"Portentous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enough, coming at a time when he was doing some of his best work. He wrote this while his mind was busy with a great masterpiece, "The Karamazov Brothers," and in this book we get nothing but the lees. It is a novel of portentous length and utter vacuity. I have read many dull books, but it is hard to recall a novel where the steady, monotonous dulness of page after page is quite so oppressive. For it is not only dull; ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... occurrences.], an uncorruptible yet mild tribunal, in which the white ballot of Pallas given in favour of the accused is an invention which does honour to the humanity of the Athenians. The poet shows how a portentous series of crimes led to an institution fraught with blessings ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... is just this. I want you, if you will, to look through these figures for me," and he produced and handed to him a portentous document headed "List ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... peasant to violate the law, especially when sanctioned, in that violation, by those whose opinion and advice he takes as the standard of his conduct. Be this as it may, the state of the country was now becoming frightful and portentous; and although there had not, as yet, been much blood shed, still there was no person acquainted with the extraordinary pains which were taken to excite the people against the payment of tithe, who was not ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Somebody had grappled the bell-rope in the Methodist church, and now over the town rang this solemn and terrible voice, speaking from the clouds. Moved from its peaceful business, this bell gained a new spirit in the portentous night, and it swung the heart to and fro, up and down, ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been some one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell me how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man among us ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... awoke Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a hoarse cry; her pretty face, that had been so fresh and fair in the evening, was sallow now and pallid; she looked like a candidate for the hospital. The rest awoke also by degrees, with portentous groanings, to feel themselves over in every stiffened limb, and to experience the infinite varieties of weariness that weighed ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... With a cry as if his heart were bursting, he started up and fell forward on his face unconscious. Some one, a bit more brutal than the rest, said, "It 's five dollars' fine every time a nigger faints," but no one laughed. There was something too portentous, too tragic in the degradation of ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... They were almost all plump, plumper even than their husbands, expensively dressed and prosperous looking; and the amount of Viennese beer they consumed at the forest restaurants to which their husbands conducted them, seemed to the Englishman portentous. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... quiet,' declared its occupant, 'and that's all I care for. Two other lodgers in the house; but they go to business every morning at half-past eight, and are in bed by ten at night. Besides, it's only temporary. I have great things in view—portentous changes! I'll tell you all about ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... however, other features about it which must not be forgotten. For instance, in this growth of a new territorial body upon the ruins of the monastic orders, in this sudden and portentous increase of the wealth and power of the squires of England, the mutability of the new system is perhaps as striking as any other of ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... lived, Replied Rusilla, never penitence Had equalled his! full well I knew his heart, Vehement in all things. He would on himself Have wreaked such penance as had reached the height Of fleshy suffering,—yea, which being told, With its portentous rigour should have made The memory of his fault o'erpowered and lost, In shuddering pity and astonishment, Fade like a ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... good of you to say that the fourteen pages of good advice did not bore you. Can it have been that you did not read them? No Dean—and perhaps no don—who has been in that portentous position as long as I have can fail to become a perennial stream of advice. It is the Nemesis of those who have all their lives been treated with more respect than they have deserved. I am the only exception with which I am acquainted. Child, ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... dignity giving way to the full feeling of triumph, he threw himself into his easy-chair, and laughed with unconstrained violence till he lost his breath, and the tears ran plentifully down his cheeks as he strove to recover it. Meanwhile, the royal cachinnation was echoed out by a discordant and portentous laugh from behind the arras, like that of one who, little accustomed to give way to such emotions, feels himself at some particular impulse unable either to control or to modify his obstreperous mirth. Heriot turned his ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... lost by these great men, in proceeding to co-operate for the glory of their country. The crisis was peculiarly portentous. Bonaparte, baffled in his views of invading England, or even Ireland—-after the last and most serious disaffection, recently extinguished, in the mutiny of the home fleet, produced an almost general unanimity of the country—had been engaged ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... so-called classical ages—and thus his sense of historical perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as a text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled period in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... "The Missouri question is the most portentous one that ever threatened our Union. In the gloomiest moments of the revolutionary war, I never had any apprehension equal to that ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... '58 was approaching its culmination. The great earthquake that for months had been making itself heard afar off by its portentous rumbling was heaving to the final crash. Already the weaker houses had ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... dawned still and portentous. Not a zephyr breeze stirred the leaves of the trees. The sweltering heat turned to a suffocating one. As the morning dragged on we found it more and more difficult to breathe; there seemed to be nothing to inflate ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... dreadful man I know by sight down the river," said Miss Belsize; and hardly had she spoke before the library door opened and out came the dreadful man in the portentous person of Dan Levy, the usurer of European notoriety, our victim of the morning and our ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... me already, but I had been deterred by the peculiarities of Barnard's housekeeper. For Mrs. Gummer was one of those housewives who make up for an archaic simplicity of production by preparations on the most portentous and alarming scale. But this time I would not be deterred. If only the guests could be enticed into my humble lair, it would be easy to furnish the raw materials of the feast from outside; and the consideration of ways and means occupied me pleasantly ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... rivers as the Amazon, and its portentous tributaries flowing from south to north, were also formed perhaps at that time, great fissures caused by the sudden splitting and cooling of the earth's crust becoming the river beds. So perhaps ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is—how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... away, plodding along the pavement heavily, huge and portentous. The back of his head bulged above the collar, with no show of neck between. He was comical and pathetic; he seemed too vast in mere flesh to be the sport of a thing so freakish as luck. To think that such a bulk had a weak heart in it—and ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... and it was lined throughout with beaten gold. In a straight path the light was reflected from every point—every point but one for at the far end, where the curved sides joined, was a circle of darkness. It stared like an eye, evil, portentous. Jerry nerved himself for an ordeal, unknown but imminent. The black eye glared ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... which disturb the mental equanimity of the patriotic and thinking citizen of our Republic, none is looming in his horizon with a more lurid and portentous aspect than the black cloud of illiteracy which is rapidly spreading over the country, and especially resting upon the Southern States of the Union. Compared with it as an element of vital danger to the Republic, Mormonism, Communism and Socialism sink into obscurity. The only way out of the ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various
... his accents were blotted out by a repetition of that portentous noise which had saluted him in the lobby of the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... portentous an array of books jostling each other upon the warshelf, there must be many people who will gladly find the little space into which they may slip a slender volume called A General's Letters to His Son on Obtaining His Commission (CASSELL). ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... such a point, and although he himself would have been the first, when the Americans threatened war (as they would have done later on), to yield to threats that which he would not yield to argument. It amused Harcourt, however, to concoct with the Chancellor and the Foreign Office portentous despatches to Mr. Blaine, in which we lectured the Americans on the permanency of their obligations. How childish it all was! Moreover, the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... had produced "Miss Multon" at the Union Square, and we were fast settling down to our steady, regular gait, having got over the false starts and breaks and nervous shyings of the opening performance, when another missive of portentous bulk ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... now using on a prodigious scale, and with long-studied skill, can only be met by similar military force, and this resisting force is summoned more slowly than that of Austria-Hungary and Germany, although the ultimate battalions will be heavier. In this portentous physical contest the American people have no part; their geographical position, their historical development, and their political ideals combine to make them for the present mere spectators, although their interests—commercial, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... contemporary of the Crimean veterans, living to this day in comfortable and old-maidish sobriety in the Potteries, hardly conscious of the fact that aeroplanes are an innovation. It is Mr. Bennett, not the Sophias, who makes us conscious of the strange, portentous progress of evolution; of the lapse of time; the changing mind of man; the desperate love of what has been; the inevitableness of what is to come, of what is to replace us, and put us, too, on the shelf among ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... monsters, with human heads and trunks and arms the human bodies passing into long snaky bodies coiled together. A single pair of wings was divided between the two outermost of the three beings, while snakes' heads, growing out of the human bodies, rendered the aspect of the group still more portentous. The center of the pediment was probably occupied by a figure of Zeus, hurling his thunderbolt at this strange enemy. We have therefore here a scene from one of the favorite subjects of Greek art at all periods—the gigantomachy, or battle of gods and giants. Fig. 81 gives a better idea of ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... proper relation with all the other qualities. Look at the terrific bombast which preceded him,—the mighty efforts of mighty men to draw music or the power of sound into their art; Hieronymo is like some portentous convulsion of Nature,—the upheaval of a new geological era. The writers felt that there must be style suited to passion, and that they must attain it,—but how? By artificial pomp?—or by yielding with artful reserve to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... A more portentous looking document bearing the heading of the "State Republican Committee Headquarters" bore the concise statement that unless an immediate, full, and public apology was forthcoming from one James Gollop for impersonating ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... her grasp on the bridle, for the ringing of a rifle rose, sharp and portentous, from beyond the rise. The colour faded in her cheek, and Hetty leaned forward a trifle in her saddle, with lips slightly parted, as though in strained expectancy. No sound now reached them from beyond the low, white ridge that hemmed in their vision but a faint ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Miss Poppy was on the ground under a green scarf. And so the accumulating dilation, on to the whirling climax of the perfect arum lily. Sudden curtain, and a yell of ecstasy from the colliers. Of all blossoms, the arum, the arum lily is most mystical and portentous. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the dash of water, loud and hoarse, With its perpetual tidings upward climb, Struggling against the wind? Oh, how sublime! For not in vain from its portentous source Thy heart, wild stream, hath yearned for its full force, But from thine ice-toothed caverns, dark as time, At last thou issuest, dancing to the rime Of thy outvolleying freedom! Lo, thy course Lies straight ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... and fetched a piece of cane, and a minute later on the salt-white sand in face of orthography and the sun appeared these portentous letters: ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... George took himself off to the mill, and all day long thought much of his mother's advice, and somehow he felt himself being impelled towards paying another visit to Bourhill. Out of that visit arose portentous issues, which were to have the strongest possible influence upon the future of Gladys Graham. He found her in a lonely and impressionable mood, and left the house, to his own profound astonishment, ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... across its surface. She was too womanly to be indifferent to the fate of any human being. At the same time she was still so much of a child, and so ignorant of the world, that Haldane's action, even as she understood it, loomed up before her imagination as something awful and portentous of unknown evils. She was oppressed with a feeling that a crushing blow impended over him. Now, almost as vividly as in her dream, she still saw the giant's club raised high to strike. If it were only in a fairy tale, her sensitive spirit ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... condemned, for mediaevalism dies hard in Spain. But the incident was portentous, and the Archbishop and his keen secretary heard in it an ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the battle of Actium to this portentous change in the fortunes of Octavius was formally recognized by him on the scene where it took place. Nicopolis, the City of Victory, was founded upon the site of his camp, with the beaks of the captured ships as trophies adorning ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... any suspicions, Miss Sprague?" asked Luke, considerably amused at the portentous solemnity of ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger
... This portentous incident was the result of a plan of great boldness devised by General Lee, from which he expected much. A few words will explain ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... to the door, at the same time, over the cook's shoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and portentous wink as though to emphasize his interrupted remark and the need for me to be soft-spoken with ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... attempt to destroy the other nations of the confederacy. Returning to Lake Ontario he built a fort at Niagara, which he had promised Dongan he would not do, and then returned to Montreal. The net results of this portentous effort were a broken promise to the English, an act of perfidy towards the Iroquois, and ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... doubt that I did indeed blanch when that portentous word was uttered in conjunction with my darling's name. Mr. Sheldon leant a little further across the table, and his hard black eyes penetrated a little deeper into the recesses of my ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... handsome girl, with a strong vein of originality. I began to doubt the evidence of my senses. Surely I must have been labouring under some hallucination the previous night. It was almost easier to believe that I had been the dupe of a portentous nightmare than that this charming girl should have enacted such a ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... night and cubes and planks of gold, he found his ship, the Mulatto Girl. She was for the Brazils. Now it is clear that one even wiser in shipping affairs than a boy would have expected to see a craft that was haughty and portentous when bound for the Brazils, a ship that looked equal to making a coast of that kind. There she was, her flush deck well below the quay wall. A ladder went down to her, for she was no more than a schooner of a little ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... powers of the world our relations are those of honorable peace. Since your adjournment nothing serious has occurred to interrupt or threaten this desirable harmony. If clouds have lowered above the other hemisphere, they have not cast their portentous shadows upon our happy shores. Bound by no entangling alliances, yet linked by a common nature and interest with the other nations of mankind, our aspirations are for the preservation of peace, in whose solid and civilizing triumphs ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Martin van Buren • Martin van Buren
... friendly Indians were still absent on their winter hunt, when, at the opening of spring, Dubuisson and his Frenchmen were startled by a portentous visitation. Two bands of Outagamies and Mascoutins, men, women, and children, counting in all above a thousand, of whom about three hundred were warriors, appeared on the meadows behind the fort, approached to within pistol-shot of the palisades, and encamped there. It is by no means ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... portentous stain'd Apulia's spacious wilds with gore; No fiercer Juba's thirsty land, Dire nurse of raging ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... breaking the fearful chain of prosperity, and led some of them to weep and groan when the gems thus sacrificed were afterwards brought back to their hand by simple fishermen, who had recovered them in the intestines of fishes—a portentous omen, which was interpreted into a sorrowful indication that the deity thus answered the propitiatory appeal, and made solemn proclamation that he had rejected it]— whether, I say, it were this spirit of jealousy awaked in me by too steady and too profound a felicity—or whether it were that great ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... greatly, and his discourse is for the greater part empty and false; the discourse of animals is small, but useful and true: slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood. ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... and smoke your pipe until we come back; and, indeed, seven is as many as the gig will carry with any degree of comfort. The cutter will go ashore to fetch off the luggage, which will probably be of somewhat portentous dimensions." ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... city of Verona," said he, "as to me they have proved not amiss." This was great praise from Baldassare; his generosity gave it point. From his pack came a pair of earrings—wagging, tinkling affairs of silver and coral; next some portentous pins, shining globes like prickly pears; a coral and bells for Master Niccola, and a scaldino of pierced brass for the adornment of the house. "Thank you, Baldassare," said Vanna to her blinking old master; then she kissed him. Before she knew where she was, before she could say, "Gia!" ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... men agree that the present aspect of society is portentous of great changes. The only question is, whether they will be for the better or the worse. Those who believe in man's essential nobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essential ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... who studies the signs of the times, the emergence of the philosophy of Evolution, in the attitude of claimant to the throne of the world of thought, from the limbo of hated and, as many hoped, forgotten things, is the most portentous event of the nineteenth century. But the most effective weapons of the modern champions of Evolution were fabricated by Darwin; and the 'Origin of Species' has enlisted a formidable body of combatants, trained in the severe school of Physical ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... call upon his Snake with due and portentous ceremony and, according to Stephen, who was present, which I declined to be, that mystic reptile declared that Dogeetah, alias Brother John, would arrive in Beza Town precisely at sunset on the third day from that night. Now as he had divined ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... stupendous that the earth itself was absolutely insignificant in comparison therewith. If, then, this stupendous sphere rotated once in twenty-four hours, the speed with which the movement of some of the stars must be executed would be so portentous as to seem well-nigh impossible. It would, therefore, seem much simpler on this ground to adopt the other alternative, and to suppose the diurnal movements were due to the rotation of the earth. Here Ptolemy saw, or at all events fancied he saw, objections of the weightiest description. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... and sends the seven sages to make the formal request for Parvati's hand. The seven sages fly to the brilliant city of Himalaya, where they are received by the mountain god. After a rather portentous interchange of compliments, the seven sages announce their errand, requesting Parvati's hand in behalf of Shiva. The father joyfully assents, and it is agreed that the marriage shall be celebrated after three days. These three days ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... Sir Rowland Blake in high fettle at knowing himself armed with a portentous weapon for the destruction of Anthony Wilding. Upon closer inspection of it, however, he came to realize—as Richard had realized earlier—that it was double-edged, and that the wielding of it must be fraught with as much danger for Richard as for their common enemy. For to betray ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... she's a witch!" shrieked the child, flinging his face, butter and all, at these portentous words, into ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Physiology and Metaphysics? And one morning, dervish-like, he wraps himself in his aba, and, calling upon Allah to witness, takes a rose from the vase on the table, angrily plucks its petals, and strews them on the carpet. Which portentous sign the Medium understands and hastens to minister ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... proportion to territory; nor, though wealthy, is she so in proportion to her exposure. That Japan at four thousand miles distance has a population of over three hundred to the square mile, while our three great Pacific States average less than twenty, is a portentous fact. The immense aggregate numbers resident elsewhere in the United States cannot be transfered thither to meet an emergency, nor contribute effectively to remedy this insufficiency; neither can a land force on the defensive protect, if the way of the ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... of March he complained of frequent vertigoes, which made him feel as though he were intoxicated; but no effectual means were taken to remove these portentous symptoms; and he regularly enjoyed his daily exercise, sometimes in boats, but oftener on horseback. His physician thought him convalescent; his mind, however, was in constant excitement; it rested not even ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... fared better, and procured a meal of homely succulence, in an unfashionable tavern, in a back street, where the wine was sound, the cutlets tender, and the serving-maid rosy. Then I walked along—for a mile, it seemed—through a dreary, gray grand rue, where the sunshine was hot, the odors portentous, and the doorsteps garnished with aged fishwives, retired from business, whose plaited linen coifs looked picturesquely white, and their faces picturesquely brown. I inspected the harbor and its goodly basin—with nothing in it—and certain ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... domino was of large size, and ate and drank voraciously throughout the entertainment, which lasted many hours, retiring every five minutes or so, and returning speedily with unabated appetite. The thing became at length so portentous, that enquiries were instituted, and it was found that the trusty Cent-Suisses had joined at a domino, and were drawing lots all through the evening for the next turn at eating; so that each ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... familiar outside, now had a strange portentous air; the gleams of his quick black eyes, the dusky tone of his cheeks, his impassive grace, startled her. New York was utterly removed: the taxi that had brought Judith and her, the swirling traffic of Columbus Circle and smooth undulations ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... miraculous and portentous in days of yore, what interpretation must needs have been put upon that vastly more picturesque phenomenon, the aurora? "Through all the city," says the Book of Maccabees, "for the space of almost forty days, there were seen horsemen running in the air, in cloth of gold, armed with lances, like ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... sitting; another hour saw it through. "I think I had my hour last night," said PRINCE ARTHUR, as, on rising of his esteemed colleague, he hastily passed out. Example again contagious; Benches emptied; but ELLIS ASHMEAD pounded along. There was the speech reproachfully facing him in its portentous-printed length; must be reeled off, though the glass roof fell. Did it at last; sat down, flushed, and triumphant. Members, warily assuring themselves speech really finished, began to stream back again, till all the Benches filled to hear DAVITT. Excellent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... that if we could have started forty or fifty years ago from zero, at the rate of our recent annual increment, we should now have reached our present position. But while we have been advancing with this portentous rapidity, America is passing us by as if in a canter. Yet even now the work of searching the soil and the bowels of the territory, and opening out her enterprise throughout its vast expanse, is in its infancy. The England and the America of the ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... extremely just that he raised not the least objection to it. Accordingly, each of the two silent, voiceless victims of the evening's occurrences were wrapped into a bundle that from without appeared to be neither portentous nor ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... eating little but drinking much. There was something unreal, almost ghastly, about the whole affair; and when at last Madame de Staemer retired, bearing Val Beverley with her, I felt certain that the Colonel would make some communication to us. If ever knowledge of portentous evil were written upon a man's face it was written upon his, as he sat there at the head of the table, staring straightly ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... they saw Men all in fire walk up and down the streets. 25 And yesterday the bird of night did sit Even at noon-day upon the market-place, Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies Do so conjointly meet, let not men say, 'These are their reasons; they are natural;' 30 For, I believe, they are portentous things Unto the climate ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... bustling crowd. Throngs of soldiers were there; throngs of priests; throngs of civilians; throngs of peasants; all moving to and fro, intermingled with the railway employes, and showing the power of steam to stir up even the lazy Spaniard to unwonted punctuality and portentous activity. In the midst of this busy scene two men stood apart, each by himself, with eyes fixed upon the entrance, as though expecting some one whose advent was of no ordinary importance. One of these was ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... A cloud, which floated in the atmosphere, An inconsiderable and feathery speck Of no proportions, now augmented, wears A threatening aspect, ominously dark; Enveloping the heaven's canopy In lowering shadow and portentous gloom; In pall of ambient obscurity. The fork-ed lightnings ramify and play Upon a background of sepulchral black; The growling thunders rumble a reply Of detonation awful and profound, To every corruscation's vivid gleam; In deep ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... crimson blush, attended by a fearful perspiration, suffused my features. The Grand Vizier became more dead than alive, and the whole Seraglio reddened as if the sunset of Bagdad shone direct upon their lovely faces. At this portentous time the awful Griffin rose, and balefully surveyed the children of Islam. My own impression was, that Church and State had entered into a conspiracy with Miss Griffin to expose us, and that we should all be put into white ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... early age of twenty-six, having suddenly disappeared from Florence, leaving certain work unfinished. A strange portentous meteor in art. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Krishna also ready to smite them down with his weapons, they all set up a frightful roar. With that terrible clamour as also with the roar of fire, the whole welkin resounded, as it were, with the voice of portentous clouds. Kesava of dark hue and mighty arms, in order to compass their destruction, hurled at them his large and fierce discus resplendent with its own energy. The forest-dwellers including the Danavas and the Rakshasas, afflicted by that weapon, were cut in hundreds of pieces and fell unto the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... must be in the morning, because the bride and bridegroom partake of the Holy Sacrament fasting. From the description of a boda in Galicia, in one of Pardo Bazan's novels, it would seem that the bride there wears white, even at the church. The wedding is a portentous affair, lasting all day from early morning, and the bride and bridegroom remain in the house. Fernan Caballero devotes some pages in Clemencia to showing how preferable is the Spanish custom of "remaining among friends" ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... good people all, I'll tell you by-and-by My own poetic worth and claims; but first of all I'll try To show how this portentous quack beguiled the silly fools Whose tastes were nurtured, ere he came, in Phrynichus's schools. He'd bring some single mourner on, seated and veiled, 'twould be Achilles, say, or Niobe—the face you could not see— An empty show of tragic woe, who uttered ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... made out that the law passed by Congress in reference to fugitive slaves is contrary to the Constitution or to the law of God, what is to be done? What is the duty of the people under such circumstances? The answers given to this question are very different, and some of them so portentous that the public mind has been aroused and directed to the consideration of the nature of civil government and of the grounds and limits of the obedience due to the laws of the land. As this is a subject not merely of general interest at this time, but ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the western seas was a broad band of gold. I got up and went down to the shore. The mouth of the stream was shallow, but as I moved south I came to a place where two small capes enclosed an inlet. It must have been a fault in the volcanic rock, for its depth was portentous. I stripped and dived far into its cold abysses, but I did not reach the bottom. I came to the surface rather breathless, and struck out to sea, where I floated on my back and looked at the great rampart of crag. I saw that the place where ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... a Freemason, announced his intention of publishing the inviolable secrets of the Society. The announcement does not seem to have created any great sensation; probably the majority of Americans were as sceptical as is the present writer as to the portentous nature of the awful Unspeakabilities which so many prosperous stock-brokers and suburban builders keep locked in their bosoms. But what followed naturally created a sensation of the most startling kind. For ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... "Venerable ancestor," she observed, "Venerable Buddha! how could you ever be aware of the existence of the portentous passage in that Buddhistic classic, 'to the effect that a son of every person, who holds the dignity of prince, duke or high functionary, has no sooner come into the world and reached a certain age ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... be selected from history, few are more striking than that of this Duke of Gloucester, great in camp and in council at an age when nowadays a youth is scarcely trusted to the discipline of a college. The whole of his portentous career was closed, indeed, before the public life of modern ambition usually commences. Little could those accustomed to see on our stage "the elderly ruffian" [Sharon Turner] our actors represent, imagine that at the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Caligula-Attila? Why hob-nob with the docile creatures of his chancery, and spread at home and abroad the worship of Geist and Kultur? Are they fit to instruct us about politics, public law, and international relations, when they were so egregiously mistaken, so blind, so befooled, with regard to the most portentous catastrophe in the memory of living men? I am glad that they see their blindness now—but why this sentimental friendliness for ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Grubstake Saloon I was in a peculiar state of exaltation. No longer was I conscious of the rasping cold, and it seemed to me I could have couched me in the deep snow as cosily as in a bed of down. Surpassingly brilliant were the lights. They seemed to convey to me a portentous wink. They twinkled with jovial cheer. What a desirable place the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... unsuccessful performance. The assault in the Dunciad is not the less unsparing and ignorantly contemptuous of scholarship. The explanation is easy. Bentley, who had spoken contemptuously of Pope's Homer, said of Pope, "the portentous cub never forgives." But this was not all. Bentley had provoked enemies by his intense pugnacity almost as freely as Pope by his sneaking malice. Swift and Atterbury, objects of Pope's friendly admiration, had been his antagonists, and Pope would naturally accept their view of his merits. And, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... it? For some years Mr. Alger has been known to scholars and others as a most indefatigable and heroic worker. This book justifies that reputation. The amount of reading that has gone to it is almost portentous. To us, who can hardly manage twelve books, big and little, in as many months, this mountainous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... felt something portentous in the scene. The Captain grew uncomfortable, too, no longer laughing heartily or joining in our talk. He kept his eyes on the sky, and smoked ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... he, selecting an arrow with portentous care, "'tis an ill thing to be cursed with eyes such ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... and departure of the waiter, Michael might have been observed to make portentous efforts after gravity of mien. He looked his friend in the face (one eye perhaps a trifle off), and addressed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to Oscar, a young prince, and Gryffhod, a Briton of some distinction, and proprietor of Caer-Broc, a villa on the Kentish coast, where the parties are sojourning. The incident embodies the superstition of sitting in the Druid's Chair, similar in its portentous moment to sitting in St. Michael's Chair, in Cornwall. It is told with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... chorus to the skies! The waters in their depths rejoice. Hark! on the midnight air A frantic cry uprose; The yell of fierce despair, The shout of mortal foes; And mark yon sudden glare, Whose red, portentous gleam Flashes on rock and stream With strange, unearthly light; What passing meteor's beam Lays bare ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the summit of the Maunganamu was lost in portentous darkness. The sky would supply a black background for the blaze which Paganel was about to throw on it. The Maories could no longer see their prisoners; and this was the moment for action. Speed was necessary. Glenarvan, Paganel, McNabbs, Robert, the steward, and the ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... drifted back into their channels and, coming with them, looming with its portentous realization above the others, the remembrance that only the evening before, he had drawn out the settlement upon her life. Now she knew why he had done it. Now she found the absolute trending of his mind. He had said if he died! That was only to blind, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... they neared a valley where a sheltered hamlet lay, A strange, portentous wailing made them pause upon their way— Voices fraught with anguish, telling of aching heart and brow, Which kept moaning: "Jesus, Master, have mercy ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... mountain. We may rely on the life it has made possible to add more positive charms and clothe it with imaginative functions. Modern engineering works often have a similar value; the force and intelligence they express merge in an aesthetic essence, and the place they hold in a portentous civilisation lends them an almost epic dignity. New York, since it took to doing business in towers, has become interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk through the overshadowed ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... wives or even three, but most would sooner have none at all. Whereupon enters Daw, a third shepherd, complaining of portents 'With mervels mo and mo.' 'Was never syn noe floode sich floodys seyn'; even 'I se shrewys pepe'—apparently a portentous omen. At this point Mak comes on the scene. He is a notorious bad character of the neighbourhood, who boasts himself 'a yoman, I tell you, of the king,' and complains that his wife eats him out of house and home. The shepherds suspect him of designs upon their flocks, so when they lie down to rest ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... He went in as carelessly as possible and smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one hand ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... was unusually stormy, dark clouds rested upon the adjacent high land, while others no less portentous hurried past us on the wings of the tempest. Soon after breakfast, we bade adieu to the wild scenery of Port Usborne, and stood across the Sound, for our old anchorage on the north side of Point Cunningham, distant one and twenty ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... the Baron, whose acquaintance with the English words used in commerce and war was singularly intimate, but who was occasionally at fault with terms of less portentous import. ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... could be but one answer, but, for some almost occult reason, he hesitated. The tone, grave, portentous, almost menacing, the paternal, kindly attitude, the pleading that unconsciously crept through the other's words; all these gave Donald to know that some crisis was at hand. For an instant, he thought of the silent, heavy moment ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... every breeze With the fallen honours of the mourning trees, The maiden waited at the accustom'd bower. And waited long beyond the appointed hour, Yet Bateman came not;—o'er the woodland drear, Howling portentous did the winds career; And bleak and dismal on the leafless woods The fitful rains rush'd down in sullen floods; The night was dark; as, now and then, the gale Paused for a moment—Margaret listen'd pale; ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... come from the gods. Some marked misfortune, an earthquake, lightning, a great famine, a portentous birth, or some such occurrence would be recognised as a prodigium, or sign of the god's displeasure. Somehow or other the contract must have been broken on the human side and it was the duty of the state to see to the restoration of the pax deum, the equilibrium of the normal relation of god ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... a general consciousness of blunders, incompetence, and corruption,—every new tale of disaster sank the hopes of England and called out wails of despair. In that state of mind the loss of the Guerriere assumed portentous dimensions. The Times was especially loud in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... your dearest concern, And you'd rather roast oxen than Oxenstiern. In sackcloth and ashes while Christendom's grieving, No thought has the soldier his guzzle of leaving. 'Tis a time of misery, groans, and tears! Portentous the face of the heavens appears! And forth from the clouds behold blood-red, The Lord's war-mantle is downward spread— While the comet is thrust as a threatening rod, From the window of heaven by the hand of God. The world is but one vast house of woe, The ark of the church stems a bloody flow, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... labelling their skeletons for the instruction of an age of science. But there was a time when the wisest believed in their existence as an article of faith, and when the boldest shuddered to hear them named. What are now idle fancies were once the most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances, and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the imagination ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... the child separated from me by this portentous history, a narrow passage, and a closed nursery door. Presently, however, the door was partly opened again as if to admit the air. The crying had ceased, but in its place the monotonous Voice of Conscience, for the moment personated by Sarah Walker's nursemaid, kept alive a drowsy recollection ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... gave gratuitous details of the scene that had taken place in his room that afternoon. Most of those present were in ecstasies at this divulging of his private life, which went forward to the accompaniment of snores from Ford, and the voice of Dove, who, with portentous gravity, sang over and over again, the first strophe of THE ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... shelter'd in a nook, An' at his lordship steal't a look, Like some portentous omen; Except good sense and social glee, An' (what surpris'd me) modesty, I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... are probably on their way to a church; and if you watch them, you will see them march in with much propriety. The superintendent is evidently not an ordinary schoolmaster; you would suppose that he is an ecclesiastic of some kind. He wears a loose black cloak, a hat with a low crown and a portentous brim, and bands such as were much worn by English clergymen till late years, and which, when strongly developed, were supposed to indicate a sympathy with Calvanistic theology. Nevertheless, the solemn-featured young man is not an ecclesiastic, neither is he a Protestant minister. He is one ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... this history properly commences, Legs, and his fellow Hugh Tarpaulin, sat, each with both elbows resting upon the large oaken table in the middle of the floor, and with a hand upon either cheek. They were eyeing, from behind a huge flagon of unpaid-for "humming-stuff," the portentous words, "No Chalk," which to their indignation and astonishment were scored over the doorway by means of that very mineral whose presence they purported to deny. Not that the gift of decyphering written characters—a gift among the commonalty of that day considered little less cabalistical ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
