me. The thoughts of glory past, and present shame, A thousand griefs shall waken at the name! May I lie cold before that dreadful day, Press'd with a load of monumental clay! Thy Hector, wrapt in everlasting sleep, Shall neither hear thee sigh, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... wondered how Mrs. Marston did it. No one ever saw her hurried or busy, yet the proofs of her industry were here. She worked like the coral insect, in the dark, as it were, of instinct unlit by intellect, and, like the coral insect, she raised a monumental structure ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the whole extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the obsession of those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the good people in white stone and black granite who throng the galleries and vestibules on the ground floor. None ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... "That monumental grace Of Faith, which doth all passions tame That reason should control; And shows in the untrembling frame A statue of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulder-straps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those uncounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental successes. "I am now third lieutenant of the Victorieuse" (she was the flagship of the French Pacific squadron at the time), he said, detaching his shoulders from the wall a couple of inches to introduce himself. I bowed slightly on my side of the table, and told him I commanded a merchant ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... was Abraham Lincoln glorified by his martyr death! How he rose at once into a great figure in history—a monumental form before which enmity was silenced! All men forgot their hostility, their criticisms, their sneers—forgot that they had ever done anything but honor him. The assassin, who thought to revenge the wrongs of the southern slaveholders ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... in the next. And it has equally accepted the existence of a Supreme Intelligence and Power, to whom all are responsible, and in connection with whom human destinies are bound up. The deeper we penetrate into the occult wisdom of the East,—on which light has been shed by modern explorations, monumental inscriptions, manuscripts, historical records, and other things which science and genius have deciphered,—the surer we feel that the esoteric classes of India, Egypt, and China were more united in their views of Supreme Power and Intelligence than was generally supposed fifty ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... a room of uncommonly large dimensions, broad and high, lighted by an enormous window looking out over the valley. Old tapestries covered the walls; on the left, a monumental fireplace, flanked by two stone men, could have burned a century-old oak in one day. An immense table littered with books, papers and magazines stood in the middle of this apartment so vast and grand that it first engrossed the eye, and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... sand-covered paths between the flowerbeds they walked to the boxwood hedge which bordered the park on the southern side. They passed before the orange-grove, the monumental door of which was surmounted by the Lorraine cross of Mareuilles, and then passed under the linden-trees which formed an alley on the lawn. Statues of nymphs shivered in the damp shade studded with pale lights. A pigeon, posed on the shoulder of one of the white ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... the Gordon riots of 1780, instead of one of the Wilkes tumults of 1768. By the way, if SENEX was "personally either an actor or spectator" in this outbreak, he fully establishes his claim to the signature he adopts. I quite agree with him that monumental inscriptions are not always remarkable for their truth, and that the one in this case may possibly be somewhat tinged with popular prejudice or strong parental feeling; but, at all events, there can be but little ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... the grandest problems of human life and destiny that ever interested the mind of man are investigated not by the aid of the millions that ostentation wastes, but by the heroic labors of the impoverished scholar, thankless until his only reward can be but a monumental stone. How seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that of the Rev. S. R. Calthrop, "If the governments of the world would spend on scientific discovery a hundredth part of what they spend on killing men, or rather in making preparation for killing ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... edged with fluted pilasters. The center element of this panel consists of two large raised rectangular panels topped by a semi-circular louvred wooden fan design, then a round keystone arch, the whole portion of the composition topped by a high monumental pediment. At its center point, the height of this composition is ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... Johnsonism, the description of Lycidas as "harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing;" among the minor, the fact that critics have gravely quarrelled among themselves over the epithet "monumental" applied to the oak in Il Penseroso, when Spenser's "Builder Oak" (Milton was a passionate student of Spenser) would have given them the key at once, even if the same phrase had not occurred, as I believe ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... saw the Chapel of Lleweney, founded by one of the Salusburies: it is very compleat: the monumental stones lie in the ground. A chimney has been added to it, but it is otherwise not much injured, and might ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Ending on the rustling leaves With minute drops from off the eaves. And when the sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me, goddess, bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown, that Sylvan loves, Of pine, or monumental oak, Where the rude axe, with heaved stroke, Was never heard the nymphs to daunt Or fright them from their hallow'd haunt. There in close covert by some brook Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... from the monumental effigy at Stratford-upon-Avon—now in the library at Abbotsford—was the gift of Mr. George Bullock, long distinguished in London as a collector of curiosities. This ingenious man was, as the reader will see in the sequel, a great ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... The monumental stone, designed to commemorate some feat of an ancient King of Man, which had been long forgotten, was erected on the side of a narrow lonely valley, or rather glen, secluded from observation by the steepness of its banks, upon a projection of which stood the tall, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... had been slow to learn and quick to forget a thing entirely when she had learned it, Ermengarde was strikingly like her. She was the monumental dunce of the school, and ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... however, we obtain knowledge of the wide field of Nestorian missions. Recent discoveries have largely added to our knowledge. It is clear that in the sixth century, {98} apparently before 540, Nestorian bishoprics were founded in Herat and Samarkand. Monumental inscriptions date back as far as 547. [Sidenote: in the Far East.] Merv, as early as 650, is spoken of as a "falling church" [9] amid the triumphs of Islam. China has been already mentioned, and though ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... that this simple narrative of a statesman of national reputation seemed to make the monumental achievements of his millionaire guests of ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... evening a fresh sea-breeze has brought us to Bordeaux. The enormous city heaps its monumental houses along the river like bastions; the red sky is embattled by their coping. They on one hand, the bridge on the other, protect, with a double line, the port where the vessels are crowded together ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... and was waited for with such impatience. Concerts and theatres opened the festal series. Services in all the churches of both confessions consecrated the coming days, and the laying of the foundation of the new bridge over the Isar, leading to the Maximilianeum, formed, historically, a monumental memorial for the occasion. Favored by the fairest of weather, the city celebrated the main festival on the 27th of September. It was a historical procession, moved through all the principal streets ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... chapel of Windsor Castle, put up by the late King to the memory of a family servant who had been a faithful attendant of his lamented daughter, the Princess Amelia. George III. possessed much of the strong domestic feeling of the old English country gentleman; and it is an incident curious in monumental history, and creditable to the human heart,—a monarch erecting a monument in honour of the humble virtues of ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the burial-ground of Edgartown,—where the dead have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to its original barrenness,—in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated a century back, or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers, and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, cross-bones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and there a winged cherub ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... great number of tributaries, some of them entirely uncharted, run into the main river. It was my business to visit this little-known back-country and to examine its fauna, which furnished me with the materials for several chapters for that great and monumental work upon zoology which will be my life's justification. I was returning, my work accomplished, when I had occasion to spend a night at a small Indian village at a point where a certain tributary—the name and position of which I withhold—opens into the ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cranks was as young as, and much cleverer than, any of them. It almost startled Henry on his first introduction to this family of two daughters and two brothers, where the father was rather like a brother grown prematurely bald, and the stepmother supplied with monumental dignity that element of solemnity without which no properly regulated household is complete, to notice the camaraderie which prevailed amongst them all. Jokes were flying about from one to another all the time, and the father ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it. I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round. A native of that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate himself and any ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Plaza on Kearney and Washington Streets. This was the most familiar part of San Francisco to me, as I have passed through this part often as a boy. It is now known as Portman Square. I looked for the "Monumental" engine house from which I had run to fires in the early fifties. A blank space was pointed out where it had been, but the fire had destroyed this ancient landmark. In the Plaza Mr. Burnes showed me a monument to ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... mind as to which room had been Madame la Marquise's boudoir in the past. It was a small apartment, having direct access on the first landing of the staircase, and the one window gave on the rose garden at the back of the house. Inside the monumental hearth, at an arm's length up the wide chimney, a receptacle had been contrived in the brickwork, with a small iron door which opened and closed with a secret spring. Chauvelin, whom his nefarious calling had rendered proficient in such matters, had soon mastered ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... sonnet-writers of the Elizabethan age, comes a somewhat technical study of the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time — a restatement of Ellis's monumental work on that subject. His discussion of music in Shakespeare's time has already been noticed. He next tried to reproduce for his class the domestic life of the age, commenting in full on the sermons, the plays, the customs of the time. In order to give unity ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... writing up which was the reason for the collection of the events of previous years which were not in themselves worthy of special commemoration. The first of these is the one which ends with the famous battle of Qarqara in 854. This has come down to us in a monumental copy which was set up at Kirkh, the ancient Tushhan, and which has been named the Monolith inscription. [Footnote: III R 7f; Rasmussen, cf.; 2 ff. Photograph, Rogers, 537; Hist., op. 226. Amiaud-Scheil, passim; Peiser, ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... all that, he kept on with his studies, and sometimes on Sunday would walk past the college grounds on Monumental square; for that was also walking past the ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... release From pedantries past, present, or to come, I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth. Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream, Builders of aspiration incomplete, So more consummate, souls self-confident, Who felt your own thought worthy of record In monumental pomp! No Grecian drop Rebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill, 270 After long exile, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... pillars rear their marble heads, To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, By its own weight made steadfast and immovable, Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe And terror on my aching sight; the tombs And monumental caves of death look cold, And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart. Give use thy hand, and let me hear thy voice; Nay, quickly speak to me, and let me hear Thy voice—my own affrights me with ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... may be found, either in stained glass, monumental brasses, or illuminated genealogies, of female figures bearing heraldic devices on their apparel. A married lady or widow had her paternal arms emblazoned upon the fore part of her vest, which by ancient writers is called the kirtle, and the arms of the husband on ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... I wander through her shady parks or lean over her monumental quays, drinking in the beauty of the first spring days, intoxicated by the perfume of the flowers that the night showers have kissed into bloom; or linger of an evening over my coffee, with the brilliant life of the boulevards ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... and under the hill where the Highlanders were posted; the baggage and camp equipages he at the same time ordered down into a plain that lies between the bank on the crown of which the house stands and the river Gary. An ancient monumental stone in the middle of the lower plain shows, that in some elder age a battle had been fought there, and that some warrior of might and ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... of an otherwise incomplete composition) is the one feature thus far introduced which does most to bind together the varying elements in the decorative scheme of the interior. It occupies the most important position in the building, at the head of the monumental staircase, and forms not only a centre of interest aesthetically, but serves as a connecting link between the other features, which have before seemed more or less unrelated. The grand staircase, built of Siena marble, the finest example of the intelligent ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration - Vol 1, No. 9 1895 • Various |
