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More "Monstrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I, father. What, keep a cake locked up seven days together, and not give one's friends a bit! That is monstrous! But let us have ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... had to move the weight off me, which was crushing me. Then a roaring sound began to come and go upon the air, louder and louder, faster and faster; the strange pungent scent came again; and then I was thrust down under the weight, monstrous, insupportable; further and further down; and there came a sharp bright streak, like a blade severing the strands of a rope drawn taut and tense; another and another; one was left, and the blade ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... according to the energy of the settlement, might be increased a hundredfold—drained, metalled, tarred, and adorned with splendid telegraph poles and wires—or might be wrapped up in a napkin of neglect, monstrous overgrown hedges and decayed ditches, and allowed to wither: the splendid main road, having regard to its ancient Roman lineage, disdainfully did not care tuppence either way; and for that matter Penny Green, which had ages ago ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... world,"—nor would this appear for a moment extravagant, if one only calls to mind the strange traditions which the Rabbinnical writers have handed down upon theological points of far more importance, or the equally absurd and monstrous notions which the modern history of sectarianism furnishes. From what has been said, however, it appears very clear, that Satan has had too much to do with tobacco. If it be verily the tree of knowledge, it must be admitted that he has preserved it with infinite care, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... girl at sea, and never well ashore. I am always in raw health—the strong mind in the potent body. Had I been at Louisburg, I should have held it, as I held Ticonderoga last July, and drove the English back with monstrous slaughter." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that people are not enough aware of the monstrous state of society, absolutely without a parallel in the history of the world, with a population poor, miserable and degraded in body and mind, as if they were slaves, and yet called freemen. The hopes entertained by many of the effects to be ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... divine gives itself to the human in the spirit of true brotherhood; the son of Zeus takes on the ills of mortality through fraternal love. The second mother of this group is Iphidameia, who declares Neptune to be the father of Otus and Ephialtes, of her monstrous twins, "who at the age of nine years threatened war upon the Gods," and proposed to storm heaven by piling Mount Ossa upon Olympus and Pelion on top of that. Such is the contrast: one set of sons is noble, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... back of the monstrous improbabilities of the sale, was enough to have shaken the reason of Immanuel Kant. The earth seemed banded together to defeat them; the stones and the boys on the street appeared to be in possession of their guilty secret. Flight was their one thought. The treasure of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... massive proportions, standing erect with outstretched arms, and of a mixed and strange composition. The head was of fine gold. The breast and arms were of silver. The belly and thighs of brass. The legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay. While the king was gazing on this monstrous figure with intense interest, his attention was arrested by the appearance of a small stone—this stone was alone; there appeared no hands handling it or moving it. It was cut out of the mountain ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... the belief in their own irresistibility and the exhaustion of their opponents. The full wave of the hideous instruments of warfare which the devilish ingenuity of the Germans had invented, liquid fire, monstrous shells, various kinds of gases including the horrible mustard gas, had struck the Americans squarely and fully, and they had stood and fought ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow; you ride down steeples and staircases and over precipices; you hover in horrible suspense over inhabited towns, vainly seeking for a brake your hand cannot find, to save you from a headlong fall; you plunge into weltering rivers, and rush helplessly at monstrous obstacles. Anon Mr. Hoopdriver found himself riding out of the darkness of non-existence, pedalling Ezekiel's Wheels across the Weald of Surrey, jolting over the hills and smashing villages in his course, while the other man in brown cursed and swore at him and shouted to stop his career. There ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... be born in shape of a beast, bird, fish, or other object, with or without the power to take human form or monstrous size. ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... loose in a hideous manner, and had taken possession of many: yea, I believe that there was never generation before nor since, that could produce so many possessed with devils, deformed, lame, blind, and infected with monstrous diseases, as that generation could. But what was the reason thereof, I mean the reason from God? Why one (and we may sum up more in that answer that Christ gave to his disciples concerning him that was born blind) was, that the works ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... efficient, devoted, inspired, and capable beyond what could be looked for from any other Egyptian, or indeed from any other sentient being. Hassan's hands became tragic and violent as he talked. He showed his teeth and seemed burning with fury. And who has done this monstrous thing? Isaacson dropped out the enquiry. Hamza—him who prayed. That was the answer. And it was through Ibrahim that Hamza had entered the service of my Lord Arminigel; it was Ibrahim's unexampled generosity and nobility that had brought Hamza to ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the time he spent alone in his book-room, sitting with his hands in his lap, staring at the unspeakable thought that paralysed him, the thought that was entangled with the very roots of his creed and that glared at him with monstrous and malignant face above the very altar of his religion—the thought of his last prayer—the effectual prayer, the fervent prayer, the damnable prayer that branded his soul with the mark of Cain, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... did the King and all his warriors marvel at the bold young knight. 'Was ever heard so monstrous a plan?' murmured the warriors each to the other. 'The stripling from a foreign land, with but eleven bold knights to aid him, would seize Burgundy and banish the King from his realm. It ...
— Stories of Siegfried - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... other class on the Lord's day'! The idea of making a man truly moral through the ministry of constables, and sincerely religious under the influence of penalties, is worthy of the mind which could form such a mass of monstrous absurdity as this bill is ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... good-natured discussion of the Land Law question between two other gentlemen present, one of them, a strong Nationalist, smote his Unionist opponent very neatly under the fifth rib. The latter contending that it was monstrous to interfere by law with the principle of freedom of contract, the Nationalist responded, "That cannot be; it must be right and legitimate to do it, for the Imperial Parliament has done it ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... northwest wind and the sea were leagued against it. They sent out threatening fingers and long spinning veils of cloud across it—skirmishers that foretold the black and serried lines, the torn and monstrous masses behind. Below these wild tempest shapes again—in long spaces resting on the sea—the heaven was at peace, shining in delicate greens and yellows, infinitely translucent and serene, above the dazzling lines of water. Over Rome itself there was a strange ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... now to the goal whence he began his course, now to the realms of sunset which he is not destined to reach. He loses his self-command, and knows not what to do, whether to draw tight the reins or throw them loose; he forgets the names of the horses. He sees with terror the monstrous forms scattered over the surface of heaven. Here the Scorpion extended his two great arms, with his tail and crooked claws stretching over two signs of the zodiac. When the boy beheld him, reeking with poison and menacing with his fangs, his ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... way the hideousness of these scenes had never shown itself to her—perhaps because she had been a child at the time, and had thrilled to the delicious excitement of it; but now, as she imagined it all happening again before her eyes, she shivered with horror. How monstrous, how ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... another vile trick of the Frisco faction. So Oakland doubled its brawny fists and swung into San Francisco for blood. And San Francisco, consciously innocent, was no less willing to join issues. To be charged with such a crime was no less monstrous than the crime itself. Besides, for too many tedious hours had the Irish heroically suppressed themselves. Five thousands of them exploded into joyous battle. The women joined with them. The whole amphitheater was filled with the conflict. There were rallies, retreats, charges, and counter-charges. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... but it was enough. Our plan had been discovered, and the chances for escape from now on to the fearful end would be small indeed. My one hope now was to return undetected to the quarters of Dejah Thoris and learn what fate had overtaken her, but how to do it with these great monstrous thoats upon my hands, now that the city probably was aroused by the knowledge of my escape was a ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to the wood, and hid her where 'twas most dense, and there waited on the alert, and glancing, now this way and now that, to see if any were coming. And while thus she stood, nor ever a thought of a wolf crossed her mind, lo, forth of a close covert hard by came a wolf of monstrous size and appalling aspect, and scarce had she time to say, God help me! before he sprang upon her and griped her by the throat so tightly that she might not utter a cry, but, passive as any lambkin, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... more recent development would be found in what is called the "sociological" novel. Monstrous and misshapen as this must seem to us often, if considered as a work of art, it would have to be reckoned with in any investigation of the treatment ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... which had snoodled beside me, its transparent shovel-snout half buried in the sand. Immune from the opiate of the sea, though motionless, with wide, watery-yellow eyes, it gazed upon me as a fascinated child might upon a strange shape monstrous though benign, and as I raised my hand in salutation wriggled off, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... we are all citizens of the same city and war between us, a civil war, a monstrous iniquity to be forgotten, as soon as it may bring in peace; or else there is no city and no home for man in the universe, but only an everlasting conflict between creatures that have nothing in common and no place where they can together be at rest."—Times Literary Supplement, ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... has here absolutely mistaken his work; for instead of exhibiting the Properties of WIT in a clearer Light, and confuting the false Claims which are made to it, he has made it his whole Business to perplex it the more, by introducing, from all Corners, a monstrous Troop of new ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it. He used to say the Cid Ruy Diaz was a very good knight, but that he was not to be compared with the Knight of the Burning Sword, who with one back-stroke cut in half two fierce and monstrous giants. He thought more of Bernardo del Carpio because at Roncesvalles he slew Roland in spite of enchantments, availing himself of the artifice of Hercules when he strangled Antaeus the son of Terra in his arms. He approved highly of the giant Morgante, because altho of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... a commission from McClure's, I was in Pittsburg writing an article on "Homestead and Its Perilous Trades," and the clouds of smoke, the flaming chimneys, the clang of steel, the roar of blast-furnaces and the thunder of monstrous steel rollers made Wisconsin lumber camps idyllic. The serene white peace of West Salem set Pittsburg apart as a sulphurous hell and my description of it became a passionate indictment of an industrial system which could so ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... penal servitude for life. A sentence, I believe, inflicted not so much for the crime, but on account of the position the prisoner formerly occupied in society, and "as a warning to others." This is a formula which, in many cases, is made to sanction monstrous injustice, and in all cases, I may say, is practically inoperative. The only parties warned by the fall and punishment of such an one as the prisoner I here refer to, are those in the same respectable position in life, because they are the only parties who have it in their power to commit ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... she was getting quite new notions as to the significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicable canopied thrones with the simple country as a background, and of saints with architectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally wedged in their skulls. Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning: but all this was apparently a branch of knowledge in which Mr. Casaubon had ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... against his authority, at all events; and her hands remained in his clasp until of his own accord he opened his fingers with an exclamation. "Do you wear bracelets for rings, my fair, or what? What!" From the monstrous bauble in his palm, he raised his eyes to hers, and if she had seen their look she might have answered differently. But her gaze was still on the ring; and as she felt him start, that impish dimple peeped out ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... when anchored under this Spit that in H.M.S. Britomart, a monstrous shark was caught, about twenty feet long, in which were found the bones of some very large animal, possibly those of a bullock, that had been carried out to sea by some current. Steering North-North-West we deepened the water in eight miles ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... that, side by side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin schools, but not the free and home thoughts which found utterance in the language of the people, if the solemn beauty of the Italian Commedia ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ugly, but more pleasant than her English rival novelist, the other pseudonymous George. They had few points in common except that both wrote well and were full of talent of a different kind and were equally monstrous, looking like two ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... language, is "large turtle," derived from the word Mi-she- mi-ki-nock in the Chippewa language. That is, "Mi-she" as one of the adnominals or adjectives in the Ottawa and Chippewa languages, which would signify tremendous in size; and "Mikinock" is the name of mud turtle—meaning, therefore, "monstrous large turtle," as the historians would have it. But we consider this to be a clear error. Whereever those annalists, or those who write about the Island of Mackinac, obtain their information as to ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... Ay, now, 'tis a vulture. O abominable! monstrous! monstrous! has not your vulture a beak? has it not legs, and talons, ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... conditions otherwise. For the purpose of suffrage they may, in the theory of our government, be equal—but we haven't yet demonstrated it. We exclude the Japanese and Chinese. We have included the negro, only within the living generation—and it's entirely evident, now, we made a monstrous mistake by doing it. Equal! Equal! ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... beat it," declared Tom, "and I want to do it without making such a monstrous gun that it will be difficult ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... century. He is said to have made a bold speech to the King; but this I will not believe of any Englishman—at least, of any plebeian Englishman—until I hear it. But there stands his statue in the Guildhall in the act of making his speech, as if the monstrous attempt ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Everywhere, even in the small hamlets and the agricultural districts, the dupes rose against their dupers. The smoldering resentment of years burst into flame, and within a week all that was left of insurance in America was the record of a monstrous and cruel delusion written in the blood of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher, and of registration of the Freethinker were made in consequence of a question as to prosecuting ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... task of emancipating the crown from parliamentary interference. But popular suspicion had been aroused by Charles's secret dealings and James's open professions; and Titus Oates, who knew something about real plans for the reconversion of England, inflated his knowledge into a monstrous tale of a popish plot. The Whigs, as the opposition party came to be called, used it for more than it was worth to damage the Tories under Danby. The panic produced one useful measure, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, many judicial murders, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... ought to be, I hold in intimate persuasion. One woman indeed now alive ... and only that one down all the ages of the world—seems to me to justify for a moment an opposite opinion—that wonderful woman George Sand; who has something monstrous in combination with her genius, there is no denying at moments (for she has written one book, Leila, which I could not read, though I am not easily turned back,) but whom, in her good and evil together, I regard with infinitely ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... observation. Clotilde had evidently not conceived the slightest alarm. The gentle serenity of her features remained unaltered. A few oddities, more or less, in Julia's ways did not constitute a sufficient novelty to attract her particular attention. Her mind, moreover, was too far away from the monstrous abysses yawning at her side; she might have stepped into them and been swallowed up, before she had suspected ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... fond and faithful creature as he is, from being the most docile and obedient of all animals, is made the most dangerous, if he become mad; so men acquire a frightful and not less monstrous power when they are in a state of moral insanity, and break loose from their social and religious obligations. Remember too how rapidly the plague of diseased opinions is communicated, and that if it once gain ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... take his departure if he did not wish his whale-boat to be cracked like a nut against the roof of the tunnel. Alive to his danger, the Commandant abandoned the search after his late prisoner's corpse, and he hastened to gain the open sea. The boat, carried backwards and upwards on the bosom of a monstrous wave, narrowly escaped destruction, and John Rex, climbing to the gallery, saw with much satisfaction the broad back of his out-witted gaoler disappear round the sheltering promontory. The last efforts of his ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... started on your light-weight handicap, Philip. Father was monstrous unreasonable that day. Seemed to think I was coming back here to put my shoulder out for your high bailiffships and bum-bailiffships and heaven knows what. You're welcome to the lot for me, Philip. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... yfaith is my sower friend to all worldly desires ouer taken with the hart of the World, Love? I shall be monstrous proud now, to heare shees every way a most rare woman, that I know thy spirit, and judgement hath chosen; is she wise? is she noble? is she capable of thy vertues? will she kisse this forehead with judiciall lipps where somuch judgement and vertue deserves ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... House believe. It is on a par, indeed, with other legislation that in past years has been engineered through this legislature under the guise of beneficent law. No, not on a par. It is the most arrogant, the most monstrous example of special legislation of them all. And while I do not expect to be able to delay its passage much longer than the time I shall be on ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... yellow rocks of bare limestone, at the foot of which is the small inn, seem to be drawing nearer. All their details become luminously distinct as the air grows darker, while the caverns gape like the black mouths of some stealthily approaching, monstrous, many-headed form. Two men are still working in a field of tobacco, and they go on until lights flash forth from all the houses in the valley. Then they slowly move off into the dusk with their ox ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... cannibalism is certainly owing to the fact that there are moments when game is scarce and hunger great. The savages began by eating human flesh to appease the demands of an appetite rarely satiated; subsequently the priests regulated and satisfied the monstrous custom. What was a meal, was raised to the dignity of a ceremony, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... the narrow-minded idiot, thought this a good time to play off a smart trick on one of Smith's regular customers. So he paraded a large variety of goods before her, and took occasion to recommend a very pretty article, for which he charged a monstrous price, because he said it was a very scarce pattern, and it was with great difficulty they had secured a single piece. As the lady herself could perceive, it had not been opened before; not a soul in the village had even seen the outside of it. Now, it must not be supposed that Mrs. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... friendly terms—or striving to be so—with people in high places, who are but too often revelling in crimes, with the very name of which they would scorn even to pollute their lips; and I would ask, did such a monstrous absurdity ever enter into any one's head as to doubt from these amicable relations whether the Government of this country or its agents repudiated such abomination of abominations? If for political purposes you submit to this latter, while for commercial purposes you refuse ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Mrs. Fairbanks. "Would you ask a young lady to go out and bury herself alive in such a country as that, or ask her to wait an indefinite number of years till the young man should return? Why it is simply monstrous." And Mrs. Fairbanks fixed her glasses firmly on her nose and gazed at Brown as if she ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... occasioned by his being employed in making of Cyder in a very cold Cellar. He had not had a Stool for some Days: at first he took a Dose of Physic, and some of the saline Draughts; but in a Day or two complained that his Belly had grown to a monstrous Size, and that he had not made Water for above twenty-four Hours; on examining, we found the Bladder so much distended as to reach up to the Navel; and upon a Catheter's being introduced, above two Quarts of Water were drawn off, and ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... down-crushed spirit, the hurled-back prayers Of wretches now long dead,—their dire bequests.— In me the echo of the stifled cry Of children for their bartered mothers' breasts. I claim no race, no race claims me; I am No more than human dregs; degenerate; The monstrous offspring of the monster, Sin; I am—just what I am.... The race that fed Your wives and nursed your babes would do the ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... what though the oven smoke? And what though I die ere morn? There was I nourished and tended, and there was Taheia born." Noon was high on the High-place, the second noon of the feast; And heat and shameful slumber weighed on people and priest; And the heart drudged slow in bodies heavy with monstrous meals; And the senseless limbs were scattered abroad like spokes of wheels; And crapulous women sat and stared at the stones anigh With a bestial droop of the lip and a swinish rheum in the eye. As about the dome of the bees in the time for the drones to fall, The dead and the maimed are scattered, ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... monstrous, perfectly atrocious, ugh! Let us make a little tour of a walk. The tombola is finished. An Irish ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... was regarded by all as influencing the fate, not of the King only, but of all who remained in communication with him, if not in this world, at any rate in the world to come. Moreover, in this particular case, while no one believed the monstrous charges against Gregory, there was sufficient in Henry's past conduct to give credibility to anything that ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... "The monstrous egoism of it all!" said Henry, laughing. "It was all got up to give me a stage, and nothing else. I didn't care whether you enjoyed it or not. What dragons ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Unlike the noise of machinery in a factory it was not homogeneous. Each sound was intended to attract attention and to evoke a certain response, but what response and from whom? Long levers projecting from the steel deck wagged back and forth spastically like the legs of monstrous insects struggling on their backs. Several times Dewforth was temporarily blinded by an explosion of blue light as a fuse blew or something short-circuited among the rows of knife-switches and rheostats on the panels. One would never really ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... veracity, Prescott has relied almost entirely upon these sources for the material of his popular work. No person can calmly survey the field to-day, compare the statements of the various authors, and visit the country itself, without seeing clearly how much of absurd exaggeration and monstrous fiction has been foisted upon the reading public relative to this period of the conquest ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... alarmed the nation, and made them attentive to the operations of parliament. Hence the publication of the parliamentary debates. And where is the injury, if the members act upon honest principles? For a public assembly to be afraid of having their deliberations published is monstrous, and speaks for itself. No mortal can construe such a procedure to their advantage; and the practice of locking the doors is sufficient to open the eyes of the blind;—they must see that all is not well ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... springing from their seats, seized their guns, ready to fire at the monster as soon as it should come within range. At a leisurely pace the tiger trotted on, the outline of its form seen clearly in the moonlight. It had just got close to the water, when, Burnett firing, the monstrous brute rolled over, casting a glance of defiance at the foe it had only then discovered. A second shot laid it lifeless on the ground. Both gentlemen reloaded; and Reginald proposed hurrying down to ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... not know yet, rose up in orderly logic, and joined what was now in her mind, completing the whole hideous tale of wickedness that had ended in the death of Ida Bamberger, who had been murdered, perhaps, in desperation to avert a crime even more monstrous. The dying girl's faint voice came back to Margaret ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... after the appeal to what were called facts, came a series of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less reputable classes, to the officers ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to see not only Goldilocks but also the Three Bears and they took a remarkable journey through the air to do so. Tommy even rode on a Rocket and met the monstrous Blue Frog. When they arrived at Goldilocks' house they found that the Three Bears had been there before them and mussed everything up, much to Goldilocks' despair. "We must drive those bears out of the country!" said Pa Flyaway. Then they journeyed underground ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on Grandpa's Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... you for me,—for one who loves you so truly?" When the question was put to her in that guise she could not quite tell so monstrous a lie as would be needed for an answer fit for her purpose. "This is a matter, Marion, in which a man has a right to demand an answer,—to demand ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... cry, resembling a shriek rather than a bark, while he struggled desperately to return. The next instant, to my horror, my faithful animal disappeared beneath the surface. As he sank I caught sight, through the water, of a monstrous alligator, which was dragging him down. Had I possessed another charge of powder, I might have rescued him, or, at all events, have avenged his death; ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... work upon the figure, perfecting every detail of expression, until he fancied he could feel and see the silver limbs of the dead Christ suffering upon the cross under the diabolical skill of his long fingers. The monstrous horror of the thought made him work marvels, and the fancied realisation of an idea that would startle even a hardened unbeliever, lent a feverish impulse to this ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... wears his leathern coat. The whole populace pursues him, hooting, yelling, and firing blank shots in volleys after him. Thus driven out of the city, he is detained for seven days in the great chamber of horrors at the Samyas monastery, surrounded by monstrous and terrific images of devils and skins of huge serpents and wild beasts. Thence he goes away into the mountains of Chetang, where he has to remain an outcast for several months or a year in a narrow den. If he dies before ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... newspaper report of to-day that leases for sixty years were to be given to indigo planters, and this without any authority from home. He seems to have suspected from the first that Lord W. would do some monstrous thing, and certainly he does ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... Among the many who did so, were two gentlemen, deputed by the Viceroy of Sicily [2] to our Duke on public business. Now these two agreeable persons met me upon the piazza: I had been shown them in passing, and now they made monstrous haste to catch me up; then, with caps in hand, they uttered an oration so ceremonious, that it would have been excessive for a Pope. I bowed, with every protestation of humility. They meanwhile continued loading me with compliments, until at last I prayed them, for kindness' sake, to leave the piazza ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... to a comfortable level all parts of the area over which I had need to bend? Though no horticulturist, perhaps, ever had such a thought before, expense was the sole objection visible. Called away just then for another long absence, I gave orders that no "dust" should leave the house; and found a monstrous heap on my return. The road-contractors supplied "sweepings" at a shilling a load. Beginning at the outskirts of my property, I raised a mound three feet high and three feet broad, replanted the shrubs on the back edge, and left a handsome border for flowers. ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... would put up with it. Londoners, as a rule, take their houses as they can get them, looking only to situation, size, and price. What Grecian, what Roman, what Turk, what Italian would endure, or would ever have endured, to use a room with a monstrous cantle in the form of a parallelogram cut sheerly out of one corner of it? This is the shape of room we have now adopted,—or rather which the builders have adopted for us,—in order to throw the whole first floor into one apartment which ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... prodigious noise he hears, Which suddenly along the forest spread; Whereat from out his quiver he prepares An arrow for his bow, and lifts his head; And, lo! a monstrous herd of swine appears, And onward rushes with tempestuous tread, And to the fountain's brink precisely pours, So that the giant's join'd by all the boars. Morgante Maggiore ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... to be aggressive is furnished by his own account of the consequences. Two rivals, he says, one of whom seems to have been Bernard of Clairvaux, took the field against him, "and succeeded in exciting the hostility of certain ecclesiastical and secular authorities, by charging monstrous things, not only against my faith, but also against my manner of life, to such a point as to detach from me some of my principal friends; even those who preserved some affection for me dared no longer display it, for fear. God is my witness that I never heard of the union of an ecclesiastical ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... death which were already girdling Paris, that flabby Cyclops, Gambetta, was to mouth his monstrous platitudes, and brood over the battle-smoke, a nightmare of pomposity and fanfaronade—in a balloon. All France was bowed down in shame at the sight of the grotesque convoy, who were proclaiming her destiny among nations, and their destiny to lead her to victory ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... boat, the last surviving boat of all that hailed from Bruntsea. That monstrous billow had tossed it up like a school-boy's kite, and dropped it whole, with an upright keel, in the inland sea, though nearly half full of water. Driven on by wind and wave, it labored heavily toward us; and ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... what seemed like vast folded leathern wings, which shook and swayed in the air at every step. Its pace was about as fast as that of a man, and it moved with ease and lightness. It seemed like some enormous bat, or rather like a winged crocodile, or yet again like one of those monstrous dragons of which I had read, but in whose actual existence I had never believed. Yet here I saw one living and moving before me—an actual dragon, with the exception of a tail; for that appendage, which plays so great a part in all the pictures of dragons, had no place here. This ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... Danced the Beggar's Dance to please them. Now, in search of new adventures, From his lodge went Pau-Puk-Keewis, Came with speed into the village, Found the young men all assembled In the lodge of old Iagoo, Listening to his monstrous stories, To his wonderful adventures. He was telling them the story Of Ojeeg, the Summer-Maker, How he made a hole in heaven, How he climbed up into heaven, And let out the summer-weather, The perpetual, pleasant Summer; How the Otter first essayed it; How the Beaver, Lynx, and Badger Tried ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... metaphysical speculation—and we do not laugh at them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief. Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew and they could not grow; they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by Christianity with scorn and indignation. But it is with human institutions, as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead when their power to hurt us has ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... I took alone, down muddy lanes, in the bad winter weather, carrying that parlour, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone in it, everywhere: a monstrous load that I was obliged to bear, a daymare that there was no possibility of breaking in, a weight that brooded on ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... readiness they moved backward step by step. The lions began to pace up and down the strip of sand, tossing their shaggy heads toward the frightened men, and then the leader, a monstrous fellow with a mane that swept the ground, advanced a few paces and uttered a tremendous roar that seemed to shake ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... King answered, 'I know not if I myself appear less monstrous in black or red, and my son shall be habited as I be. ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... from now stranger will meet with stranger, but when they make the sign of peace and sit down with one another, they shall find that words come more easily, though one may seem outwardly monstrous to the other. Only, now we must go our own way. We are youths setting forth on our journey of testing, while the Elders wish ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... Both he compares, and measures in his mind; And sometimes casts an eye upon the east, 220 And sometimes looks on the forbidden west. The horses' names he knew not in the fright: Nor would he loose the reins, nor could he hold them tight. Now all the horrors of the heavens he spies, And monstrous shadows of prodigious size, That, decked with stars, lie scattered o'er the skies. There is a place above, where Scorpio, bent In tail and arms, surrounds a vast extent; In a wide circuit of the heavens he shines, And fills the space of two celestial signs. 230 ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... differences of which the chicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough represented in the vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ that had laid itself by accident. That other supernatural school of thought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... confronted a black and monstrous figure. A rifle barrel caught some glinting beams. "Halt! halt!" He was dismayed for a moment, but he presently thought that he recognized the nervous voice. As he stood tottering before the rifle barrel, he called out: "Why, hello, ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... was far more various and picturesque than nowadays. Both sexes dressed in gaudy colors and delighted in strange fashions, so that, {497} is Roger Ascham said, "he thought himself most brave that was most monstrous in misorder." For women the fashion of decollete was just coming in, as so many fashions do, from the demi-monde. To Catharine de' Medici is attributed the invention of the corset, an atrocity to be excused only by her own urgent need ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... brain, but a pain came with the effort of memory. So my eyes went back to my grandfather in the window. His face was now become black as Scipio's, and he wore a red turban and a striped cotton gown that was too large for him. And he was sewing. This was monstrous! ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... almost like brutes, and scarcely knowing, and assuredly never caring about the existence of God; some of them are even counted cannibals. The Gipsies of this country are altogether different; for monstrous crimes are ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... on the left side his well-handled spear Grasped where the ash was knottiest hewn, and smote, And with no missile wound, the monstrous boar Right in the hairiest hollow of his hide Under the last rib, sheer through bulk and bone, Deep in; and deeply smitten, and to death, The heavy horror with his hanging shafts, Leapt, and fell furiously, and from raging lips Foamed out the latest ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... all giddy. With an effort he oriented himself so that the cat's vision became his, and he watched in distaste as the chickens scurried, scrawny wings lifted and beaks achirp, this way and that to escape the monstrous cat. ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... to one, of whose great efficacy we have frequent instances in sacred history: I mean, the just judgment of God against an offending people." The state of public morals, Fielding considers, to have drawn down upon society this signal visitation of Providence. "Indeed, such monstrous impieties and iniquities have I both seen and heard of, within these last three years, during my sojourning in what is called the world, particularly the last winter, while I tarried in the great city, that, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... delight, I beheld from my window—I may say, indeed, from my bed—the stupendous vision. The beams of the rising sun shed over it a variety of tints; a cloud of spray was ascending from the crescent; and as I viewed it from above, it appeared like the steam rising from the boiler of some monstrous engine.... ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... scene on the lake had been exciting, it became not less so on shore, when all the negroes, male and female, crowding together, began to scale, strip, and salt the fish. Each of them had an account to give of some grand fishery, where a monstrous fish, a mile in length, had been taken by some fortunate "Sambo" of the South. The girls gaped with terror and astonishment, the men winking and trying to look grave, while spinning these yarns, which certainly beat all the wonders ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... was the Satyr, strangely unreal for all that he cast a shadow and tossed the dust with his hoofs. After him from the brake came a monstrous lout, a thing of horse and rhinoceros, chewing a straw as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman and two Wolf-women; then the Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes in her peaked red face, and then others,—all hurrying eagerly. As they came forward ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... brain, was the dank and noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death and lived on death. And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows of the anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of evil that dared not face him in battle but that knew that, soon ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... little later in the Morning of Time—later by perhaps some two or three hundred thousand years. Monstrous mammals now held sway over the fresh, green round of the young earth, so exuberant in her youthful vigor that she could not refrain from flooding the Poles themselves with a tropical luxuriance of flower and tree. The supremacy of the Giant Reptiles ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... hardly conceivable that Christian nations should go to war to-day for the settlement of points of doctrine. Three hundred years ago the whole church thought that necessary; to-day a very large part of the church would think it horrible and monstrous. It is not very long ago that the church believed in the settlement by force of disputes between individuals. The wager of battle was supposed to be a proper and Christian way of determining the guilt or innocence of an accused person. To ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... no sorer misfortune in all human destiny, than when the mighty of the earth are not also the first men. Then everything becometh false and distorted and monstrous. ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... much sense in that," admitted the scientist, "until you stop to think that paleontologists adopted the word 'thunder' as meaning something large and monstrous, as thunder is the loudest ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... balanced are even the very mightiest of these monarchs of the woods in all their proportions and circumstances there never is anything overgrown or monstrous-looking about them. On coming in sight of them for the first time, you are likely to say, "Oh, see what beautiful, noble-looking trees are towering there among the firs and pines!"—their grandeur being in the mean time in great part invisible, but to the living eye it will be manifested sooner ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... many things in creation besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything which is in nature is—or has the right to be—in art. It includes in its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and accounts kings and emperors to be mere catchpolls and constables, bound to execute with implicit faith all the commands of insolent ecclesiastics. Bellarmin was made a cardinal for his efforts and devotion to the papal cause, and maintaining this monstrous paradox,—that if the pope forbid the exercise of virtue, and command that of vice, the Roman church, under pain of a sin, was obliged to abandon virtue for vice, if it would not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... withered tree stood apart, an outcast from its fellows. The thought struck me as I went up to it, and tapped the decayed trunk with my fingers: "You and I, my friend—we have seen our past, and are out of the pale now." With this I sat down on one of the huge roots, that coiled like monstrous serpents at my feet, and leaning my head against the tree prepared to ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... silent battle of wills raged. Upon one side was a horrible and gigantic brain, of undreamed of power; upon the other side a strong man, fighting for all that life holds dear, wielding against that monstrous and frightful brain a weapon wrought of high-tension electricity, applied with all the skill that earthly ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and getting the corners of his monstrous shirt-collar (Bob's private property, conferred upon his son and heir in honor of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... brilliant and the shapes startling, some almost to grotesqueness, though even such added to the charm and romance of the landscape as the giant cacti render weirdly beautiful the waste spots of the sad Mohave. And over all the sun shone huge and round and red, a monster sun above a monstrous world, its light dispersed by the humid air of Caspak—the warm, moist air which lies sluggish upon the breast of this great mother ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... complaint, she gathered herself for her spring. A week, and then another, she stood breathless and following with eyes astrain the figure of her ally, little Belgium, gallant and heroic, which had moved out upon the world arena, the first to offer battle to the armour-weighted, monstrous war lord of Europe, on his way to sate his soul long thirsty for blood—men's if he could, women's and little children's by preference, being less costly. And as she stood and strained her eyes across the ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... repaired on board, taking Ben with him. As they pulled up the harbour in a shore boat towards the frigate, which lay lashed alongside a hulk, Ben was astonished at the number of ships he saw, and the vast size of many of them. It seemed to him as if the wind could never affect such monstrous constructions, even to move them along through the water; and as to the sea tossing them about as it did the boats to which he was accustomed, that seemed impossible. Several of them carried a hundred huge iron guns, and others even a larger number. He saw many ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... the same time I have no fear of its ever becoming law. But it may be useful, for its monstrous and unprincipled provisions will teach the Imperial Government the folly of permitting a Colonial Legislature to tamper with those great and holy principles of the Constitution, on the preservation of which the prosperity and happiness of the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... behind these twinkling masses I knew were all things tragic, comic—people laughing, fighting, hating, scheming, dreaming, loving, living. I thought of that row of cabins de luxe that I had seen on the Christmas boat. Here was the same thing magnified, a monstrous caravansary with but one question over its doors: ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... forced in the morning to rise and dress myself in the dark, because they would not suffer my kinsman's servant to disturb me at the hour I had desired to be called. I was now resolved to break through all measures to get away, and after sitting down to a monstrous breakfast of cold beef, mutton, neats'-tongues, venison-pasty, and stale beer, took leave of the family; but the gentleman would needs see me part of my way, and carry me a short cut through his own grounds, which he told me would save ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... all his days, but now he turned instinctively to a human being. His hand was wet and cold. It grasped Philip's with feeble, despairing energy. The old man was fighting with the fear of death. And Philip thought that all must go through that. Oh, how monstrous it was, and they could believe in a God that allowed his creatures to suffer such a cruel torture! He had never cared for his uncle, and for two years he had longed every day for his death; but now he could not overcome the compassion that filled his heart. What a price ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... third brother, who was called the Chevalier de Savoie, died in consequence of a fall from his horse. The Prince Eugene was a younger brother: he had two sisters, who were equally ugly; one of them is dead, and the other is still living (1717) in a convent in Savoy. The elder was of a monstrous shape, but a mere dwarf. She led a very irregular life. She afterwards ran away with a rogue, the Abbe de la Bourlie, whom she obliged to marry her at Geneva; they used to beat each ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... were peculiar to their order, and which gave them, with the Spaniards, the name of orejones.29 This ornament was so massy in the ears of the sovereign, that the cartilage was distended by it nearly to the shoulder, producing what seemed a monstrous deformity in the eyes of the Europeans, though, under the magical influence of fashion, it was regarded as ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... I do that my own personal decease is not more certain than that our religion will subdue the world, I own that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I pass my thoughts around the globe, and consider how distant is yet that triumph. There are the realms on which the crescent beams, the monstrous many-headed gods of India, the Chinaman's heathenism, the African's devil-rites. These are, to a large extent, principalities and powers of darkness with which our religion has never been brought into collision, save at trivial and far separated points, and in these cases the attack ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... know that, but I am without reason afraid of them. I think of the demons as being like monstrous bats. But that is a silly use ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... said the king, "are monstrous to the contemplation of youth only. You are learning your lesson early; I have studied mine for many years, and with a bitterness of soul which in some measure prepared me for the completion. My kingdom has passed from me at the moment you have lost your ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... distance, that we might not encumber each other's motions, ere the triple giant-brotherhood drew near to attack us. They were about twice our height, and armed to the teeth. Through the visors of their helmets their monstrous eyes shone with a horrible ferocity. I was in the middle position, and the middle giant approached me. My eyes were busy with his armour, and I was not a moment in settling my mode of attack. I saw that his body-armour was somewhat clumsily made, and that the overlappings ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... it. Everything is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There is ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... a crab which lives on the cocoa-nuts; it is very common on all parts of the dry land, and grows to a monstrous size: it is closely allied or identical with the Birgos latro. The front pair of legs terminate in very strong and heavy pincers, and the last pair are fitted with others weaker and much narrower. It would at first be thought quite impossible for a crab ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... case against the prisoner looked extremely black. That monstrous figure of Owen Saxham, based upon an ingenious hypothesis of guilt, and plastered over with a marvellous mixture of truths and falsities, facts and conjectures, grew uglier ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... enough for naughty girls, and long enough for two letters, faith. Congreve and Delaval have at last prevailed on Sir Godfrey Kneller to entreat me to let him draw my picture for nothing; but I know not yet when I shall sit.(26)—It is such monstrous rainy weather, that there is no doing with it. Secretary St. John sent to me this morning, that my dining with him to-day was put off till to-morrow; so I peaceably sat with my neighbour Ford, dined with him, and came home at six, and am now in bed as usual; and now it is time ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... "'Tis monstrous!" exclaimed Hart, bitterly, as he realized the travesty. "You cannot act and never could. I was a fool to ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... pistol from his belt, he sprang to the brass gun, held the pan of his pistol over the touch-hole and fired. The shot was succeeded by the hiss of the cannon's priming, then the blaze and the crashing thunder of the monstrous gun burst upon the savages with such deafening roar that it seemed as if their very ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... of aristocracy by no means resembles those kinds which preceded it. It will be observed at once, that as it applies exclusively to manufactures and to some manufacturing callings, it is a monstrous exception in the general aspect of society. The small aristocratic societies which are formed by some manufacturers in the midst of the immense democracy of our age, contain, like the great aristocratic societies of former ages, some men who are very opulent, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and the proposition which he related was so monstrous, that Mary, in spite of her real distress, could not help laughing out. "I really cannot help it," she said; "well, it really was a most extraordinary statement, I confess. But, my dear Charlie, you are not afraid that he will ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... 'Monstrous, though! monstrous!' pursued the butcher. 'The boys of this town be gettin' past all control. Proper young limbs, I call some ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... he must see Miss Farwell again. She must listen to his explanation and apology. She must somehow understand. For apart from his interest in the young woman herself, there was that purpose of the minister to win her to the church. It was a monstrous thought that he himself should be the means of strengthening her feeling against the cause to which he had given his life. So he had gone to Judge Strong's home early that evening determined to see her. But at the gate, when he saw Dr. Harry turning in as if to stop, ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... for the thing at the back of her head, he would have done it now. Nothing but that gave him courage to abstain. It grew bigger and bigger, more shapeless, monstrous, absurd, and abominable, as he looked at it. Nothing should force upon him the necessity of assisting to carry such an abortion through the world. "One ought to sacrifice everything to friendship," said ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the first mate's indignities throws Corkey into a long fit of strangling, ending with a monstrous sneeze. ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... place on such a plant. Flowers in spring and early summer. It requires warm greenhouse or stove treatment. There are some fine examples of this species at Kew. A variety of this species, with a fasciated or monstrous habit, is ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards by a slow and stately motion; the hieroglyphs were crystalline formations; and the shaft of the great Pyramid was the air-hole of a volcano. De Maistre preferred a similar explanation of the monstrous structures of modern society. The hand of man could never have reared, and could never uphold them. If we cannot say that Burke laboured in constant travail with the same perplexity, it is at least true that he was keenly alive to it, and that one of the reasons why he dreaded ...
— Burke • John Morley
... shrieked Dumiger, "I am a man: and it is because I am a man, a free man of Dantzic, that I appeal against this monstrous treatment. Be a man! why, I appeal to you, sir, to be a man, and to give up that situation, if it can only be retained by cruelty to others. I say again, be you a man, and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... middle, the crocodiles to eat them, and the women not to show them any favor or wish them well, if they broke their word." Sometimes they performed the pasambahan for greater solemnity and confirmation of the oath. That consisted in bringing forward the figure of some monstrous beast asking that they might be broken into pieces by it if they failed in their promise. Others, having placed a lighted candle in front of them, said that as that candle melted and was consumed, so might he who failed in his promise be ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... from the present article, that I denied that Rawleigh was the writer of his own great work!—because I have shown how great works may be advantageously pursued by the aid of "Literary Union." It is a monstrous inference! The chimera which plays before his eyes is his own contrivance; he starts at his own phantasmagoria, and leaves me, after all, to fight with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... as the rest with all dilligence. The morning early following we marched without making great noise, or singing as accustomed. Sejourning awhile, we came to a lake 6 leagues wide, about it a very pleasant country imbellished with great forests. That day our wild people killed 2 Bears, one monstrous like for its biggnesse, the other a small one. Wee arrived to a fine sandy bancke, where not long before many Cabbanes weare errected and places made where Prisoners ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... The monstrous deference of the footman who received Anthony's coat and hat gave a disconcerting fillip to the latter's uneasiness. As a respectful butler preceded the party upstairs, he felt as if he were being conducted to ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Derga's Hostel" is a specimen of remarkable beauty and power. The primitive nature of the story is shown by the fact that the plot turns upon the disasters that follow on the violation of tabus or prohibitions often with a supernatural sanction, by the monstrous nature of many of the warriors, and by the utter absence of any attempt to rationalise or explain the beliefs implied or the marvels related in it. The powers and achievements of the heroes are fantastic and extraordinary ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... apart as pensions of considerable amounts to the mistresses of grandees, and persons in high offices of the state, and also in order to political and other purposes, far alien to the objects of the institution. The Roman Catholics of other countries are scarcely able to credit that so monstrous an abuse of the pontifical authority really exists, it not being possible to conceive that, for a paltry sum of money, Christians can remain exempt from an ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... disturbing influence at the bottom of the pool. Then, as Phil continued to gaze, that influence revealed itself as a shapeless fawn-coloured something imperfectly seen through the disturbed water, and the next moment an enormous head emerged, a pair of monstrous jaws gaped widely, and the air of the cavern at once became again surcharged with the disgusting effluvium which Phil had once before observed. As Stukely gazed, fascinated, at the terrifying object ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... emulation was very keen. "Well," said the Beau-Site, "let 'em go! With their Captain Deverax! We shall be better without 'em!" And that deadliest of all feuds sprang up —a rivalry between the guests of rival hotels. The Metropole had issued a general invitation to a dance, and after the monstrous conduct of the Clutterbucks the question arose whether the Beau-Site should not boycott the dance. However, it was settled that the truly effective course would be to go with critical noses in the air, and emit unfavourable comparisons with the Beau-Site. The Beau-Site ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... practices, the monstrous impudence, the cruel rapacity and enormous gains of the obscene tribe of quacks, together with the mischief they do, and the ruin they work, would require much more space to adequately ventilate than we can devote to it here. The healing art is a noble one, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about it, one that belonged among western mining camps or among the half savage dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact that it lived on a corn farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer, "something monstrous in Nature." ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... times High Sheriff of the two counties; he received Elizabeth, his sovereign and patroness, at his seat at Hinchinbrooke (one of the convents), and in general he played the role with which we are so tediously familiar in the case of the new and monstrous ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... in which the individual is but an atom. It is a monstrous tree—a veritable Ygdrasyl— penetrating both the region of darkness and the realm of light. Whatever its peculiarities—whether monarchical or republican, Christian or Pagan—it is a goodly tree when it brings forth ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... "there was a monstrous oak chest,—iron bound, or brass bound,—where the crown and jewels were hid away for a great many years. At the time when Scotland was united to England, they put these things in this chest; and they were left there so long ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... these, is habitually slandered by them in self-defense. To all the ladies in whose welfare they deem themselves entitled to a voice and interest they hint at the vices and general unworth of the "ladies' man" in no uncertain terms, and to their wives relate without shame the most monstrous falsehoods about him. Nor are they restrained by the consideration that he is their friend; the qualities which have engaged their own admiration make it necessary to warn away those to whom the allurement would be a peril. So the man of charming personality, while loved by all the ladies ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... of the monstrous being whose unveiled face she had never seen, was not deceived by the suavity of his manner. Nevertheless, she fought down her terror, knowing how much might depend upon her retaining her presence of mind. How much of her ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... Jesuit doors. It would ill suit his plans if only two common rascals were to swing for it. Far better let it remain a mystery open to awful guesses. Omne ignotum pro horrifico.... Lovel's temper was getting the better of his prudence, and the sight of this monstrous baboon with his mincing speech stirred in ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... say it results in the following monstrous figment:—that the fruit of Herod's incestuous connexion with Herodias had been a daughter, who was also named Herodias; and that she,—the King's own daughter,—was the immodest one[48] who came in and danced before him, 'his ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... in the arm and the ball came from the rear. Again was Conway behind him. The thought that he might be slain in this treacherous manner was distracting, but what could he do? He durst not complain; such a monstrous charge against a brother officer would have to be substantiated by the best of proof. He could only avoid Conway as much as possible during battle, and hope for the best. After the battle at Milton, by reason of ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... helplessness. What in God's name could he do? Could he denounce Wardour to Captain Helding on bare suspicion—without so much as the shadow of a proof to justify what he said? The captain would decline to insult one of his officers by even mentioning the monstrous accusation to him. The captain would conclude, as others had already concluded, that Crayford's mind was giving way under stress of cold and privation. No hope—literally, no hope now, but in the numbers of the expedition. Officers and men, they all liked ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... keep people waiting in this manner," he boomed; "perfectly monstrous." The next moment the door was shut and bolted, and Draycott followed the Lascar's example—just in time: green dressing-gown was returning with his sponge. In official parlance, a general action ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration. Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... "you have attained your end, and have certainly chosen a particularly delicate moment for your intrusion. I would not brawl in the presence of death, but I can assure you that if I were a younger man your monstrous conduct ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the studied craft of the scripture-makers, in making every part of this romantic book of school-boy's eloquence bend to the monstrous idea of a Son of God, begotten by a ghost on the body of a virgin, there is no imposition we are not justified in suspecting them of. Every phrase and circumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... such as you are, and on her hands in one way or another, she carves and chisels, and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue. She may succeed so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great, sad, monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the monument at once of her success and her failure, the object of her compassion, the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form into which her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... here," writes Dickens, "told me of an interview he had with the King;" being ordered by their High Mightinesses to solicit his Majesty in this matter. King "harbors 'most monstrous wicked designs, not fit to be spoken of in words,' reports Ginkel. 'It is certain,' added he, 'if the King of Prussia continue in the mind he is in at present, we shall see scenes here as wicked and bloody as any that were ever heard of since the creation of the world.' 'Will sacrifice ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... few amateurs who never go their way heedlessly; who savor their Paris, so to speak; who know its physiognomy so well that they see every wart, and pimple, and redness. To others, Paris is always that monstrous marvel, that amazing assemblage of activities, of schemes, of thoughts; the city of a hundred thousand tales, the head of the universe. But to those few, Paris is sad or gay, ugly or beautiful, living ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... in Stormy Winds"; or it may be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"—consisting of seven separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from Scripture ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... some Pallace, or some stately tower, Which ouer-lookes the neighbour buildings round In scorning wise, and to the Starres vp growes, Which in short time his owne weight ouerthrowes. What monstrous pride, nay what impietie Incen'st him onward to the Gods disgrace? When his two children, Cleopatras bratts, To Phaebe and her brother he compar'd, Latonas race, causing them to be call'd The Sunne and Moone? Is not this folie right? And is not this the Gods to make his ...
— A Discourse of Life and Death, by Mornay; and Antonius by Garnier • Philippe de Mornay
... the master of Addison, and of Boileau, the master of Pope, will appear ridiculous to an Englishman. To accuse the vicious style which prevailed in the age of Bossuet, Fenelon, and Pascal, will appear monstrous to every one with the least tincture of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... like this idea at all, and became more than ever intent on his own matrimonial prospects. He almost thought that he had a right to Lady Ongar's money, and he certainly did think that a monstrous injustice was done to him by this idea of a marriage between her and his cousin. "I mean to ask her as I've gone so far, ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... not think of remaining at sea. It would be monstrous for a man heir to L10,000 a year, besides very large accumulations, to be knocking about the world and running the risk of having his head taken off with a round-shot every day. I earnestly entreat you not to dream of ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... instances of regeneration in mind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to consider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently from other men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin therefore by asking a general psychological question as to what the inner conditions are which may make one human character differ so ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... not have to drive the peyondix-beam to the planet Strett; it was already there. And there was the monstrous First Lord Thinker Zoyar. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... and wonderfully incline to the worse; of our laws and customs there are many that are barbarous and monstrous nevertheless, by reason of the difficulty of reformation, and the danger of stirring things, if I could put something under to stop the wheel, and keep it where it is, I would do it ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... body, up through her strong young soul, surged joy of freedom and joy of hope. Compared with what her lot had been until such a few brief days before, this lot of friendless wanderer in the wilderness was dark indeed. But she was comparing it with the monstrous dream from which it was the awakening. She was ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... tactful, I know, but you exaggerate, Katharine. People are talking about us. She was right to tell us. It only confirms my own feeling—the position is monstrous." ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and arranged themselves in a circle around a large stone not far from the shore, and which Orm well knew. What was his surprise when he saw that the stone had now completely assumed the form of a man, though of a monstrous and gigantic one! He could clearly perceive that the little blue lights were borne by dwarfs, whose pale clay-coloured faces, with their huge noses and red eyes, disfigured, too, by birds' bills and owls' eyes, were supported ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... country, increasing the population in one or two years from a few thousand to several hundred thousand. A large number crossed the plains from the Western States, and many of them sought for farming lands upon which to settle. To them a grant of land, leagues in extent, seemed a monstrous wrong to which they could not be reconciled. The vagueness, also, in many instances, of the boundaries of the land claimed gave force and apparent reason to their objections. They accordingly settled upon what they found unenclosed or uncultivated, ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... about putting it to more practical use than to gild an hour with an old legend. They told how the spook of the Spanish captain haunted the wreck, and that the gold was guarded by a dragon in the shape of a monstrous horned and mottled frog, or some other devil of the sea, to which the diver did seriously incline, but not to make him give up the undertaking. He prudently, however, consulted with an old Indian witch, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... of the English attitude towards the war was the disposition to treat it as a monstrous joke. It is a disposition traceable in a vast proportion of the British literature of the time. In spite of violence, cruelty, injustice, and the vast destruction and still vaster dangers of the struggles, that disposition held. The English mind refused flatly to see anything ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... be a monstrous thing for a man to do! But Drought's head is quite turned. You can ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... words so monstrous, so intolerable, that Erica, accustomed as she was to discourtesies, broke down altogether. It was so heartless, so cruelly false, and she was so perfectly defenseless! A wave of burning color swept over her face. If she could but have gone away have hidden herself from ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... of what the audience ought to see or know. No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... referring to a recent lawsuit, said that it was monstrous that careful conclusions based upon a long life of study should be upset by the production of a pencil sketch, and he called for the removal of Mr. Justice DARLING from the Bench. Art criticism was not a mere matter of caprice, as people were now pretending, but an exact science. If a qualified ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... of a human being, flocks of hideous galanasas and great droves of condors would rise lazily, too heavy from their ghastly feast, to flap their monstrous wings. ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... shown that this does sometimes occur with hybrids; yet I grant much less frequently with hybrids than with mongrels. Looking to the cases which I have collected of cross-bred animals closely resembling one parent, the resemblances seem chiefly confined to characters almost monstrous in their nature, and which have suddenly appeared—such as albinism, melanism, deficiency of tail or horns, or additional fingers and toes; and do not relate to characters which have been slowly acquired by selection. Consequently, sudden reversions to ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... divine. The reign of man is over, and he has come. He whom disquieted priests exorcised, whom sorcerers evoked on dark nights, without yet seeing him appear, to whom the presentiments of the transient masters of the world lent all the monstrous or graceful forms of gnomes, spirits, genii, fairies, and familiar spirits. After the coarse conceptions of primitive fear, more clear-sighted men foresaw it more clearly. Mesmer divined him, and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the two great houses, monstrous voids that might never be filled. John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake loved their wives; and when a man has loved a woman, and that woman his wife, as these two had loved, it seems in a way to disrupt the cosmogony ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... limb of a tree above his head swayed a huge python, one of those reptiles that are able to crush a man's bones in their coils. A few yards away crouched a savage panther, its glaring red eyes fixed full on the helpless Claus. One of those monstrous spotted spiders whose sting is death crept stealthily toward him over the matted leaves, which shriveled and turned ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... here a good many days," said Waldron, "to see the steamers and the dockyards. They are building a monstrous iron ship, somewhere here. She is going to be five hundred tons bigger ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... assembled, He so merrily and madly Danced at Hiawatha's wedding, Danced the Beggar's Dance to please them. Now, in search of new adventures, 20 From his lodge went Pau-Puk-Keewis, Came with speed into the village, Found the young men all assembled In the lodge of old Iagoo, Listening to his monstrous stories, 25 To his wonderful adventures. He was telling them the story Of Ojeeg, the Summer-Maker, How he made a hole in heaven, How he climbed up into heaven, 30 And let out the summer-weather, The perpetual, pleasant Summer; ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... not a question of right, 't is one of expediency," replied the bondsman. "A year at court, Miss Janice, would teach you that in this world 't is of monstrous importance to ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... and representation of Artemis as [Greek] (many-breasted), 'we are told, was borrowed from the East, a large term.' I say 'she is even blended in ritual with a monstrous many-breasted divinity of Oriental religion.' {139b} Is this 'large term' too vague? Then consider the Artemis of Ephesus and 'the alabaster statuette of the goddess' in Roscher's Lexikon, p. 558. Compare, for an Occidental parallel, the many- breasted goddess of the maguey ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... can force its way to the front without treading on innumerable toes. For me, now, to cry halt merely because it happens to be my own toes that are in the way would be—ridiculous—absurd—would be monstrous. [Nobody contradicts him.] You are perfectly justified- -if this case means what you say it does—in putting up a candidate against me for East Poplar. Only, naturally, it cannot be Annys. [He reaches out his hand to where ANNYS stands ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... of mingled indignation and scorn upon Roland's face was simply beyond description when he heard this barefaced and monstrous request. ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... corps arrived, armed with pick and cutlass, and marched in good order to the assault. A breach was soon opened, and the distribution began. The King smiled at the opening in the tart; though vast, it hardly showed more than a mouse hole in the monstrous wall. ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... established forever. If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again. Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the blood of the martyrs of Jesus." The Beast, described in the thirteenth chapter, is unquestionably Nero; and this fact shows the expected immediateness of the events pictured in connection with the rise and destruction of that monstrous despot.26 The truth of this representation is sealed by the very first verses of the book, indicating the nature of its contents and the period to which they refer: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass: Blessed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... staring at the monstrous form with amazement, not unmixed with awe, while DuQuesne, paying no attention to anything except the knowledge he was seeking, manipulated the controls of the instrument. His first quest was for the weapons and armament of the vessel. In ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... against the sin of intercourse during the menstrual period. It may be added that Aquinas and many other early theologians held, not only that such intercourse was a deadly sin, but that it engendered leprous and monstrous children. Some later theologians, however, like Sanchez, argued that the Mosaic enactments (such as Leviticus, Ch. XX, v. 18) no longer hold good. Modern theologians—in part influenced by the tolerant traditions of Liguori, and, in part, like Debreyne (Moechialogie, pp. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... force of Boers which may have been advancing from the direction of Magersfontein. The horses, which had come a hundred miles in four days with insufficient food and water, were so done that it was no uncommon sight to see the trooper not only walking to ease his horse, but carrying part of his monstrous weight of saddle gear. But in spite of fatigue the force pressed on until in the afternoon a distant view was seen, across the reddish plain, of the brick houses and corrugated roofs of Kimberley. The Boer besiegers cleared off ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... story of fears, suppressions, monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements. I don't remember much of that sort of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... because the earth would have then been too hot to allow of life, my reply is: "That is not my affair; settle that with the geologist, and when you have come to an agreement among yourselves I will adopt your conclusion." We take our time from the geologists and physicists; and it is monstrous that, having taken our time from the physical philosopher's clock, the physical philosopher should turn round upon us, and say we are too fast or too slow. What we desire to know is, is it a fact that evolution took place? ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... universal hiss, the sound Of public scorn. He wondered, but not long Had leisure. Wondering at himself no more, His visage drawn, he felt; too sharp and spare His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining Each the other, till supplanted down he fell, A monstrous serpent on his belly prone, Reluctant, but in vain. A greater power Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... whose "Literary Essays" I borrow Poe's opinion, says: "Poe boldly asserted that the conspicuously ideal scaffoldings of Hawthorne's stories were but the monstrous fruits of the bad transcendental atmosphere which he breathed so long." But I hope this way of putting it is not Poe's. "Ideal scaffoldings," are odd enough, but when scaffoldings turn out to be ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... unit to France, and these few furloughed boys from Canada back to their regiment, was not large as steamers go, but it looked monstrous to Jeb. Had he been familiar with trans-Atlantic travel he would have missed the library, main saloon, smoking and writing-rooms, as these spaces which formerly belonged to the pleasure traveler were now converted ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... taking upon Him to reprove some Young Rakes of the Conechta Clan very sharply for their impiety, they were so provok'd at the Freedom of his Rebukes, that they tied him to a Tree, and shot him with Arrows through the Heart. But their God took instant Vengeance on all who had a hand in that Monstrous Act, by Lightning from Heaven, & has ever since visited their Nation with a continued Train of Calamities, nor will he ever leave off punishing, and wasting their People, till he shall have blotted every living Soul of ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... ceased; and a hundred voices broke out at once, pouring invectives on the traitorous ambition of Sir William Wallace, and invoking the regent to pass some signal condemnation on so monstrous a crime. In vain Kirkpatrick thundered forth his indignant soul; he was unheard in the tumult; but going up to the countess, he accused her to her face of falsehood, and charged her with a design from some really treasonable ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... breast? Beyond the Dnieper will my die be cast, While boundless space divides me from the spot; Can I endure it? Oh, the impatient spirit Will lie upon the rack of expectation And measure out this monstrous length of space With groans and anxious throbbings ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Some monstrous suggestion of Form was almost upon him. He grasped the projection and just as his head sank out of sight the Form seemed to smash down ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... and still he could hear the insolent voice in which the monstrous remarks were made that had torn him from the twilight of his self-complacency; remarks that distressed him more than any other grief he may have felt in the secrecy of his bed chamber and which completely and forever robbed him of all the joys of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution! At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... well known to my neighbours as a peaceable man," Van Duyk repeated, "and think it monstrous that I should be so interfered with ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... the story of his trial, and alluded to "the fresh outbreak of anger on the part of those hornets who accuse me of heresy," said he, "simply because I have translated into the vulgar tongue some of your little works, wherein they pretend that they have discovered the most monstrous pieces of impiety." He transmitted to Erasmus a list of the paragraphs which the pope's delegates had condemned, pressing him to reply, "as you well know how. The king esteems you much, and will esteem you still more when you have heaped confusion on this brood of benighted theologians ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... stuck up with a complication of gums, slime, and general impurity, that I wore out more than two thousand pair of bootjacks getting my boots off that night, and even then some Christian hide peeled off with them." It is monstrous. Such statements are simply lies—there is no other name for them. Will the reader longer marvel at the brutal ignorance that pervades the American nation when we tell him that we are informed upon perfectly good authority that this extravagant compilation ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... given up hope and stood leaning against a stanchion in morose contemplation of a school of porpoises. They were very playful porpoises. They seemed to be actually enjoying themselves. That there should be joy anywhere in that gray and colorless world was, to the Tyro, a monstrous thing. Then he turned ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of its bias toward himself. He told himself that he had been let off fairly easily, though he winced considerably under the adulation of the Daily Mercury, and found himself breathing most freely when least was said about him. The day of his triumph in the Mercury he made monstrous cowslip balls, and thought that the world had never been sufficiently congratulated upon possessing the ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... gathered herself for her spring. A week, and then another, she stood breathless and following with eyes astrain the figure of her ally, little Belgium, gallant and heroic, which had moved out upon the world arena, the first to offer battle to the armour-weighted, monstrous war lord of Europe, on his way to sate his soul long thirsty for blood—men's if he could, women's and little children's by preference, being less costly. And as she stood and strained her eyes across the sea by this and other sights moved to her soul's depths, ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... "Then, isn't it monstrous to leave her in this fashion, after seventeen years of married life, without a fault to find ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... they should be friends. It is monstrous to suppose them lovers. The melancholy of their natures drew them together, and the sympathy of their tastes cemented the bond. To the woman-hating man of genius, this woman was a revelation and a wonder; to the great princess ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... home from work all the people sitting outside their doors, the shop assistants, dogs, and their masters, used to shout after me and jeer spitefully, and at first it seemed monstrous and distressed ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... my blood my ancient kindred spoke,— Grotesque and monstrous voices, heard afar Down ocean caves when behemoth awoke, Or through fern forests roared the plesiosaur Locked with the giant-bat ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... hurrying home through the dark of the unlighted streets when he comes upon a paper lantern resting on the ground. On one side squats a Chinese civilian on his hams, on the other side squats a Japanese soldier. One dips his forefinger in the dust and writes strange, monstrous characters. The other nods understanding, sweeps the dust slate level with his hand, and with his forefinger inscribes similar characters. They are talking. They cannot speak to each other, but they can write. Long ago one borrowed the other's ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... swiftly receded, came a monstrous wave, and no wonder, which raised the surface of the sea to a level with the topmost cliff of the Calling Place. Queen Mab, who had flown to a pine-tree there, saw the salt water fall back down the steeps ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... "I was monstrous sorry," returned the goddess, without understanding this distinction, "that I was not at home when you called upon me. Pray, how do you like my dress? I assure you I think it's the prettiest here. But do you know there's the most shocking thing in the world happened in the ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... very gaudy lobsters and quaint cray-fish and crabs with lanky legs dispute your attention on the shore with the shell-fish of the loveliest hues; there is no lack of remarkable creatures indoors. Monstrous spiders, whose bite is very unpleasant, drop from the roof; tarantulas and scorpions get into your boots, and cockroaches, hideous to behold and disgusting to smell, invade every place from your bed to your store-cupboard. ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fame! Who, for a while, took leave of friends in town;— "Business, forsooth! to Yorkshire call'd her down, Too weighty to be settle'd by Attorney!"— And, in a month's, or six weeks' time, came back! When every body cried, "Good lack! How monstrous thin you've grown, upon ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... Men! Oh, this is too monstrous, too grotesque. We cruel doctors have kept the secret from you faithfully; but it is like all secrets: it will not keep itself. The buried truth germinates and breaks ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... one of them killed a fat young cow, and, leaving his rifle on the ground, went up and commenced to skin her. While busily engaged in his work, he suddenly heard right behind him a suppressed snort, and looking around he saw to his dismay a monstrous grizzly ambling along in that animal's characteristic gait, within a ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... religion was full of such divinities—the jackal-headed Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that, following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask—this partly ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... my orders," said Murphy. "We're going through the gate." He punched the button on his camera and passed under the monstrous portal. ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... what a grain of sand! What multitudes of worlds beyond our own, and, if life exists in them, what combinations are possible other than those of which we are the result! What is life, what is organic substance in the monstrous universe but an indifferent mass, a passing accident, the corruption of a few epidermic particles? And if this be life, what is that humanity which is so small a fragment of it?—Such is Man in nature, an ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Talizac. Then turning to the crowd of spectators: "Gentlemen," he said, "I am the victim of a most monstrous calumny, and I call on you to treat this scoundrel with his trumped-up tale as ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... 'It's a monstrous thing', he said, 'to heap up so much sand on the fields near the river, and narrow the bed; when the ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's child, Who in the language of their farm-fields spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk, Shaming a monstrous wrong. The world-wide laugh Provoked thereby might well have shaken half The walls of Slavery down, ere yet the ball And mine of battle ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Spanish colonies and an opening for contraband trade. In the river Plate region, where the dissensions of Spaniards and Portuguese afforded another opening, English traders smuggled. The Spaniards, with monstrous fatuity, refused to make use of the superb waterways provided by the Parana and Paraguay, and endeavoured to stifle all trade. England's main struggle was with France. It was prolonged by her entanglement in European disputes and by political causes, by the want of co-operation among ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... atrocious than the massacre in cold blood of thousands of disarmed prisoners? Is incest with a sister more shocking to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will not continue the disgusting comparison. As long as Napoleon is unable to acquit himself of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no right to pronounce Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; nor have Frenchmen, as long as they obey the former as a Sovereign, or the Continent, as long as it salutes him as such, any reason to despise the latter for crimes which lose their enormity when ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... any time of the day these formations were uncanny. In time of morning or evening shadow the effect upon the imagination was intensified. The strange outcropping was repeated nowhere else. It jutted forth, white and mysterious—a monstrous tenting-ground left over from the Stone Age. As if to deepen the effect of the weird stage setting, Nature contrived that all the winds which blew here should blow mournfully. The lighter breezes stirred vague whisperings in the pine-trees. The heavy winds wrought weird ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... agitated, stirred to the depths, and for that very reason he acquitted himself with more dignity and quiet calm than usual. He held himself with such a tight rein that his soul ached, but he never relaxed his hold. He told himself that it would be monstrous if by a word or gesture, by a tone of the voice, he betrayed anything to this little, innocent, timid, frightened girl on his arm. He never dreamed of the remotest possibility of dreams on her part. The soul beside him, seemingly separated only by thin walls of flesh, was in reality separated ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Quashy, who had stood with his ten fingers expanded, his great mouth open, and his whole emotional soul glaring out of his monstrous eyes. ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... laugh or to strike at his upturned face. His tactless devotion filled her life as with some sickly perfume, stifling her. If only she could be by herself for a little while to think! But he was with her night and day. There were times when, as he would cross the room towards her, he grew monstrous until he towered above her, a formless thing such as children dream of. And she would sit with her lips tight pressed, clutching the chair lest she should start ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... standing army whose numbers no one can calculate. All estimates that I have seem purely imaginary. The ordinary figure given for London is from 60,000 to 80,000. This maybe true if it is meant to include all habitually unchaste women. It is a monstrous exaggeration if it is meant to apply to those who make their living solely and habitually by prostitution. These figures, however, only confuse. We shall have to deal with hundreds every month, whatever estimate we take. How utterly unprepared society is ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... abruptly, "has just informed us of the unfortunate incident. We have come to tell you that no duel can take place. It is monstrous. The life of Colonel Vega does not belong to him, it belongs to the Cause. We will not permit him to risk it needlessly. You, of all people, should ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... coronet for her niece! I can't think how she came to be satisfied with a trumpery Irish one. You stare, Violet; but that is my aunt's notion of managing, and the way she meant to deal with all of us. She has monstrous hoards of her own, which she thinks give her a right to rule. She has always given out that she meant the chief of them for me, and treated me accordingly, but I am afraid she has got into a desperately bad temper now, and we must get her out of it ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Their earlier victims had been the allies and dependants of Rome; they had drawn revenues from kings and free peoples, they had pillaged the public treasury. But they had not yet begun to put up for sale the security of the empire and of Rome itself. Now this last and monstrous stage had been reached. The authority of the senate, the power which the people had delegated to its magistrate, had been betrayed to the most dangerous of foes; not satisfied with treating the allies of Rome as her enemies, the nobility were now treating her enemies ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... scarlet, then pale. A monstrous idea had sprung up in her mind; an idea so monstrous that she strove to thrust it away violently, without even contemplating it. Why had Vere not told her? There must be some good and sufficient reason. Vehemently—to escape from that monstrous idea—she sought it. Why had everything else in ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... knew that they were right; that if he stayed where he could live an easy life, a fat and easy life he would lead; that in a few years he would be good for nothing except to eat and sleep—no more. One day, waking suddenly from a bad dream of himself so fat as to be drawn about on a dray by monstrous fat oxen with rings through their noses, led by monkeys, he began to wonder what he should do—the hardest thing to do; for only the hardest life could possibly save him from failure, and, in spite of all, he really did want to make something of his life. He had been reading ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... transformation of the Desert now began in earnest. It grew apace. Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour's journey, the twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrous revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to conceal even in the daytime. And, while he well understood the eroding agencies that have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a deeper interpretation lurking just behind their literal ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... thus seemed forgotten of Heaven itself, sat a woman huddling her young—two girls and a boy. The fireplace was of monstrous proportions, and the chimney yawned upward so widely that one looking up the sooty passage might see the stars shining overhead. A little fire burned feebly in the huge stone recess: scant warmth might such a fire yield, kindled in such a fireplace, to those around ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... trembling sergeant and orderly followed in his train. Upon us, one by one, he pounced, this "brave, silent (?) man" at the back. My blue fal-de-lal jacket he unbuttoned and revealed, horror of horrors, very crime of crimes, the fact that I was not wearing the monstrous red scarf which, according to the laws of the R.A.M.C., which alter not, must always be worn by all patients at all times, in life, or even in death, I presume. And further, a most perspiring bare chest revealed the heinous fact that I had omitted to put on the thick flannel ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... to me their Aigle for full Freedom no more pants, And the Senator, he mutthers ov "degraded immigrants." Says they can't "assimilate" us; faix, the wurrud sounds monstrous foine, But Oi fancy that it's maning is, "We mane to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... wished with all his heart he had not accepted it! From the moment of her greeting—with its mixture of shrinking and sweetness—he had realised the folly, the humiliation even, of his presence in her house. He could not rise—it was monstrous, ludicrous almost, that she should wish it—to what she ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... companion, and rode around the gallows with that zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented little children with their damnable arts of witchcraft. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... October, they perceived a flat island, fifteen leagues in length, covered with wood, abundantly supplied with good water, having a fresh lake in the middle, and full of people. The natives stood on the shore in great admiration of the ships, which they believed to be some monstrous unknown animals, and were as impatient to be better informed respecting them, as the Spaniards were to go on shore. The admiral went on shore in his boat well manned, and having the royal standard displayed, accompanied by the two captains of the other ships, Martin ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... "O Martin—'tis in there—all huddled—in the darkest corner! And I—I slept with it—beside me all night!" Coming within the cave I looked whither her shaking hand pointed and saw what I took at first for a monstrous egg and beyond this the staves of a small barrel; then, bending nearer, I saw these were the skull and ribs of a man. And this man had died very suddenly, for the skeleton lay face down one bony arm folded under him, the other wide-tossed, and the skull, shattered ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... laying down their lives for God, and being speedily united to him, anticipated the executioners in completing their sacrifice. Among the impious, absurd, and false maxims of the Pagan Greeks and Romans, scarce any thing was more monstrous than the manner in which they canonized suicide in distress, as a remedy against temporal miseries, and a point of heroism. To bear infamy and all kind of sufferings with unshaken constancy and virtue, is true courage and greatness ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... certainly the most obnoxious to the popular leaders. Besides, the whole texture of the plot contains such low absurdity, that it is impossible to have been the invention of any man of sense or education. It is true the more monstrous and horrible the conspiracy, the better was it fitted to terrify, and thence to convince, the populace: but this effect, we may safely say, no one could beforehand have expected; and a fool was in this case more likely to succeed than a wise man. Had Shaftesbury laid the plan of a Popish conspiracy, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... more. A curry was exactly the medium which would disguise this taste. By no possible supposition could this stranger, Fitzroy Simpson, have caused curry to be served in the trainer's family that night, and it is surely too monstrous a coincidence to suppose that he happened to come along with powdered opium upon the very night when a dish happened to be served which would disguise the flavor. That is unthinkable. Therefore Simpson becomes ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... though on the treatment of offspring depend their lives or deaths and their moral welfare or ruin, yet not one word of instruction on the treatment of offspring is ever given, to those who will hereafter be parents? Is it not monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to the chances of unreasoning custom, or impulse, or fancy, joined with the suggestions of ignorant nurses and ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and the word was given to advance again; but hardly had the elephants moved, when there was a terrific roar, and a monstrous tiger bounded out toward us, lashing his tail from side to side, baring his white teeth, and laying down his ears as his eyes literally blazed ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... slunk down the marble steps and down the winding walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall. But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found so near ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... eagerly snatch at the chance thus presented of claiming the title of British subjects. It is quite hopeless to attempt to convince Englishmen that any American would not be British if he could. Pride in American citizenship is an idea utterly monstrous and inconceivable to them, and they can look on the profession of it in no other light than that of a laudable attempt at making the best of a bad case. Therefore, the Jook persisted in ignoring our protestations of patriotic ardor, and in paying ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... bound to a large sofa placed in the middle of a well-furnished room. Before her was placed a monstrous and sinister thing—the menacing barrel of a revolver. Its trigger was bound by a number of strings, each one ending in a nail. These were embedded in lighted wax candles, and from ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... and sounding Seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... went out warningly to Smoke's chest, and together they listened to a groan, deep and long drawn, that came from one of the cabins. Ere it could die away it was taken up by another cabin, and another—a vast suspiration of human misery. The effect was monstrous and nightmarish. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... reproduce the forms and feelings with which the waking imagination is most engaged. Bunyan's rest continued to be haunted with the phantoms which had terrified him when a child. He started in his sleep, and frightened the family with his cries. He saw evil spirits in monstrous shapes and fiends blowing flames out of their nostrils. 'Once,' says a biographer, who knew him well, and had heard the story of his visions from his own lips, 'he dreamed that he saw the face of heaven as it were on fire, the firmament crackling and shivering with the noise of ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... the assembly, in part horror, in part incredulity of so monstrous a crime. "What dreadful charge is this you bring?" asks the King, in natural doubt; "How were guilt so prodigious possible?" Telramund offers as explanation a further accusation, and in doing it gives a hint, not of his motive in ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... "There are about three and one-third millions of them now. Say they are worth, old and young, large and little, one thousand dollars a head—monstrous thing, to put a price upon a human head, but suppose it. It would amount to but a few billions of dollars. What would a war cost between these two sections? Perhaps a million dollars a day! How much cheaper could these slaves be purchased and deported from these shores! Their owners regard ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... I have no fear of its ever becoming law. But it may be useful, for its monstrous and unprincipled provisions will teach the Imperial Government the folly of permitting a Colonial Legislature to tamper with those great and holy principles of the Constitution, on the preservation of which the prosperity and happiness of the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... he said, "though generally I hate to have my sleep broken. But just now I was having a nightmare. I was dreaming that a monstrous Katydid was chasing me. And if you hadn't called to me I don't know what would have happened.... I think," he added, "I must have dined too heartily—on ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... timber left from this fire, wedged in tightly above the bridge, is the only gorge at which workmen have labored all this week with dynamite and monstrous cranes. In it and below it are unnumbered hundreds of bodies. How many perished in that frightful fire will never be known. Only a small proportion of the bodies can ever be found. Some were burned so that nothing but a handful of ashes remained, and that was swept away long ago with ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... the best calicoes, just in from New-York. Pease, the narrow-minded idiot, thought this a good time to play off a smart trick on one of Smith's regular customers. So he paraded a large variety of goods before her, and took occasion to recommend a very pretty article, for which he charged a monstrous price, because he said it was a very scarce pattern, and it was with great difficulty they had secured a single piece. As the lady herself could perceive, it had not been opened before; not a soul in the village had even seen the outside ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... argued. Should a monster, something abnormal in strength and subtlety and wickedness, something which menaced all the good in the world, be allowed to exist? Gordon argued that it should not. He was driven to it by years of fruitless struggling against this monstrous creation in the shape of man. He had seen such suffering because of him; his whole life had been so turned and twisted this way and that way because of him, that he himself had in the end become abnormal, and mentally ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... both declared "not guilty" of the monstrous and absurd charges brought against them and the accusation ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... never had been Joseph Smith's,—and the present chief, Taylor, had but one. He showed us many cabinet photographs of Salt Lake City, his own family, leading Mormons, and the like: especially of the Old Tabernacle, like a monstrous tortoise, and one from a finished drawing of the new, of even more tasteless architecture, being the most gigantic piece of perpendicular ever perpetrated, and full of unsightly windows. When asked about ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... nothing before you but ruin," said the archdeacon, now moved beyond all endurance. "Ruin both for you and Eleanor. How do you mean to pay the monstrous ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... showing that apparently I was interested at this early age in the variability of plants! I told another little boy that I could produce variously colored primroses by watering them with certain colored fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and has never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... paling of the dark blue sky. There were stars, too, but they were not very brilliant. Way down in the north, at the edge of the world, there lay a long, low-flung line of cloud, black, scarcely discernible in the light of the moon. And from its centre, true north, there grew out a monstrous human arm, reaching higher and higher, up to the zenith, blotting the stars behind it. It looked at first—in texture and rigid outline—as the stream of straw looks that flows from the blower of a threshing machine when you stand straight in its line and ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... ambition, avarice, and pride; and wade through oceans of unvaried evil with that sense of dejection which comes from Digby's Mores Catholici or the Origines de la France Contemporaine, books which affect the mind by the pressure of repeated instances. The Inquisition is not merely "the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal," but it is "utilised by selfish greed and lust of power." No piling of secondary motives will confront us with the true cause. Some of those who fleshed their swords with preliminary bloodshed on their way to the holy war may have owed their ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... did not pay, and promises which he did not keep; and Guicciardini tells in a few words what use he made of his holy office, declaring, that, "with his immoderate ambition and poisoned infidelity, together with all the horrible examples of cruelty, luxury and monstrous covetousness, selling without distinction both holy things and profane things, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dragging through the billows, clinging to the friendly spar, Hugh Ridegway sped onward, his body stiff and sensationless, his brain fogged and his heart dead with that of the girl to whom he clung so desperately. At last the monstrous waves began to show their outlines to his blinding eyes. The blackness of the dome above became tinged with a discernible shade of ever-increasing brightness. A thrill shot through his fagging soul as he realized that the long night ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... for light, with its wide fellowships and high enthusiasms, will displace the struggle for power, with its mean passions, its monstrous illusions, and ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... yet brought the soil of morality into cultivation, and it yielded at the same time the most beneficent and poisonous productions, with the fresh luxuriant fulness of prolific nature. Here the occurrence of the monstrous and horrible did not necessarily indicate that degradation and corruption out of which alone, under the development of law and order, they could arise, and which, in such a state of things, make them fill us with sentiments of horror and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the Revolution, Laharpe was once more at his elbow, and the catchwords of the gospel of humanity were still on his lips. The very proclamations which denounced Napoleon as "the genius of evil,'' denounced him in the name of "liberty,'' and of "enlightenment.'' A monstrous intrigue was suspected for the alliance of the eastern autocrat with the Jacobinism of all Europe, which would have issued in the substitution of an all-powerful Russia for an all-powerful France. At the congress of Vienna Alexander's attitude accentuated this distrust. Castlereagh, whose single-minded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... manlike, unwilling to be satisfied with mere feeling, desirous of retrieving the irretrievable. "Fool," he muttered, "a weak fool I have been! I have fastened this monstrous chain ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... protruding above the water. From its active and unsteady motions, Jack knew it was making up its mind to attack us; so he urged us vehemently to paddle for our lives, while he himself set us the example. Suddenly he shouted, "Look out! there he comes!" and in a second we saw the monstrous fish dive close under us and turn half-over on his side. But we all made a great commotion with our paddles, which, no doubt, frightened it away for that time, as we saw it immediately after circling round us ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... belief, I deny it. That a man should be punished for having come to an honest conclusion, the honest production of his brain; that an honest conclusion should be deemed a crime and so declared, it is an infamous, monstrous assertion, and I would rather go to hell than to keep the company of a God who would damn his child for ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... sight of the boats, a spirit of sedition began to manifest itself in furious cries. They then began to regard one another with ferocious looks, and to thirst for one another's flesh. Some one had already whispered of having recourse to that monstrous extremity, and of commencing with the fattest and youngest. A proposition so atrocious filled the brave Captain Dupont and his worthy lieutenant M. L'Heureux with horror; and that courage which had so often supported them in the field of glory, ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... humanity. They were of a dozen different nationalities, and as the girl looked at them it was not with revulsion or scorn but with a sudden quickening of heartbeat and a little laugh that had in it something both of wonder and of pride. This was the Horde, that crude, monstrous thing of primitive strength and passions that was overturning mountains in its fight to link the new Grand Trunk Pacific with the seaport on the Pacific. In that Horde, gathered in little groups, ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... is at war you have only to look at the map of Central Europe. You can hardly fail to be struck by the curious resemblance which the outline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire bears to a monstrous bird of prey hovering threateningly over Italy. The body of the bird is formed by Hungary; Bohemia is the right wing, Bosnia and Dalmatia constitute the left; the Tyrol represents the head, while ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... quite horrible with his monstrous head and little body, as he rubbed his hands slowly round, and round, and round again—with something fantastic even in his manner of performing this slight action—and, dropping his shaggy brows and cocking his chin in the air, glanced ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... began while these fine days held, they would have the luck of weather as we had never had it. Think of the drenching rains and winds of the Passchendaele attack! In the popular mind the notion of 'a German God' was taking actual concrete shape. A huge and monstrous form, sitting on a German hill, plotting with the Kaiser, and ordering the weather precisely as the Kaiser wished—it was thus that English superstition, aided by Imperial speeches and telegrams, began to ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... protective tariff. This was to afford bounties to favored classes and particular pursuits at the expense of all others. A proposition to tax the whole people for the purpose of enriching a few was too monstrous to be openly made. The scheme was therefore veiled under the plausible but delusive pretext of a measure to protect "home industry," and many of our people were for a time led to believe that a tax which in the main fell upon labor was for the benefit of the laborer who paid it. This ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... through his eye-glass as it crawled away from him, knowing that one touch of its fangs would mean death from which there could be no possible escape. That any reasoning being should be inspired with terror—sickening, deadly terror—by such pitifully harmless things, seemed to him monstrous; and he determined to try and cure her of ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... branches, she saw a light. But when she came to the edge of the clearing she made out that the illumination came from a fire, not a lantern. The interior of the cabin was awash with shadows, and across the open doorway of the hut the monstrous and obscure outline of a standing man wavered to and fro. There was no clamor of many voices. And her heart leaped with relief. Hervey and his men, then, had lost heart at the last moment. They had not dared to attack Red Jim Perris in spite ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... been the allies and dependants of Rome; they had drawn revenues from kings and free peoples, they had pillaged the public treasury. But they had not yet begun to put up for sale the security of the empire and of Rome itself. Now this last and monstrous stage had been reached. The authority of the senate, the power which the people had delegated to its magistrate, had been betrayed to the most dangerous of foes; not satisfied with treating the allies of Rome ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... the lid with hands he could barely control. Fear was thick in his throat now. What could an alien do to a man who discovered it? Would it be Harding there—or some monstrous thing still changing? How long did it take a revived monster to go mad when it found no way ...
— Dead Ringer • Lester del Rey
... speculative matters wisdom considers higher principles than science does, and consequently is distinguished from it; and so must it be also in practical matters. Now it is evident that what is beside the order of a lower principle or cause, is sometimes reducible to the order of a higher principle; thus monstrous births of animals are beside the order of the active seminal force, and yet they come under the order of a higher principle, namely, of a heavenly body, or higher still, of Divine Providence. Hence by considering the active seminal force ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of the month of May, then," he continued, "my father is at Naples. It is whilst there, that he, a man of prudence and sense, a dignified diplomatist, a nobleman, prompted by an insensate passion, dares to confide to paper this most monstrous of ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... longing in my breast? Beyond the Dnieper will my die be cast, While boundless space divides me from the spot; Can I endure it? Oh, the impatient spirit Will lie upon the rack of expectation And measure out this monstrous length of space With groans and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... nothing; since for these we entertain the most profound respect. We have only assailed those by whom we have been assailed; and we have held each and every man responsible only for what he himself has said and done. We should, indeed, despise ourselves if we could be guilty of the monstrous injustice of denouncing a whole people on account of the sayings and doings of a portion of them. We had infinitely rather suffer such injustice—as we have so long ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... that was in Henry the Eighth to shape the very course of English history, to override the highest interests of the state, to trample under foot the wisest counsels, to crush with the blind ingratitude of fate the servants who opposed it. Even Wolsey, while he recoiled from the monstrous form which had revealed itself, could hardly have dreamed of the work which that royal courage and yet more royal appetite was to accomplish in the years to come. As yet however Henry was far from having reached ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... occurred in 1857, when Thomas Pooley, a poor Cornish well-sinker, was sentenced by the late Mr. Justice Coleridge to twenty months' imprisonment for chalking some "blasphemous" words on a gate-post. Fortunately this monstrous punishment excited public indignation. Mill, Buckle, and other eminent men, interested themselves in the case, and Pooley was released after undergoing a quarter of his sentence. From that time until ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Unheard-of stratagem, in any age. Which well its crafty authors did repay.... 'Enough, enough,' our critic folks will say; 'Your period excites alarm, Lest you should do your lungs some harm; And then your monstrous wooden horse, With squadrons in it at their ease, Is even harder to endorse Than Renard cheating Raven of his cheese. And, more than that, it fits you ill To wield the old heroic quill.' Well, then, a humbler tone, if such your will is:— Long sigh'd and ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... reduced to three.[1227] This iniquity was immediately denounced and exposed through pamphlets, journals, and debates. Men frankly admitted that no reason or economic principle justified the existence of such monstrous levies. Indeed, every honest influence, legal, social, and political, opposed it. The press condemned it, good men mourned over it, and wise men unmasked it. But with the help of twenty Republicans, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the waves beneath Sits the grim monarch of insatiate Death; The shark rapacious with descending blow Darts on the scaly brood, that swims below; The crawling crocodiles, beneath that move, Arrest with rising jaw the tribes above; 60 With monstrous gape sepulchral whales devour Shoals at a gulp, a million in an hour. —Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish'd day One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display! From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd, And one ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... said, contemptuously, 'that is damned nonsense. It is monstrous and cruel. We parted better friends than we have been in years. I will tell you all that happened—not to clear myself, but to help you to find out the truth.' His story is as follows: Yesterday afternoon, owing to his constant attendance on his father, he did not look ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... that terrific jolt seemed to divorce body and mind. So far as further resistance was concerned, he was helpless. He swam about in an opaque mist. There, afar off, on the floor, was stretched another Martin Blake, a shadow of Martin Blake; and he saw monstrous things surrounding this adumbration of himself, headless bodies, and bodiless heads, and detached ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... was addicted to the black craft, which it must be understood became more and more prevalent during all the four periods, until it culminated in the inevitable catastrophe, which to a great extent purified the earth of the monstrous evil. It must also be borne in mind that down to the very end when Poseidonis disappeared, an Intitiate emperor or king—or at least one acknowledging the "good law"—held sway in some part of the island continent, acting under the guidance of the Occult Hierarchy in controlling where possible the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... but I am without reason afraid of them. I think of the demons as being like monstrous bats. But that is a silly ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... fortnight; time enough for naughty girls, and long enough for two letters, faith. Congreve and Delaval have at last prevailed on Sir Godfrey Kneller to entreat me to let him draw my picture for nothing; but I know not yet when I shall sit.(26)—It is such monstrous rainy weather, that there is no doing with it. Secretary St. John sent to me this morning, that my dining with him to-day was put off till to-morrow; so I peaceably sat with my neighbour Ford, dined with him, and came home at six, and am now in bed as usual; and now it is time to have another letter ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... sort ob man, Massa Tom. Stranger t' me. I nebber seed him afo'. He suah was monstrous polite t' ole black Eradicate, an' he gib me a half-dollar, too, jest fo' a little ride. But I aint' gwine t' sell Boomerang, no indeedy, I ain't!" and Eradicate shook ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... "It is monstrous," he said, "after the education that you have had, and the place that I, if I survive him; or, if not, your brother, will take at the death of your uncle; that you should dream of throwing yourself away, in ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... He announced the most arbitrary notions in the blandest tones, and asserted that the doctrine of concurrent representation and taxation was a wild revolutionary idea, exploded by American independence. The revenues he called the Queen's, and thought it monstrous that any should dispute her right to her own. Though he compared the parent country to the hen and the colonies to chickens, he could see nothing to disturb the analogy in a demand for fresh contributions. He asserted that all constitutional ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... all the royalists and regicides, and illustrious headless.(178) Mrs. Frere ran about, looked at nothing, let him look at nothing, screamed about Indian paper, and hurried over all the rest. George grew peevish, called her back, told her it was monstrous. when he had come so far with her, to let him see nothing; "And you are a fool, you don't know what you missed in the other room."—"Why, what?"—"Why, my Lord Holland'S(179) picture."—"Well! what is my Lord Holland to me?"—"Why, do you know," said he, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... spirit I speak of what I think best adapted to the needs of man. I endeavor to throw aside the prejudices of education. I look upon the Protestant religion as unnatural; a monstrous belief which deforms man. So far as I can see, its influence has been blighting. It takes youth, joy, and animation from the world. It grants no indulgence for sin, nor for the mistakes of ignorance. It is cruel and harsh, and men become narrow ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... the very last man to understand or sympathize with any phase of life through which he had not himself passed. He had never been troubled with religious doubts; skepticism seemed to him monstrous and unnatural. He met the confession, which his son had made in pain and diffidence, with a most deplorable want of tact. In answer to the perplexing questions which were put to him, he merely replied testily that Luke had been overworking himself, and that he had no business to ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... at their achievement of their hopes I do exceedingly marvel. For evil purposes are, perchance, due to the imperfection of human nature; that it should be possible for scoundrels to carry out their worst schemes against the innocent, while God beholdeth, is verily monstrous. For this cause, not without reason, one of thy disciples asked, "If God exists, whence comes evil? Yet whence comes good, if He exists not?" However, it might well be that wretches who seek the blood of all honest men and of the whole senate should wish to destroy ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... sugar-cane. The lake, which abounds with excellent fish, is less favoured in this respect than the land, for it contains numerous crocodiles and alligators, of such immense size that in a few moments one of them can tear a horse to pieces, and swallow it in its monstrous stomach. The accidents they occasion are frequent and terrible, and I have seen many Indians become their victims, as I shall subsequently relate. I ought, doubtless, to have begun by speaking of the human beings who ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... echo."* Others were alarmed on a still sunshiny morning by the discharge of guns and muskets; bullets seemed to whistle past them, and the noise of drums resounded in the air, seeming to pass away to the westward; others fancied that they heard the galloping of horses over their heads; and certain monstrous births which took place about the time filled the superstitious in some towns with doleful forebodings. Many of these portentous sights and sounds may be ascribed to natural phenomena—to the northern lights which occur vividly in those latitudes, the meteors which explode in the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... not been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking excuse for them: it requires no great penetration to see what that excuse must have been. If the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court were as perfect as some fancy them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it and inexcusable, probably impossible. But if it was (as it may be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur Thomas with something ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... time the house was nothing but a horrible and a magnificent funeral pile, a monstrous funeral pile which lit up the whole country, a funeral pile where men were burning, and where he was burning also, He, He, my prisoner, that new Being, the new ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... she uttered that monstrous word killed. But utter it she did in its naked terror. Now she knew a simpler feeling than that of the grand sympathy of the dreamer with the horrors of war as a whole. She knew the dumb, helpless suspense of the womenfolk remaining at home watching for the casualty lists that ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... it is not taken from the tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about gryfouns that fly away with yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous feet as ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... gamesters are the forlorn-hope; the great winner is the eagle; a stander-by, who encourages, by little ventures himself, the freshly-imported gallant, who is called the gull, is the wood-pecker; and a monstrous bird of prey, who is always hovering round the table, is the gull-groper, who, at a pinch, is the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... prisoner, and under the care of the ladies of Luxemburg, those excellent persons prayed her to clothe herself as honest girls were wont to do. Above all, the English ladies, who have always made a parade of chastity and modesty, must have considered her so disguising herself monstrous and insufferably indecent. The Duchess of Bedford sent her female attire; but by whom? By a man, a tailor. The fellow, with impudent familiarity, was about to pass it over her head, and, when she pushed him away, laid his unmannnerly hand upon her—his tailor's hand on that hand which had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Wanderer, there at Prosopis—so shalt thou smite them. Farewell. I will seek out the Hathor if in any way I can come at her, and tell her all. But of this I warn thee, the hour is big with Fate, and soon will spawn a monstrous birth. Strange visions of doom and death passed before mine eyes as I slept last ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... noon she would probably find Mrs. Wade among her books. She felt light of heart. Within this hour Glazzard would be gone from Polterham. Four days hence, Denzil would be a Member of Parliament. Had she no claim to happiness—she whose girlhood had suffered such monstrous wrong? Another reason there was for the impulse of joy that possessed her—a hope once already disappointed—a voice of nature bidding her regard this marriage as true and eternal, let the world ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... not only a desire for peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever. If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again. Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to achieve ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... not hoot at them! I, throughout my life, guided by absolute deference to their weakness—paying them politeness, courtesy—whatever I touch I am happy in, except when I touch women! How is it? What is the mystery? Some monstrous explanation must exist. What can it be? I am favoured by fortune from my birth until I enter into relations with women. But will you be so good as to account for it in your defence of them? Oh! were the relations dishonourable, it would be quite another matter. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... And flung on the humps of a silver camel. In short it was the sweetest thing For a weary youth in a wood to light on: And finer far than what a king Built up, to prove his taste, at Brighton. The gilded gate was all unbarred; And, close beside it, for a guard, There lay two dwarfs with monstrous noses, Both fast asleep upon some roses. Sir Rudolph entered; rich and bright Was all that met his ravished sight; Soft tapestries from far countries brought, Rare cabinets with gems inwrought, White vases of the finest mould, And mirrors set in ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... hard, and he sought some mud to smear his head and shoulders, then came back and made the mark so big, so strong, and so high, and emphasized it with such claw-gashes in the bark, that it could be read only in one way—a challenge to the present claimant from some monstrous invader, who was ready, nay anxious, to fight to a finish for ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... rules the state of things, Reward goes backwards, Honor on his head, Who is not poore is monstrous; only Need Gives forme and worth to every humane seed. As cedars beaten with continuall stormes, 5 So great men flourish; and doe imitate Unskilfull statuaries, who suppose (In forming a Colossus) if they make him Stroddle enough, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... and cunning in Saxo's eyes. Oldest of beings, with chaotic force and exuberance, monstrous in ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... you are going to marry that horrible man Mulready. It is monstrous, isn't it? I think they ought to be prosecuted and punished for such a wicked thing, and father only a ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... stepped aside into the grove nearby, keeping all the while an eye on his gate, guarded by his two monstrous dogs. He selected an elm tree twenty feet high, tore it up by the roots, pulled off the branches, and peeled it for a whip. This he jerked up and down to make ready for his task of thrashing ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... miserable here alone. He longed for his employer to come back quickly. And the din in the eating-house got louder and louder. Growing shriller every second, it all melted into one note, and it seemed like the roaring of some monstrous boast, with hundreds of different throats, vaguely enraged, trying to struggle out of this damp hole and unable to find a way out ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... risk of meeting something worth running away from; just as John Steel, Christopher Holder, and a widow woman did. Their story may be read in the Harleian Miscellany. True and Wonderful is the title of the narrative, A Discourse relating a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great Annoyance and divers Slaughters both of Men and Cattell, by his strong and violent Poyson: In Sussex, two Miles from Horsam, in a Woode called St. Leonard's Forrest, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... recognize the persecutions of the Roman emperors which so harried the Church, the heresies by which it was desolated, and the schisms by which it was torn. Soon, the eagle reappeared, less menacing but not less dangerous; he shook his plumes above the sacred car, which speedily underwent a monstrous transformation. From divers parts of it arose seven heads armed with ten horns; a courtesan was seated in the midst; a giant stood at her side, exchanging with her impure caresses which he interrupted to scourge her cruelly. Then, cutting loose the metamorphosed ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... and it quelled the fear of death. In some legends of the Norse mythology there is a humorous element which shows freedom of spirit; while in others, such as the legend of the death of Balder, there is a pathos not uncongenial to Christianity. The Northmen were not priest-ridden. Their gods were not monstrous and overwhelming forces like the hundred-handed idols of the Hindu, but human forms, their own high qualities idealized, like the gods of the Greek, though with Scandinavian force in place of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... whose whole faculties should be bent upon the acquirement of a real knowledge of human physiology should worry themselves with getting up hearsay about the alternation of generations in the Salpae is really monstrous. I cannot characterise it in any other way. And having sacrificed my own pursuit, I am sure I may sacrifice other people's; and I make this remark with all the more willingness because I discovered, on reading the names of your Professors just now, that the Professor of Materia Medica is not ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... she, "I am sure you know what I mean; but you must know I have a prodigious monstrous great favour to beg of you: now pray don't refuse me; I assure you if you do, I shall be so mortified ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... art should never take place of, but be subservient to, nature; and a gentleman, if confined to a situation, had better conform his designs to that, than to do as at Chatsworth, level a mountain at a monstrous expense; which, had it been suffered to remain, in so wild and romantic a scene as Chatsworth affords, might have been made one of the ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... of increase, not merely among the native population separately, but throughout the population of the country, as a whole, including the foreigners. The climax of this movement was reached when, during the decade 1880-90, the foreign arrivals rose to the monstrous total of five and a quarter millions (twice what had ever before been known), while the population, even including this enormous re-enforcement, increased more slowly than in any other period of our history except, possibly, that of the great ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... their opponents to account for the inequality of conditions, for those commercial debaucheries in which monopoly and competition, in monstrous union, perpetually give birth to luxury and misery; they reproach economic theories, always modeled after the past, with leaving the future hopeless; in short, they point to the regime of property as a horrible hallucination, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... and her master's image during the latter part of her service in Fitzgeorge-street; but, little by little, the cloud had melted away, leaving the familiar image clear and unshadowed as of old. She had suffered her mind to be filled by a suspicion so monstrous, that for a time it held her as by some fatal spell; but with reflection came the assurance that this thing could not be. Day by day she saw the man whom she had suspected going about the common business of life, coldly ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... law or legal process. It is Captain Williams,—one of those British officers whom Mr. Hastings states to be the pests of the country. This is the man who comes here as evidence against these women, and produces this monstrous paper. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... successors. What might have become of his sons Giovanni Maria (died 1412) and Filippo Maria (died 1447), had they lived in a different country and under other traditions, cannot be said. But, as heirs of their house, they inherited that monstrous capital of cruelty and cowardice which had been accumulated from ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the world she had known. He imagined her in an Arab garden where orange blossoms fell like snow, eating her heart out for the far country and friends she would never see again, rebelling against a monstrous tyranny which imprisoned her in this place of perfumes and high white walls. Or perhaps the scented petals were falling now ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... one can calculate. All estimates that I have seem purely imaginary. The ordinary figure given for London is from 60,000 to 80,000. This maybe true if it is meant to include all habitually unchaste women. It is a monstrous exaggeration if it is meant to apply to those who make their living solely and habitually by prostitution. These figures, however, only confuse. We shall have to deal with hundreds every month, whatever ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... it, and therefore they would not have it. It was quite monstrous that anybody should attempt to do anything so completely out of the ordinary course of proceeding. It was not to be borne; and as in this country it happens, free and enlightened as we are, that no man can commit a greater social offence ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... vanity to truth. This distinguished foreigner has travelled much; he asks whither you are going?—where you stop? if you have a great quantity of luggage on board?—and laughs when he hears of the twenty-seven packages, and hopes you have some friend at the custom-house, who can spare you the monstrous trouble of unpacking that which has taken you weeks to put up. Nine, ten, eleven, the distinguished foreigner is ever at your side; you find him now, perhaps, (with characteristic ingratitude,) something of a bore, but, at least, he has been most tender to the children and their mamma. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... purely beautiful, but the Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything which is in nature is—or has the right to be—in art. It includes in its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than any other period, are rich in instances of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... staring at the lamp and his heart stood still. Recalling the monstrous confusion of the life we lead, he distinctly saw what that life could be if men were brought up to obey these rules, and rapture such as he had long not felt filled his soul, just as if after ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... scientific men, they climbed into the whale-boat alongside and went ashore to see. And they saw something that was alive but which could hardly be called a man. It was blind, unconscious. It squirmed along the ground like some monstrous worm. Most of its efforts were ineffectual, but it was persistent, and it writhed and twisted and went ahead perhaps a score ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... it is not a farce it is a tragedy. And such a tragedy! My God! Horrible—monstrous—cruel beyond conception, and enough to make one believe in ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and daughter, who, it appears, gave the commissioners no little trouble by their perverse conduct, returned to Savannah and were engaged to labor at the filature, at three shillings per day, at which Mr. Habersham exclaims, "monstrous wages!" The reelers now advanced with much proficiency, and five of them, on the 10th of May, wound off eleven pounds of cocoons each. The proportion of raw silk to the cocoons, appeared, on a variety of trials, to be nearly ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... them on donkeys or ponies—a father with a little son before or behind him, a man in a black cloak with panniers laden with branches of trees, which hid the saddle, and, in the semi-obscurity, made them look like some monstrous beast of strange form, another perched upon a great bundle of hay or grass, and so on, all passing rapidly from the malaria of the fields to the safety of ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... mummies of bulls and other animals been found in them? All record relating to Cheops is at least very questionable; thus history fades into fable, and is clouded with doubt. Bunsen claims for Egypt nearly seven thousand years of civilization and prosperity before the building of these monstrous monuments. We do not often pause to consider how little real history there is. Conjecture is not history. If contemporary record so often belies itself, what ought we to consider of that which comes through the shadowy distance of ages? It will be remembered that a mummy of ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... suddenly. That last comer was no other than Mr. Adolphus Longstaff. As it happened he was seated next to Dolly, with Lady Beeswax on the other side of him. Whereas his Holy of Holies was on the other side of Dolly! The arrangement made seemed to him to have been monstrous. He had endeavoured to get next to Isabel; but she had so manoeuvred that there should be a vacant chair between them. He had not much regarded this because a vacant chair may be pushed on one side. But before he had made all his calculations Dolly Longstaff was sitting ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... earliest inhabitants of Italy. Moreover, hesitation on this point is impossible for other reasons, as Roman historians allude to the practice. Pliny,[55] in saying how little removed was a human sacrifice from a meal, adds, that it ought not to surprise us to meet with this monstrous custom amongst barbarian races, as it prevailed in ancient times in Italy ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... not on such a subject? or what trouble is it to refute these monstrous inventions of the poets ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... estimate of men, and their reverence for women, cherishes an eager and aimless rivalry, weakens true feeling, wipes away the bloom of true modesty, and induces an ennui, a satiety, and a kind of dilettante misanthropy, which is only the more monstrous because it is undoubtedly real. You shall hear young men of intelligence and cultivation, to whom the unprecedented circumstances of this country offer opportunities of a great and beneficent career, complaining that they were born within this blighted circle; regretting ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... taste of the age of Malebranche, the master of Addison, and of Boileau, the master of Pope, will appear ridiculous to an Englishman. To accuse the vicious style which prevailed in the age of Bossuet, Fenelon, and Pascal, will appear monstrous to every one with the least tincture of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... again, for I was so deep in the water that I could not hold the gun sloping enough to pour the powder in. I therefore had to search for a shallow place, and after several shots under these trying circumstances, I was delighted to see the monstrous animal roll over into the water. I now towed him after me to the stream, but the Malays objected to having the animal put into the boat, and he was so heavy that I could not do it without their help. I looked about for a place to skin him, but not a bit of dry ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... frequent instances in sacred history: I mean, the just judgment of God against an offending people." The state of public morals, Fielding considers, to have drawn down upon society this signal visitation of Providence. "Indeed, such monstrous impieties and iniquities have I both seen and heard of, within these last three years, during my sojourning in what is called the world, particularly the last winter, while I tarried in the great city, that, while I verily believe we are the silliest people under Heaven in every other ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... At that monstrous charge my spirit almost went from me. That it should be this thing, above all others that should be brought against me! I glanced this way and that; and saw how even Chiffinch, who had fallen back a little as I advanced, was looking askance ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... they immediately appeared to his eyes, and never, for a moment, did he feel sure of the execution of his project. But even if every question had been settled, every doubt cleared away, every difficulty overcome, he would probably have renounced his design on the instant, as something absurd, monstrous, and impossible. But there were still a host of matters to arrange, of problems to solve. As to procuring the hatchet, this trifle did not trouble Raskolnikoff in the least, for nothing was easier. As a matter of fact Nastasia was scarcely ever at home, especially of an evening. She was constantly ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... waiting at the steps as the carriage rolled up the winding drive, with a monstrous bouquet of his choicest blossoms for Polly, and one exactly like it only a little smaller, for Phronsie; and Prince came rushing out getting in every one's way and nearly devouring Phronsie; and there was King Fisher running away on toddling feet from his ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... confounded by the unexpected circumstance, to turn at once, and when I did, it was to see both pairs of eyes shining, and both faces dimpling with real or affected gaiety. Indeed, if the matter had stopped there, I should have thought myself the victim of some monstrous delusion; but when, a half-hour later, I found this box missing from the cabinet where I had hastily thrust it at the peremptory summons of our hostess, I knew that I had not misunderstood the nature of the cry I had heard; that it ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... this occurred to me, just then. The one thing that loomed big in my mind's eye was the monstrous injustice of the accusation. Coming right on top of what I'd lately experienced at the hands of the men who had really done that dirty job—my head still tingled from the impact of Hicks' pistol—it stirred up all the ugliness I was capable of, and a lot that I had never suspected. ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... an instant, through tears, amazed and incredulous. Surely some one was playing a monstrous joke upon her today. Soon she would come upon the strings and false bottoms and wigs and masks of the game. But the office boy's contemplation of her distress was real. Something must be done. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... and which could reflect and neutralize for some little time even the terrific beam Costigan was employing. Nor was the pirate unarmed—a vicious flare of incandescence leaped from his Lewiston, to spend its force in spitting, crackling pyrotechnics against the ether-wall of the squat and monstrous Standish. But Costigan's infernal machine did not rely only upon vibratory destruction. At almost the first flash of the pirate's weapon the officer touched a trigger; there was a double report, ear-shattering in that narrowly confined space; and the pirate's body literally flew into mist as a half-kilogram ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... gibbets, the cross-pieces to which, conforming rigidly to the Washington rule of contrariety, are fastened to the bottom instead of the top of the upright. Your theory is, that the destinies of the nation are to be hanged on these monstrous gibbets, and you wonder whether the laws of gravitation will be complaisant enough to turn upside down for the accommodation of the hangman, whoever he may be. It is not without pain that you are forced ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... averted her eyes so as to evade his greeting. . . . The old man felt sad over such indifference, not on his own account, but on his son's. Poor Julio! . . . The unbending parent, in complete mental immorality, found himself lamenting this indifference as something monstrous. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... where birth and breed are more than any other thing, where a drop of impure blood effects an ineradicable stain; therefore the thought of this girl's ignoble parentage was so repugnant to him that the more he pondered it the more pitiful it seemed, the more monstrous. Lying awake and thinking of her in the stillness of his quarters, it had seemed a very unfortunate and a very terrible thing. During his morning duties the vision of her had been fresh before him again, and his constant contemplation of the matter ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Mr. Rymer, laying a hand on his forehead, and leaving a black mark there. 'There is no end to your kindness; but I feel it as a disgrace to us—to me—that you, a lady of property, should be working here like a servant. It is monstrous—monstrous!' ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the contrary, he rebelled against himself, and cried in fury: "It is monstrous, I have in fact spoiled for myself the only pleasure that remained to me—the flesh. Once I amused myself without blame, now I pay for my poor debauches with torments. I have added one more weariness to existence—would that I could ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... and as he did so, from outside came a strange sound, as of a long monstrous groan from a thousand throats. Again the dying man stirred; his hand sought his brother's arm and gripped it with a kind of feeble strength; then dropped ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... aunt?" demanded Lily. It was monstrous, but she had a very dramatic imagination, and there was a faint hint of enjoyment in ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that extent constructive even expiatory. I've been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether. There it is—it's done." And then he further explained. "It took hold of me because the idea of getting her quite out of the way for Chad helps to ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... shores of France he discovered his mistake. He had only to give his real name, "the Marquis de St. Evremonde," which he was obliged to do if he would help Gabelle, and the title was the signal for rude threats and ill treatment. Once in, he could not go back, and he felt as if a monstrous net were closing around him (as indeed, it was) from which there was ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... own part," the Duke continued, "I have advised the police to turn their attention to the south of France. I have already said that I do not believe that the Duchess would encourage so monstrous an action, but the lad had the most wrong-headed opinions, and it is possible that he may have fled to her, aided and abetted by this German. I think, Dr. Huxtable, that we will now ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there was a great legged worm, a monstrous green thing, very venomous in its bite; and presently as I moved I brushed it with my heel, and like the dart of light it swooped with its tiny head and struck me with its fangs in the lower thigh. With my knife I cut through its neck and it fell to writhing and ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... such quivering flakes upon the golden flesh of Eve, half hidden among laurels, as she stretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam. No one but Tintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah, summoned by the beck of God from the whale's belly. The monstrous fish rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapour from his trump-shaped nostril. The prophet's beard descends upon his naked breast in hoary ringlets to the girdle. He has forgotten the past peril ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... carpenter and the first mate had got their axes ready to cut them away, should such occur. At length a tremendous sea came roaring towards our weather bow. The ship struggled as if to avoid it, but she pitched headlong into the deep hollow just before her, and a monstrous sea, lifting its head half way up to the foretop, came right down on our deck, sweeping up to the main hatchway. Horner and several of the men shrieked out with terror, believing that their last moments ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... sweat, shivering, with a spasm of revolt. She fought against the meshes in which Nature had entrapped her. She wished to live, to live freely, and it seemed to her that Nature had tricked her. Then she was ashamed of such thoughts, and seemed monstrous in her own eyes, and asked herself if she were more wicked than, or made differently from, other women. And little by little she would grow calm again, browsing like a tree over the sap, and the dream of the living fruit ripening in her womb. What was it? What was ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... sure to recover again almost as quickly as he had been taken ill. Nobody could refuse to try the effect of so reasonable a proposal, before sending for a surgeon. Accordingly, John was supported upstairs, with great difficulty; being a monstrous weight, and regularly tumbling down two steps every time they hoisted him up three; and, being laid on the bed, was left in charge of his wife, who, after a short interval, reappeared in the parlour, with the gratifying intelligence that ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... defense of my will. I felt the malevolent fury of Its striving. Like the antennae of some monstrous insect brushing about my body, I felt Its evil desires wavering about my mental self, examining, searching where It might seize. It had not yet found the weakness It sought. If ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... and monstrous practices was indeed most difficult. The most pernicious of all was one which was likely to bring about tragic results. They believed firmly in a class of doctors among their people who professed that they could procure the illness of an individual at will, and that by certain ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... hardly imagine Erastus Root serious in the expression of such a monstrous doctrine. His life had been pure and noble. He was a sincere lover of his country; a statesman of high purpose, and of the most commanding talents. No one ever accused him of any share in this financial corruption. Yet a more Machiavellian opinion could ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the duke, Danby, Ormond, and all the ministry; persons who were certainly the most obnoxious to the popular leaders. Besides, the whole texture of the plot contains such low absurdity, that it is impossible to have been the invention of any man of sense or education. It is true the more monstrous and horrible the conspiracy, the better was it fitted to terrify, and thence to convince, the populace: but this effect, we may safely say, no one could beforehand have expected; and a fool was in this case more likely to succeed than a wise man. Had Shaftesbury ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... last things which a student of Joe Miller would have thought it possible to invent. Yet this the Americans have achieved. Whatever may be the value attached to it, many a laugh has been created by that monstrous exaggeration, so worded as to give a momentary and bewildering sense of possibility to something most egregiously absurd, which as decidedly belongs to America as the bull does to Ireland. "A man is so tall that he has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... gentlemen endeavor to gain themselves the reputation of wits and humorists, by such monstrous conceits as almost qualify them for bedlam; not considering that humor should always lie under the check of reason, and that it requires the direction of the nicest judgment, by so much the more as it indulges itself in the most ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... through the dust, and were well on on the Commercy road, there was a short halt, and during this halt there passed us the largest Tun or Barrel that ever went on wheels. You talk of the Great Tun of Heidelburg, or of those monstrous Vats that stand in cool sheds in the Napa Valley, or of the vast barrels in the Catacombs of Rheims; but all these are built in situ and meant to remain steady, and there is no limit to the size of a Barrel that has not to travel. The point about this enormous ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... silence reigned. For long stretches the shores and very vast and solitary waters produced the impression of an unknown stream, upon which this poor little sail was the first in all the world to venture itself. The further they advanced, the more this monstrous river dismayed him. He imagined that his mother was at its source, and that their navigation must last for years. Twice a day he ate a little bread and salted meat with the boatmen, who, perceiving that he was sad, never addressed a ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... ready to meet anything, they bounded into the place, when, as if worked by a spring, the horrible figure in the tub started upright like a monstrous jack-in-the-box. ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... will be a law enacted that prevent men from drinking liquor, especially those in whom there is a dominant appetite for it. The idea of licensing men to sell liquor and punishing men for drinking it is monstrous. To be sure, they are not punished for drinking it in moderation, but no man can be moderate who has such an appetite as I have. Why license men to sell liquor, and then punish others for drinking it? What sort of sense ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... cursed his curiosity, for—he saw it now—it was the desire to approach the mystery revealed by Koupriane and to penetrate once more, through all the besetting dangers, an astounding and perhaps monstrous enigma, that had brought him to the threshold of the datcha des Iles, which had placed him in the trembling hands of Matrena Petrovna in promising her his help. He had shown pity, certainly, pity for the delirious distress of that heroic woman. But there had been more curiosity than pity in his ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... me, is bandy-legged; is no better than a girl at sea, and never well ashore. I am always in raw health—the strong mind in the potent body. Had I been at Louisburg, I should have held it, as I held Ticonderoga last July, and drove the English back with monstrous slaughter." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... himself headlong downwards. Beneath him lay the body of the mighty fabric, its vast roof, its crocketed pinnacles, its buttresses and battlements scarcely discernible through the gloom, but looking like some monstrous engine devised ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was severely hurt by a harpooned and desperate whale turning upon the small boat, and, by his monstrous jaws, smashing it to pieces, one of which, striking him in his right side, crippled him for life. When sufficiently recovered, he married, according to previous engagement, and his daughter, born in due time, and closely resembling ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... this book; he is irritated by the marching in of the household brigade to family prayers, and he declares that we 'know no more of that race which inhabits the basement floor, than of the men and brethren of Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send missionaries'—a monstrous imputation. He constantly resumes the moralising attitude; and his pungent persiflage is poured out, as if from an apocalyptic vial, upon worldliness and fashionable insolence. Sir Barnes Newcome's divorce from the unhappy Lady Clara furnishes a text ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... this chaos of incandescent nature, sent in a flame of deep blue sky and sea. It lay there calmly, like some phantasmagoric flower, some monstrous rose that swoons away, with upturned face, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... found to be utterly useless. In vain were the yards braced round. Without the use of the rudder the ship could not be got sufficiently off to give her head-way. Slowly she continued to drive towards the monstrous berg, which threatened, should she strike it, to ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... that!" Mrs. Berry returned immediately on the charitable tack. "Belike it's some one of his acquaintance 've married her for her looks, and he've just met her.... Why it'd be as bad as my Berry!" the relinquished spouse of Berry ejaculated, in horror at the idea of a second man being so monstrous in wickedness. "Just coupled, too!" Mrs. Berry groaned on the suspicious side of the debate. "And such a sweet young thing for his wife! But no, I'll never believe it. Not if he tell me so himself! And men don't do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... went by (which I shall describe in the next chapter), I "learned a few." I heard tales of the police, and police-courts, and lawyers, that were unbelievable and monstrous. Men, prisoners, told me of personal experiences with the police of great cities that were awful. And more awful were the hearsay tales they told me concerning men who had died at the hands of the police and who ...
— The Road • Jack London
... the tailor, terrified, though Aramis had pronounced these words in his sweetest and most honeyed voice. The request appeared, on reflection, so exaggerated, so ridiculous, so monstrous to M. Percerin that, first he laughed to himself, then aloud, and finished with a shout. D'Artagnan followed his example, not because he found the matter so "very funny," but in order not to allow ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... glossy, and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution! At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... bold enough to wish to go out and unravel the mystery of the west now walked in chains from a Spanish ship to a Spanish prison! It was monstrous ingratitude, all declared; and they did not hesitate to show their sympathy. The story of his disgrace traveled rapidly, and everywhere it brought out the better nature of the Spanish people, who accordingly denounced this harsh treatment by ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... had always found him good-natured and correct, but considered his intellect somewhat below the average grade. A few months subsequently he died in jail of consumption. Regarded from the ordinary moral stand-points, this was a strange, an unaccountable, a monstrous act, and we are unable to take the first step towards a solution of the mystery. Looking, however, at the material conditions of his affections, his propensities, his impulses,—his cerebral dynamics,—we get a clew, at least, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... time, I cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report of them when she conceived that the time had come to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compass, whose knobby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising monster, dropped into the water one of her little gloves, and the swash made by the hippopotamus drifted it close under Billy's ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... first place, the two races are not amalgamated. Intermarriages between them are so rare, that few of the readers of this article can remember ever to have known one. Such marriages are regarded as monstrous and disgraceful, though the law should, as in some of the States, recognize them. One sentiment in respect to them pervades the whole community, and that a sentiment of aversion. Those half-breeds which spring from licentiousness, or even from the very few ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... miracle of her escape should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not have been three days inside a fish, but that does not make him a merman. And in all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type. We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain. Copper-coloured men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
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