"Fabulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that it seemed to be the very beginning of life. The adventures to which that elm-tree conducted her were oddly reminiscent of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. For once, the true had outrivaled the fabulous. ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... as we have already seen, strange fancies filled his brain: dreams, for instance, of occupying the highest posts in the land, or of gaining fabulous sums of money by some wildly impossible scheme, such as visiting the Great Mogul with a magical ring, or obtaining rubies and emeralds from a rich Dutchman. The two apparently incompatible sides to Balzac's character are difficult to reconcile. On some ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... as we came along, as to the place of which we were in quest; and finding nobody with a very clear or ready conception of it or its whereabouts, began to feel as if it were of a half-fabulous character. At length, however, at a place called Crossford, we were told we should have to leave our carriage and the road, and ascend the side of the valley to the northward, where, about a mile and a half onward, we should find a small farm called ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... must report. The pendulum in the clock on a lady's mantel-shelf is not more natural than the pendulum swung in a cathedral tower, though the swing of the one is a slight and the swing of the other a great arc. Browning is a pendulum whose vibrations touch the horizons. He does business with fabulous capital and on a huge scale, and thinks, sees, serves, and loves after a colossal fashion, but is as natural in his large life as a lesser man is in his meager life. "Caliban upon Setebos" is a hint of the man's immense movement of soul and his ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... with a stream of golden hair. It began at the back of her head, covered her body with a thick mantle, flowed in front of her from the shoulders in two waves which united under the chin, and fell down to her feet in one wavy sheet. It was, indeed, the miraculous hair, a fabulous fleece, with heavy twists and curls, a glorious, starry efflorescence, the warm and living robe of a saint, perfumed with ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... extraordinary thing in the world for the suppression of stages, for confessed precipitate intensity—to use together every instant of the hour that might be left them. Yet to use it for what?—unless, like beautiful fabulous figures in some old-world legend, for the frankest and almost the crudest avowal of the impression they had made on each other. He couldn't have named, later on, any other person she had during this space been engaged with, any more than he was to remember in the least what ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... delight at a success which both sides promised themselves to render fruitful. It is an instance of poor, naked human nature caught in the fact. But, as in other instances, she cannot play the woman with impunity. Madame des Ursins dwells with complacency upon her description of the fabulous cortege which he has in preparation. Lackeys innumerable, a legion of pages and gentlemen, fiocches and carriages, emblazoned with gold, a suite with which in the present day a sovereign would not encumber himself, and which ate up the remainder ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... himself. Here, then, is a little fact, my Grecian boys, that you won't easily get over. The father of history, the eldest of prose writers, has been first explained, illustrated, justified, liberated from scandal and disgrace, first had his geography set to rights, first translated from the region of fabulous romance, and installed in his cathedral chair, as Dean (or eldest) of historians, by a military man, who had no more Greek than Shakspeare, or than we (perhaps you, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... no doubt, rumours of wonderful stones which had fallen down from the heavens to the earth, but these reports seem to have obtained but little credit. They were a century ago regarded as perfectly fabulous, though there was abundant testimony on the subject. Eye-witnesses averred that they had seen the stones fall. The bodies themselves were unlike other objects in the neighbourhood, and cases were even authenticated where men had been ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... of Bellini's "Nachtwandlerin" could hardly be called literature, nor Theodor Mundt's fabulous novel, "Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum." The latter I will mention later ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... think, to read this, and to an even greater degree some of the other stories, which have been translated by Mr. Joyce and others, without perceiving how thoroughly impregnated with old-world and mythological sentiment they are. An air of all but fabulous antiquity pervades them, greater perhaps than pervades the legends of any other north European people. We seem transplanted to a world of the most primitive type conceivable; a world of myth and ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... in 1847, and have never visited that part of the country; but the bascinet which was there in Grose's time was at least of the date of Guido de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the builder of Guy's Tower, who died in 1315, and who has always been confounded with the fabulous Guy: and if it has disappeared, we have to regret the loss of the only specimen of an English bascinet of that period that I am ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... these are related in the 'Narratives of the School;'— about the burning of the ancestral shrine of the sovereign , and a one-footed bird which appeared hopping and flapping its wings in Ch'i. They are plainly fabulous, though quoted in proof of Confucius's sage wisdom. This reference to them is more than enough. 5 ay, G, . 6 Ana. XII. xi. 7 ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... said that Chaucer pays slight heed to chronology in this passage, where the deeds of Turnus, the glory of King Solomon, and the fate of Croesus are made memories of the far past in the time of fabulous ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... while the intellectual classes in secret entertain entirely opposite ones. He acted throughout in the most perfect good faith; and if, on a subsequent scrutiny, his authorities have proved to be the fabulous creations of Spanish-Arabian fancy, he is not in fault." (p. 104.)—We, also, desire to deal in "perfect good faith" with our readers, who will naturally inquire what new light has been thrown on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... humps rose pavilions of silk in flowing draperies, on some of which the entire Fatihah was superbly embroidered. Over the pavilions arose enormous aigrettes of green and black feathers. Such were the mahmals, containing, among other things of splendor and fabulous value, the Kiswah which the Sultan was forwarding to the Scherif of Mecca to take the place of the worn curtains then draping the Tabernacle ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... surplus of luxuries as was brought to his doors by his old and paternal friend, "John Company." His wants were simple, his life healthy, though full of toil, his appetite great—an appetite which throve upon what it fed, and gave rise to fabulous feats of eating, recalling the exploits of the beloved and big-bellied Ben of ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... great elasticity of the membrane which forms its wings. It must have been from an exaggerated account of the fox-bats of the Eastern Islands that the ancients derived their ideas of the dreaded Harpies, those fabulous winged monsters sent out by the relentless Juno, and whose names are synonymous with rapine ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 'fabricate'] v. 1. To produce chips from a design that may have been created by someone at another company. Fabbing chips based on the designs of others is the activity of a {silicon foundry}. To a hacker, 'fab' is practically never short for 'fabulous'. 2. 'fab line': the production system (lithography, diffusion, etching, etc.) for chips at a chip manufacturer. Different 'fab lines' are run with different process parameters, die sizes, or technologies, or simply to provide more ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... his father's wretched farm or hired out to neighboring farmers. But in spite, or perhaps by means, of this rude environment, he grew to be a stalwart giant, reaching six feet four at nineteen, and fabulous stories are told of his feats of strength. With the growth of this mighty frame began that strange education which in his ripening years was to qualify him for the great destiny that awaited him, and the development of those mental faculties and moral ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... priestly dogmas, nor an observer of their religious rites and ceremonies, was none the less a truly just man, the perfect type of the righteous of all times and countries. On the other hand, the circumstances that his sufferings were no more than a probation, and that they were followed by fabulous wealth and intensified happiness, are dismissed by the poet as wholly irrelevant to the question at issue. Nor, considering their purely exceptional character, would they have tended in any degree to solve it. If Job's misery was an ordeal, all unmerited suffering cannot be pressed ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... repeated Don Carlos. "Dios! Ten thousand pesetas! Miss Rostrevor, I congratulate you! Ten thousand pesetas are the Spanish equivalent of about sixty pounds, in English money. You see what a fabulous value your lover places on you. Sixty pounds! You must ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... has more or less to do with what is called art. In its various forms art touches in some degree practically the entire human race. Its various activities have developed great industries, and for the entertainment it affords fabulous sums of ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... of a sudden she turned spendthrift. She appropriated I do not know what fabulous sums, to spend just as she pleased, for once. She attended bargain sales, and brought away such finery as had never graced our flat before. Home from work in the evening, after a hurried supper, she shut herself up in the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast, big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with a million eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet can love this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generous excitement his massive and mysterious 'joie-de-vivre,' the vast scale of his iron anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and will not change ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... in broken phrases she tried to tell him what she felt. "Never did a man come more against his will than I. But I had no choice in the matter when that big giant got hold of me. He coaxed me at first"—laughing at the recollection—"then tried to bribe me—I forget what fabulous sum he offered me—half of his kingdom, I think. I mind he asked me if money were any use to me, but I stuck it out that I wouldn't come until he said he'd break every bone in my body, or words to that effect. So, my dear ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... affair might be mentioned. Before dinner on that day every one of the guests at Matching Priory knew that the man who had refused to be made Under-Secretary of State had been accepted by that possessor of fabulous wealth who was well known to the world as Madame Goesler of Park Lane. "I am very glad that you did not take office under Mr. Gresham," she said to him when they first met each other again in London. "Of course when I was advising you I could not be sure that this ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... sleep. I would I could infuse my blood into your veins that you might be a part of me, my thought your thought, and your heart mine—A murmur has just escaped your lips as though it were a soft reply. Be calm and beautiful forever as you are now! Ah! would that I possessed that fabulous fairy power which, with a wand, could make you sleep while I am absent, until, returning, I should wake you ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... a horror of Father Peter. He could not find his faith again. Every dream misled him: and there were dreams that his waking moments carried on,—fabulous treasures, for which the waking man had only to stretch out his hand to hold what he had seen ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... It was he who bent the first pin with which Tom extracted his first stickleback out of "Pebbly Brook," the little stream which ran through the village. The first stickleback was a splendid fellow, with fabulous red and blue gills. Tom kept him in a small basin till the day of his death, and became a fisherman from that day. Within a month from the taking of the first stickleback, Benjy had carried off our hero to the canal, in defiance of Charity; and between them, after ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... is come We will do thus and thus: Till this my vigil seem quite strange And almost fabulous; We two will live at once, one life; And peace shall be ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... legend; and the monkish legend had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the knightly romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back into its earliest elementary stage. The bewildering romance, light tarnished with darkness, the semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with human falsehoods, these fade even of themselves as life advances. The romance has perished that the young man adored. The legend has gone that deluded the boy. But ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... "It is fabulous! If it goes on, my aunt will have an administration as important as that of a European state. Oh! you are happy here, you people; you are busy. I amuse myself! And if you knew how it wearies me! I am withering, consuming myself, I am ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Torquatus, Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, even the fabulous Minos himself, became as familiar in the tribune as in the theatre, and the public went crazy over them. The shades of the heroes of antiquity hovered over the revolutionary assemblies. Posterity alone ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... and the Piazza Signoria was filled with a vast concourse of people. Every spare foot of space was taken. Platforms had been erected and seats sold for fabulous prices. Every window ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Cook's Straits and even further south. The story is current that Auckland is due to an early job of Government officials, who combined to buy up the land about it and when it had been fixed upon as the site of the capital, sold out their lots at fabulous prices, to the feathering of ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... not reached in the Avesta. It is in the Bundahish, a work which, while much later, is based on earlier traditions, memories it may be, of antediluvian legends brought from the summits of upper Asia by Djemschid, the fabulous Abraham of the Persians of whom Zarathrustra was the Moses. But in default of the Eternal, the Avesta ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... hill, after the fleeing sentinel, in hope of coming upon the rebels but half-prepared. Or rather, as we then felt, so we chose to think, foolish as the opinion was. Indeed what could have been more foolish, less military, more like a tale of fabulous knights in some enchanted forest? A cavalry charge, with no sort of regular formation, up a wooded hill, in a night dark enough in the open but sheer black under the thick boughs; to meet an encamped enemy at the top! ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... 'Yes,' but I was almost sorry, knowing that my day's pleasure would cost her one of anxiety. However, I gathered up my hooks and lines, with some white salted pork for bait, and with a fabulous number of biscuit, split in the middle, the insides well buttered, then skilfully put together again, and all stowed in sister's large work- bag, and slung over my shoulder, I started, making a wager with Enoch White, as we walked down to the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... (so the creature has been named) is a fabulous bird, 'the chief of the 360 classes of the winged tribes.' It is mentioned in the fourth Book of the second Part of the Shu, as appearing in the courtyard of Shun; and the appearance of a pair of them has always been understood to denote ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... is thought to have been the famous poet Valmiki, but the work has evidently been rehandled several times, and there are three versions of the poems still extant. The poem consists of twenty-four thousand verses, and the story of it—now overlaid as it is with extravagant and fabulous accretions—is evidently founded on fact. The scene of the poem is laid in the city of Ayodhya, the modern Oudh, which is described in glowing colors as a place of ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... succeeding ages had been masters of the city. There had been indiscriminate massacres of the populace, the last by Nadir Shah, the King of Persia in 1747, when 100,000 souls were put to death by his order, and booty to a fabulous amount was carried away. Still, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of fortune through which it had passed, Delhi was, in 1857, one of the largest, most beautiful, and certainly the richest city in Hindostan. ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... royal procession extended from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, along which route windows and seats had been secured at fabulous prices, while the throng of sightseers that densely crowded the streets was in the best ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... time. A murmur of applause at his nerve ran through the circle. DeLong hesitated, as one who thought, "Seventeen has come out twice—the odds against its coming again are too great, even though the winnings would be fabulous, for a good stake." He placed his next bet on ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Genoese January, unless a tramontana is blowing, and there was none on our half-day. But in any case we did not walk. We selected the best-looking cab-horse we could find, and he turned out better than his driver, who asked a fabulous price by the hour. We obliged him to show his tariff, when his wickedness was apparent from the printed rates. He explained that the part we were looking at was obsolete, and he showed us another part, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... are turning scarlet on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behind the Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on these shallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts the common earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes. Purple, violet, and rose are spread around us. In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shines Venice—a long low broken line, touched with the softest roseate flush. Ere we reach the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Central Africa in quest of King Solomon's mines is impelled by a hope closely akin to that of the Spaniards. The excavator who digs for the buried treasures of the Incas or of the Egyptians is often led by a desire for the fabulous. Search is now being made in the western desert of Egypt for a lost city of burnished copper; and the Anglo-Egyptian official is constantly urged by credulous natives to take camels across the wilderness in quest of a town whose houses ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... seen the document," resumed Sir Reginald, "it must, indeed, be so; and this misguided boy is prepared to take any desperate step in order to obtain the title and the estate. All that he has said about a will must be fabulous, as no man in his senses would risk his neck to obtain so hollow a distinction as a baronetcy—we are equally members of the class, and may speak frankly, Sir Gervaise—and the will would secure the estate, if there were one. I cannot ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... they do it now for money, not for love, and in most cases use modern materials and patterns, even imported yarns and "Diamond dyes!" Genuine curios or antiques are already becoming very rare, except in museums, and sometimes command fabulous prices. As the older generation passes, there is danger of losing altogether the secret of ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... be proud of. I, too, was proud—for him, if not so certain of the fabulous value of the bargain. It was wonderful. It was not so much of his fearlessness that I thought. It is strange how little account I took of it: as if it had been something too conventional to be at the root of the matter. No. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Mississippi Valley, and in the Western mountains from North Dakota to New Mexico. In nearly every coal-bearing region, iron was also discovered and the great fields of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota soon rivaled those of the Appalachian area. Copper, lead, gold, and silver in fabulous quantities were unearthed by the restless prospectors who left no plain or mountain fastness unexplored. Petroleum, first pumped from the wells of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1859, made new fortunes equaling ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... having first been settled by a race who came out of a great cave and traveled over the realm on the backs of turtles, founding cities and towns wherever they went. This will show that the traditions of the aborigines are so fabulous as scarcely to deserve mention. Touching the vandal act of the Catholic priest Zumarrage, Prescott says: "We contemplate with indignation the cruelties inflicted by the early conquerors. But indignation is qualified with contempt when we see them thus ruthlessly trampling out the sparks of knowledge, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... now gave way; he proffered fabulous rewards to any who would save him; but none could help; nay, all were in like distress. His brain reeled—the ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... same with everything—music, poetry, politics. I go night after night to hear the best music in the world given at fabulous cost in the Metropolitan Opera House and am content to murmur vague ecstasies over Caruso, without being aware of who wrote the opera or what it is all about. Most of us know nothing of orchestration or even the names of the different instruments. We may not even be sure of what is meant ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... his bank, when rumour accused him of burning the court-house that he might sell his abstracts to the county at a fabulous price, he called a public meeting to hear his defence, and repeated to his townsmen that query, "Who carried the flag?" adding in a hoarse whisper: "And yet—great God!—they say that the little corporal is an in-cen-di-ary. Was this great war fought ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... say no to Ray, but even he looked dubious at the small gray fellow's voluble outpouring of pseudo-scientific jargon. Ray, made sensitive by years of open skepticism on the part of many listeners, caught the look and insisted on a demonstration of his fabulous invention. ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... the shade of the dull passage, and looking through the doorway, he beheld the atrium of a Roman house, roomy and rich to a fabulous degree of magnificence. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the Piazzetta, doffing their jewelled caps to the admiring crowd with capricious grace and whimsical motions, like a flock of birds of paradise, in doublets of velvet and cloth of gold, with hair floating loose about their throats; with devices of fabulous birds—of stars flashing light—of mystic arabesques and hieroglyphs embroidered on their silken hose, in pearls and gold and precious stones:—truly a gay and frivolous company to be under the grave control ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... on a saddle-blanket, with the saddle for a pillow and the serape, or blanket, for a cover. We never feared rain except in winter. As the spring and summer of 1848 advanced, the reports came faster and faster from the gold-mines at Sutter's saw-mill. Stories reached us of fabulous discoveries, and spread throughout the land. Everybody was talking of "Gold! gold!" until it assumed the character of a fever. Some of our soldiers began to desert; citizens were fitting out trains of wagons and packmules to go to the mines. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... OF QUIVIRA. An Indian slave in one of the villages cheered Coronado and his followers with a fabulous tale about a wonderful city, many days' journey across the plains to the northeast, which he called Quivira. The king of Quivira, he said, took his nap under a large tree, on which were hung little ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... with steaming hot blood—one waded in it on the floor. The stench was almost overpowering, but to Jurgis it was nothing. His whole soul was dancing with joy—he was at work at last! He was at work and earning money! All day long he was figuring to himself. He was paid the fabulous sum of seventeen and a half cents an hour; and as it proved a rush day and he worked until nearly seven o'clock in the evening, he went home to the family with the tidings that he had earned more than a dollar and a half ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... money," says the historian, "which had been withdrawn from the Bank of the United States was deposited in local banks, money was easy and speculation extended to every branch of trade. New cities were laid out; fabulous prices were charged for building-lots which existed only on paper" etc. And in Van Buren's time the people paid the violinist, as they have in ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... up to elbow my dreaming childhood out of existence, I fed the same hunger for the hidden and mysterious with Detective-Police stories, Captain Kidd's voyages, and wild tales of wrecks on the Spanish Main, of those vessels of fabulous wealth that strewed the deep sea's lap with gems (so the stories ran) of lustre almost rare enough to light the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... became known in Market Drayton that Clive had returned to England. Rumor credited him with fabulous wealth. It was said that he drove through London in a gold coach, and outshone the king himself in the splendor of his attire. No report was too highly colored to find easy credence among the simple country folk. Clive was indeed rich: he had a taste ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... whom he had educated, and who had preferred sharing the fortunes of his governor to living quietly with the King, his father. After several expeditions into Western France, Hastings became the theme of terrible and very probably fabulous stories. He extended his cruises, they say, to the Mediterranean, and, having arrived at the coasts of Tuscany, within sight of a city which in his ignorance he took for Rome, he resolved to pillage it; but, not feeling strong enough to attack it by assault, he sent ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... if you and she were not the same. Couple that with the eyes he makes at you, and you've got assurance twice assured. You ought to have guessed it from the first syllable he uttered. And when he went on about her exalted station and her fabulous wealth! Oh, my ingenue! Oh, my guileless lambkin! And you Trixie Belfont! Where's your famous wit? Where are your ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... Prince of Heroes, (as Paterculus stiles him) graz'd on mount Aventine: These Examples, tis true, are not convinceing, yet they sufficiently shew that the employment of a Sheapard was sometime look'd upon to be such, as in those Fabulous times was not alltogether unbecomeing the Dignity of a Heroe, or the Divinity of a God: which consideration if it cannot be of force enough to procure excellence, yet certainly it may secure it from the imputation of baseness, since it was sometime ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... fella dog," Van Horn countered, in his heart knowing that he would not sell Jerry for a hundred fathoms, or for any fabulous price from any black, but in his head offering so small a price over par as not to arouse suspicion among the blacks as to how highly he really valued the golden-coated son ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... civilization, that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or "bandit fierce", or to the unmitigated fury of the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... on with his eyes shut. ("When I need an adventure," he said, "I just trot old Major Mary with my eyes shut. Courting death isn't half as costly as they think it is.") And when he had opened his eyes, the sky was gone, and everything was white and thick and folded in and fabulous. Obviously, as he convinced us, the sky had fallen. But he had driven on through it and in it, and had found it, as I recall his account, to be made of inextinguishable dreams. These, Abel ran on, are on the other side of the sky for anybody who claims them, ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... and he didn't go over. She went away. And then the town learned a wonderful thing. The old lady, her aunt, who had been considered just fairly rich, turned out to be the possessor of almost fabulous wealth, owing to her great holdings of stock in a Western gold mine which had suddenly struck it rich. And to the girl she willed it all. It was then, of course, that the girl became the Princess, but the boy did not realize that—just then. To him ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... of extraordinary Conceptions from these Intrigues, or by Women without actual Copulation, are equally fabulous with those of the Engendring of Men: It would be as surprizing to find a Man with a teeming Belly, as to see a Woman increase there meerly by her ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... his Fabulous Stories and Relations to the King of Spain was made praefect of the Kingdom of Jucatan, in the Year of our Lord 1526; And the other Tyrants to this very day have taken the same indirect Measures to obtain Offices, and screw or ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... persistence past belief, and Grim knew how to worm the truth out of him and make him keep his word, which is more than some of the professional reformers know how to do with their proteges. I believe that Suliman would rather have earned Grim's curt praise than all the fabulous delights of even ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... could give a fabulous excellence to the construction and management of the "Fable;" extract interest from street crossings and scavengers, and let fly into the literary atmosphere an immortal Opera, the "Beggars'," which, though feathered by the moultings of the very basest night-birds, has pursued a career ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... a cut of the famous bridge across the Rhine, but a hurried examination brought him no comfort. He looked over at Snorky across the aisles and Snorky winked back at him in the triumph of achievement. Still if Snorky was to share in the fabulous returns it was only right that Snorky should contribute to the practical details! The truth is that Skippy in calmer mood had already begun to regret the impulse of the day before. Five million dollars after all was a good deal to give away in a gesture, ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... are wonderful," she would say. "Honora's clothes are better-looking than those I buy in the East, at such fabulous prices, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... harmony with his own humor. Irving is known to us all, as only wits and poets are ever known. But of the singular being who possessed so remarkable a genius for accumulation, of which this Library is one of the results, little has been imparted to the public, and of that little the greater part is fabulous. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... crossed River Street, and stopped in front of the Cut-Rate Pharmacy. The windows of this establishment offered little to entice save the two mammoth chalices of green and crimson liquor. But these were believed to be of fabulous value. Even the Cut-Rate Pharmacy itself could afford but one of each. Inside the door a soda fountain hissed provocatively. They took lemon and vanilla respectively, and the lordly purchaser did not take up his change from the wet marble until he had drained his glass. He ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... wood pile, and logs were brought in with which to feed the oven fires. But wood was dear, and had Daniel fed his little iron stove in the garret with such costly food, his monthly bill would have reached a fabulous height. He paid seven marks a month for his room and counted every penny so as not to shorten the period of his liberty ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... so well pleased with any written remains of the ancients as with those little aphorisms which verbal tradition hath delivered down to us under the title of proverbs. It were to be wished that, instead of filling their pages with the fabulous theology of the pagans, our modern poets would think it worth their while to enrich their works with the proverbial sayings of their ancestors. Mr Dryden hath ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians. Concerning your private life, these men often speak more like malicious enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... possessors of our fabulous wealth an ever-increasing philanthropy, devoting a surplus of possessions unheard of by our fathers to education, literature, arts, and mercy, thereby making themselves the beloved and blessed favorites of a happy ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... of needlework reached its climax long ago, and is now very old. History and faded rags are the only witnesses to its fabulous glories, in Classical, Oriental, and early Mediaeval days. It would appear that nothing new remains to be invented. Copies of past styles, and selections from the scraps we retain and value as models, are all that ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... low sandy heads that close the great port towards the sea, thirteen millions sterling of exports is carried away each year by the finest ships in the world. Here, too, are waterworks constructed at fabulous expense, a service of steam-ships, between this and the other great cities of Australia, vieing in speed and accommodation with the coasting steamers of Great Britain; noble churches, handsome theatres. In short, a great city, which, in its amazing ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... Were copies to be written? In capital B's and H's most of the girls under Miss Peecher's tuition were half a year ahead of every other letter in the alphabet. And Mental Arithmetic, administered by Miss Peecher, often devoted itself to providing Bradley Headstone with a wardrobe of fabulous extent: fourscore and four neck-ties at two and ninepence-halfpenny, two gross of silver watches at four pounds fifteen and sixpence, seventy-four black hats at eighteen ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... arrivals at our "diggings" was a Mexican, who had followed the profession of a medico in former times, but who was now an inveterate gold hunter; one of the sort who are perpetually on the move from place to place, seeking placers of fabulous richness, but never working any claim long enough to fairly develop it. Perhaps they have no sooner commenced operations in one place, when a rumor comes of rich finds at some far distant point, and off they go, to ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... landscape or historical painting. "A landscape, however excellent in its distributions of wood, and water, and buildings, leaves not one trace in the memory; historical painting is perpetually false in a variety of ways, in the costume, the grouping, the portraits, and is nothing more than fabulous painting; but a real portrait is truth itself, and calls up so many collateral ideas as to fill an intelligent mind more than any ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... went away, leaving behind her not a trace of anything other than the memory of a joy that grew more fabulous as the storm-tossed years rolled by. Daniel never saw her again, and never heard from ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... landscape. A purple glow came down upon the Mokattam Hills. Perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception. The soaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in a moment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing. Ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and level places sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble. That indescribable quality of the Desert, which makes timid souls avoid the hour of dusk, emerged; ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... clothes so readily; they were forever making use of that fabulous thing—credit! At first it took his breath away to discover that the people here in the town got everything they wanted without paying money for it. "Will you please put it down?" they would say, when they came for their ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... court all day to-morrow," said Montague. "But I'd like to see the collection. I understand it's a wonderful affair,—the old man has spent all his spare time at it. You hear fabulous estimates of what it's cost him—four or ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... the Dreamer was pursuing that train of thought, when the maitre d'hotel—the superb maitre d'hotel—entered with solemnity, carrying in a great silver plate a turbot of fabulous dimensions—one of those phenomenal fish which are only seen in the old paintings representing the miraculous draught of fish, or perhaps in the window of Chevet, before a row of astonished street-boys who flatten their noses against ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... not only be accumulated in Africa, but attracted from the white world, with one great difference from present usage: no return so fabulous would be offered that civilized lands would be tempted to divert to colonial trade and invest materials and labor needed by the masses at home, but rather would receive the same modest profits ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... person of a venerable aspect, who asserted, that half the impositions which are put upon these ages, have been transmitted by writers who have given too great pomp and magnificence to the exploits of the ancient Bear Garden, and made their gladiators, by fabulous tradition, greater than Gorman[316] and others of Great Britain. He informed the company, that he had searched authorities for what he said, and that a learned antiquary, Humphrey Scarecrow, Esq., of Hockley-in-the-Hole, recorder ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... will save, or perish with you!' You mounted your horse with me in your arms. Behind us screamed and moaned the servants of my house, but you regarded them not, and I trustingly clung to your heart, for I knew that if danger threatened me, you would surely save me! Oh, do you yet remember that fabulous ride? How we rested in out-of-the-way houses, or with poor peasant people, and then proceeded on farther and farther! And how the sun constantly grew warmer, melting the snow, and you constantly became more cheerful and happy, until, one day, you ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... They extended back twenty two hundred and thirty-four years behind the Christian era. There is no reliable history so ancient as the writings of Moses. All the efforts between Moses and David are without regular form—a mass of rearranged tradition, both fabulous and corrupt; long after the times of David the pages of writers regarded authentic, are loaded with ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... intrepid chaser of elephants; Lageroniere, who was for one instant on the point of becoming the king of a savage tribe, and of whom Dumas, in his "Thousand and One Phantoms," has related in so improbable a manner a fabulous episode of real adventures; Gray, whom London cites with pride among its naturalists; Mitchell, director of the London Zoological Gardens; Henry Monnier, the sparkling reflection of Moliere; Alphonse Karr; Deshayes, for whom conchology and the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the deep voice of the fabulous bear, who asks this question of the little child in the story; but Molly had never read the 'Three Bears,' and fancied that his anger was real; she trembled a little, and drew nearer to the kind lady who had beckoned her as to a refuge. Lord Cumnor was very fond ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the few fragments we have of Berosus contain no indication. They only tell of a great deluge which took place under the last of that fabulous line of ten kings which is said to have begun 259,000 years after the apparition of the divine Man-Fish, Oannes, and to have reigned in the aggregate a period of 432,000 years. The description has always excited great interest from its extraordinary ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... griffin, is a fabulous bird that figures largely in Persian romance. It is fabled to have dwelt in the Mountain Caf and to have once carried off a king's daughter on her wedding-day. It is to this legend that the story-teller appears to refer in the text; but I ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... rich corporation of Hamburg merchants who wished to purchase all the available land in Samoa for the purpose of founding a colony, the principal industry of which would be cotton-growing. Cotton was bringing fabulous prices in Europe, and the corporation had already made purchases of land both in Fiji and Tahiti, and were using every effort ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... like most other ideas, are comparative. I have never known fabulous riches, but I should manage badly as a poor woman. Up to this point I could sympathise with Edward Hallett. Mr ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... In such bilge lie the springs of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of some of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids are led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out that they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres, and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been launched, with its ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the great advocate of unlicensed printing, when he said: "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.... I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."[573] The edict utterly prohibited the introduction of any books from Geneva and other places notoriously rebellious to the Holy See, the retention ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... After this fabulous preamble, they proceeded to handle the matter of fact with logical precision. It was absurd, they said, that Mr. Wilkes and Lord Leicester should affect to confound the persons who appeared in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Expedition and Battles: To which is added, A Criticism on Q. Curtius, as a fabulous Historian. By M. le Clerc, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... circumstances of extraordinary mystery, that the two narratives are totally irreconcilable (even allowing the utmost for the exaggerating influence of tradition), except by supposing report to have combined and blended together the fabulous histories of several distinct bearers of the family name. However this may be, I shall lay before the reader a distinct recital of the events from which the foregoing tradition arose. With respect to these there can be no mistake; they are authenticated as fully ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... for fifty miles around; the occasional feuds with the neighboring gentry; the Major's duel with Rathbone Culbertson about Kitty Chalmers, who afterward married a Thwaite of South Carolina; and private yacht races for fabulous sums on Mobile Bay; the quaint beliefs, improvident habits, and loyal virtues of the old slaves—all these were subjects that held both the Major and Hargraves absorbed for hours at ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... grievance. They cleared and planted rapidly and have raised fabulous crops, but when it came time to strip the hemp for market they found that the wildmen upon whom they had banked as potential labor would not work. A few came and stayed, but most of them quit after earning a few pesos. So the hemp rotted in the field. Desperate, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... being hurriedly manufactured. From cylinders placed in central positions in a score of cities it was discharged continuously, covering these centers with an impenetrable pall of night that no light would penetrate. Only by the glow of radium paint, which commanded fabulous prices, could official business be transacted, and that only to a very ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectation of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... don't understand. I proposed to her because I thought I was rich. In a foolish moment I thought I had discovered that some old stocks I had had acquired a fabulous value. She believed it, too, but because she thought I was now a rich man and she only a poor girl—a mere servant to her father's guests—she refused me. Refused me because she thought I might regret it in the ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... familiar with the name of Stradivarius, the old violin-maker of Cremona. He has been dead nearly two hundred years, and his violins now bring fabulous prices. George Eliot, in one of her poems, puts some noble words into the mouth of the old man. Speaking of the masters who will play on ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... famous than these two worthies was Roch Braziliano, the truculent Dutchman who came up from the coast of Brazil to the Spanish Main with a name ready-made for him. Upon the very first adventure which he undertook he captured a plate ship of fabulous value, and brought her safely into Jamaica; and when at last captured by the Spaniards, he fairly frightened them into letting him go by truculent threats of ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors for ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... reasonable time be informed of these facts. It may be said in reply that history sufficiently informs children on these points. But the world of the young is the domestic circle; all beyond is fabulous, unless brought home to them by comment. The fact, therefore, of different opinions in religious matters being held by good people should sometimes be dwelt upon, instead of being shunned, if we would secure a ground-work of tolerance ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... the intricate, electronic witchery of the 21st century could not pin guilt on fabulous Lonnie Raichi, the irreproachable philanthropist. But Jason, the cop, was sweating it out ... searching for that fourth and final and all-knowing rule that would knock Lonnie's "triple ethic" for a ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... the centre of courtly propriety and fashion; on the other hand, with faces which seemed to belong to another age, curiosities of existence from remote provinces of France, or Europe, from distant, half-fabulous lands, remoter still. Jules Damville, who would have liked best to be a sailor, [44] to command, not in any spiritual ark, but in the French fleet—should half-ruined France ever come to have one—led his companions one evening to inspect ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... from one of the name of Szop, a soldier, valet, or heyduc (reitre, valet, ou heiduque) in the service of Stanislas Leszczinski, whom he followed to Lorraine.] Indeed, until we get possession of indisputable proofs, it will be advisable to disregard these more or less fabulous reports altogether, and begin with the first well-ascertained fact—namely, Nicholas Chopin's birth, which took place at Nancy, in Lorraine, on the 17th of August, 1770. Of his youth nothing is known except that, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... our ups and downs as does everyone else who attempts it. I get numerous letters telling of their experience and troubles asking for details just how to go about it. What makes it so fascinating is that in certain seasons we have fabulous success and them again in others almost complete failure. Fall of '41 and spring of '42 we averaged 75% catches in budding chestnuts. Fall of '42 and spring of '43 our chestnut budding was just about nil, only 3 or 4% catches, and I am at a loss how ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... which all sorts of fabulous stories have passed current, is found more frequently in the depths of the sea than in those of the earth. There can be no doubt that it is the product of several conifers, or cone-bearing trees, overwhelmed by the waves. Although the gum which exuded from them has remained ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... hinder the voyage of the ship to Nueva Espana, on account of the fabulous ships which, it is reported, have been seen, according to the statement of an Indian, although there is no confirmation of such news. The great amount that was spent in the despatch of the armada, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... by a false faith. Women have been taught by their religious guardians that the Bible, unlike all other books, was written under the special inspiration of the Great Ruling Intelligence of the Universe. Not conversant with works on science and higher criticism, which point out its fabulous pretensions, they cling to it with an unreasoning tenacity, like a savage to his fetich. Though it is full of contradictions, absurdities and impossibilities, and bears the strongest evidence in every line of its human origin, and in moral sentiment is below many of the best books ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... "New Yorker," the best weekly paper in the United States, but it was not profitable. When Harrison was nominated for President in 1840, Greeley started "The Log-Cabin," which reached the then fabulous circulation of ninety thousand. But on this paper at a penny per copy he made no money. His next venture was "The New York Tribune," price one cent. To start it he borrowed a thousand dollars and printed five thousand copies of the first number. It was ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... abundance of boats too, and what strongly resembled a stockade; but what most took up the attention of all on board were a couple of long, low, well-made vessels, each displaying a curious figure-head bearing a faint resemblance to some fabulous monster; and in these armed boats both the soldiers and sailors of the little expedition were quite right in believing that they saw nothing more nor less than the much-talked-of vessels of the kris-bearing pirates of Malaya, the well-known, ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... every advantage, whilst Descartes is not indulged a single one. According to some, it is to the former that we owe the discovery of a vacuum, that the air is a heavy body, and the invention of telescopes. In a word, Sir Isaac Newton is here as the Hercules of fabulous story, to whom the ignorant ascribed all ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... both, 'Twas said they saw but one; and no discerner Durst wag his tongue in censure. When these suns— For so they phrase 'em—by their heralds challeng'd The noble spirits to arms, they did perform Beyond thought's compass, that former fabulous story, Being now seen possible enough, got credit, That ...
— The Life of Henry VIII • William Shakespeare [Dunlap edition]
... Caroline islands; and the same affinity may again be traced amongst the Battas and Malays. When these events happened, is not so easy to ascertain; it was probably not very lately, as they are extremely populous, and have no tradition of their own origin, but what is perfectly fabulous; whilst, on the other hand, the unadulterated state of their general language, and the similarity which still prevails in their customs and manners, seem to indicate that it could not have been ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... the year 1474. The first book printed in English was a translation. Caxton was both the translator and printer of the Destruction of Troye; a book which, in that infancy of learning, was considered as the best account of the fabulous ages, and which, though now driven out of notice by authors of no greater use or value, still continued to be read in Caxton's English to the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... said, "Will you take me back to Venice? Will you be my guide? Will you put faith in me? You shall be richer than ten of the richest houses in Amsterdam or London, richer than Rothschild; in short, you shall have the fabulous wealth of ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... good lady was gone. She could draw but one conclusion from such a strain of remark about people with fabulous incomes. The cheerful cosmopolitan must have been dining with Mr. Midas, and must have sat much too long at table. What a pity that so pleasant a man should permit himself such excesses! There was, however, but one course for a self-respecting woman to pursue—Mrs. Grundy ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... so long condemned by the laws of the nation, being exploded by some, and accounted such a reproach, as unfit to be any longer on record.—In answer to this, I shall only notice, (1.) That there have been some hundreds of volumes published of things fabulous, fictitious and romantic, fit for little else than to amuse the credulous reader; while this subject has been in a great measure neglected. (2.) We find it to have been the constant practice of the Lord's people in all ages, to hand down and ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... with the hounds and jolly loud-voiced riders, cub-hunting, on a bright September morning. The wood symbolized everything that he wished to forget. And he thought that if he were really a rich man—not a poor little well-to-do trader, but a fabulous millionaire—he'd buy all this woodland, cut down every tree, chase away every shadow, and grow corn in the sunlight. He would buy woodland and parkland too—he would burn Aunt Petherick's hidden cottage, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... with windows, but no rooms behind, like a ruin, though he had hitherto entertained the notion that he had slept beneath its roof, and on soft cushions too, which he now plainly perceived could only have been clouds like his fabulous flock. Eager to pursue his discoveries still further, he went on fiddling as he came down the hillock towards the lady, when what was not his horror and surprise on perceiving that the face he had so much admired was hollow as a ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... Fabricate, fabulous, facetious, factitious, fallacious, fallible, fastidious, fatuous, feasible, feculence, fecundity, felicitous, felonious, fetid, feudal, fiducial, filament, filtrate, finesse, flaccid, flagitious, floriculture, florid, fluctuate, foible, forfeiture, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Meanwhile, her own care was to keep the fragile creature who was living upon hope still on this side of the Great Divide. And to this end she worked night and day. She kept her cabin clean and well lighted and well warmed. She bought and made soup, and gave fabulous prices for meat and wine, and sat with her long hours cheering her with stories heard in the saloons and picked up in the streets, and scraps of news from the ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... means properly the autumn season, when the migratory birds fly away; to fly to wyraj means to fly to warm countries. Hence figuratively the folk applies the word wyraj to warm countries and especially to some fabulous, happy countries, lying beyond ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... who have still sound judgment to the value of a sestertium, and sense to the value of an as, let myself be borne away by these fantasies, and I do this for the reason that, if they are not possible, they are at least grandiose and uncommon? Such a fabulous empire would be a thing which, some time or other, after long ages, would seem a dream to mankind. Except when Venus takes the form of Lygia, or even of a slave Eunice, or when art beautifies it, life itself is empty, and many a time it has the face of a monkey. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... After summarizing a letter on this subject from Velasco's predecessor, Montesclaros, the king approves the latter's advice to choose, as such way-station, the islands called Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata (afterward found to be fabulous) instead of Monterey; and orders Velasco to see that a port and settlement be established there, the enterprise to be conducted by Sebastian Vizcaino. Another decree (May 3, 1609) states that, as Velasco has not carried out this order, and advices have ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... blue ether to our former altitude, and floated off over those majestic mountain-tops, toward the west. Loath to part from scenes of such impressive beauty,—scenes, alone paralleled in our recollection by fabulous tales of Oriental enchantment,—we gazed behind us at those flashing crests of alabaster, until they grew small in the distance, and finally were wholly lost to our sight. With them disappeared the last vestige of the solid earth, and we were again afloat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... impeding in some degree their progress in learning, that is, in the classical part of it. They believe these to have inculcated a system of morality frequently repugnant to that of the Christian religion. And the Heathen mythology, which is connected with their writings, and which is fabulous throughout, they conceive to have disseminated romantic notions among youth, and to have made them familiar with fictions, to the prejudice of an unshaken devotedness to the love ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... pox on't! Your vulgar will count this fabulous and impudent now: by that candle, they'll ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... is. The battle on the Alia was fought on the 16th of July; the military tribunes entered upon their office on the first of that month; and the distance between Clusium and Rome is only three good days' marches. It is impossible to restore the true history, but we can discern what is fabulous from what is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... must be to search, in those barbarous and illiterate ages, for the annals of a people, when their first leaders, known in any true history, were believed by them to be the fourth in descent from a fabulous deity, or from a man exalted by ignorance into that character. The dark industry of antiquaries, led by imaginary analogies of names, or by uncertain traditions, would in vain attempt to pierce into that deep obscurity which covers the remote ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... originated from the city of the Tyrians, he took her about with him, without letting people know that he was on terms of undue intimacy with her; and when he was involved in bursting disgrace because of his mistress, he started a fabulous kind of psychopompy[44] for his disciples, and saying, forsooth, that he was the Great Power of God, he ventured to call his prostitute companion the Holy Spirit, and he says that it was on her account he descended. ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... copy on mechanical grounds, and put it in for our modesty and sophistry. In his broad, hot room, all flaring with gas, he stood at a flat stone like a surgeon, and took forms to pieces and dissected huge columns of pregnant metal, and paid off the hands with fabulous amounts of uncurrent bank bills. His wife and he went thrice a year on excursions to the sea-side, and he was forever borrowing a dollar from somebody to ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Colonel Thorn was an American of fabulous wealth, who was for a season or two very notorious in Paris. He was the hero of the often-told story of the two drives to Longchamps the same day; first with one gorgeous equipment of liveries, and a second time with other ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Hercules to the earlier ages; for these our Stoics have declared were wise men, unconquered by labors, despisers of pleasure, and superior to all terrors. Cato did not slay wild beasts, whose pursuit belongs to huntsmen and countrymen, nor did he exterminate fabulous creatures with fire and sword, or live in times when it was possible to believe that the heavens could be supported on the shoulders of one man. In an age which had thrown off its belief in antiquated superstitions, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... the sailors added yet more fabulous things to Peter's knowledge. There was an unknown continent east of Asia, west of America, called on the maps "Gamaland." [2] Now, Peter's consuming ambition was for new worlds to conquer. What of this "Gamaland"? ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... had scarcely shut my eyes when something that fell by me with a great noise awaked me. This was a large piece of raw meat; and at the same time I saw several others fall down from the rocks in different places. I had always regarded as fabulous what I had heard sailors and others relate of the valley of diamonds, and of the stratagems employed by merchants to obtain jewels from thence; but now I found that they had stated nothing but the truth. For the fact is, that the merchants come to the neighborhood of this valley, when the ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... attempted suicide. After the thorough study of him at 23 he was placed in an asylum. There he was occupied at basket weaving and was chiefly notable for keeping up the characteristics that were peculiar to him before. He continually lied and, indeed, seemed to get his main pleasure out of telling fabulous stories to ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... virtual; baseless, in nubibus[Lat]; unsubstantial &c. 4; vain. unborn, uncreated[obs3], unbegotten, unconceived, unproduced, unmade. perished, annihilated, &c. v.; extinct, exhausted, gone, lost, vanished, departed, gone with the wind; defunct &c. (dead) 360. fabulous, ideal &c. (imaginary) 515, supposititious &c. 514. Adv. negatively, virtually ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... creating, by means of poetry, a second life within life, even within common real life. We admire the great facility with which, in his occasional poems, he elevates all circumstances by the feelings, and embellishes them with suitable sentiments, images, and historical and fabulous traditions. Their roughness and wildness belong to his time, his mode of life, and especially to his character, or, if one would have it so, his want of fixed character. He did not know how to curb himself; and so his life, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... his fathers. The expressions by means of which Charles is made to point with unmistakable clearness to a contemplated massacre,[878] of which, however the case may stand with respect to his mother, it is all but certain that he had at this time no idea, can only be regarded as fabulous additions of which the earliest disseminators of the story were altogether ignorant. The fact that the cardinal legate's rejection of the ring was publicly known[879] seems to be a sufficient proof that it was ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... this blow; she, however, carried him off to the moose-deer, and from moose-deer to round-towers, to various architectural antiquities, and to the real and fabulous history of Ireland, on all which the count spoke with learning and enthusiasm. But now, to Colonel Heathcock's great joy and relief, a handsome collation appeared in the dining-room, of which Ulick ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... Northwestern Pennsylvania had been long known, and some use made of it since 1826. For several years experiments had been making in refining the oil. The excellence of the light from it now drew attention to the value of the product, wells began to be bored and oil land sold for fabulous prices. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... there are no ways but the way to which you are accustomed. That is sanity to you, and all else is madness. You have a map of life which is like your maps of the world—with all the safe known places marked by their familiar names, and outside you have drawn childish pictures of fabulous beasts, and written, "This is a desert." But I tell you I have gone into these deserts, and found good green grass there, and sweet spring water, and delightful fruits. And beyond them I have seen ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... into that extraordinary career, in the thread of which, glory and disgrace, far-sighted and princely public spirit and insatiate private greed, were to be so strangely intertwined. In 1592 he planned the great adventure which astonished London by the fabulous plunder of the Spanish treasure-ships; in the same year he was in the Tower, under the Queen's displeasure for his secret marriage, affecting the most ridiculous despair at her going away from the neighbourhood, and pouring forth his flatteries on this old woman of sixty as ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... apparently valueless western land, belonging to her people, has developed fabulous ore, and they say that she is now ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... infant should be subjected, is one of great practical importance. The attempt has been made of late to shake the public faith in its efficacy, and to revive the old fabulous stories and foolish notions as to the production of serious affections of the blood and skin in this manner. At the same time, the increasing frequency and virulence of small-pox are becoming only too evident. We therefore consider it our ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... fine-looking men, their general appearance is good, they have a martial air, and, as far as I can judge, they go through their manoeuvres pretty well. It would be difficult to recognize in them the old soldier of the Pope, the fabulous personage whose duty it was to escort processions, and to fire off the cannon on firework nights; the well-to-do citizen in uniform who, if the weather looked threatening, mounted guard with an umbrella. The Holy Father's ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... pressure sufficient to lift two tons. Not one window in a thousand can stand that strain. The only use of locks is to keep out sneak-thieves and compel the modern scientific educated burglar to make a noise. But making a noise isn't enough here, at night. This place with all its fabulous treasures must be guarded constantly, now, every hour, as if the ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... were in a dying state, somebody might have written for you—Madame Lesperon or your uncle," speaking as if the persons were fabulous creatures. ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas |
