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More "Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intellectual kind, and, therefore, superior to all others, even to Sir Walter Scott's, which are, one and all, ethical; in other words, they treat of human nature only from the side of the will. So, too, in the Zauberfloete—that grotesque, but still significant, and even hieroglyphic—the same thought is symbolized, but in great, coarse lines, much in the way in which scenery is painted. Here the symbol would be complete if Tamino were in the end to be cured of his ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... itself was interesting, the cabinet was nothing short of entrancing. It was full of carved animals in all manner of grotesque positions. And the sick gentleman knew the name of each and kept saying such funny things about them that Nance laughed hilariously, and Dan forgot the prints of his muddy feet on the bright carpet, and even gave ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... Conversation halted when he came near and made him feel that he was the subject of their talk. As a matter of fact, he generally was. He was a source of great speculation with them. Some of them had gone so far as to bet he wouldn't live a year. They all seemed grotesque to him, so work-scarred and bent and hairy. Even the men whose names he had known from childhood were queer to him. They seemed shy and distant, too, not like his ideas ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... vaudeville, all jests and smiles, illustrated in motley contrast with helm and hauberk, cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests, winged griffins and nimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and enamoured princes, all mingled together in the illuminated colours and the heroical grotesque romance ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Macdonaldiae, the famous Night-blooming cereuses, have white flowers which remain open only one night. They are, however, though so transient, a marvelous sight. Prone to strange tasks indeed is the hand of Nature which has fashioned these grotesque, clumsy, lifeless looking plants to accumulate nourishment and moisture for months from the niggardly desert sands, and to mature for a few hours' existence only these marvelously fashioned flowers which collapse with the first rays of the heat-giving sunshine. C. ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... mob was raised in Edinburgh, but it was appeased without the loss of life and with no other casualty save the frightening of the provost's wife. There were some eccentric movements among the Cameronians, rendered all the more grotesque by the Jacobites taking the leadership in them; and some of the more vehement clergy betook themselves to their own special weapons in the holding of a day ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... alone, to the deserted churchyard. The wreath of flowers on Columbine's grave was already faded, and he sat down there. It was a study for a painter. As he sat with his chin on his hands, his eyes turned up towards me, he looked like a grotesque monument—a Punch on a grave—peculiar and whimsical! If the people could have seen their favourite, they would have cried as usual, 'Bravo, ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... of a mediaeval book of the first class is beyond description by words or by wood cuts. Every inch of space was used. Its broad margins were filled with quaint ornaments, sometimes of high merit, admirably painted in vivid colors. Grotesque initials, which, with their flourishes, often spanned the full height of the page, or broad bands of floriated tracery that occupied its entire width, were the only indications of changes of chapter or subject. In printer's phrase the composition was "close-up and solid" ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... composition. They are tableaux vivants transferred by the calotype. In the one[Footnote: See Frontispiece] a bonneted mechanic rests over his mallet on a tombstone—his one arm bared above his elbow; the other wrapped up in the well-indicated shirt folds, and resting on a piece of grotesque sculpture. There is a powerful sun; the somewhat rigid folds in the dress of coarse stuff are well marked; one half the face is in deep shade, the other in strong light; the churchyard wall throws a broad shadow behind, while in the foreground there is a gracefully ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... without opposing, the idolatry of the benighted multitude; who groped painfully for some revelation of God and of truth; who at times believed fully in a superintending providence, and again had fears whether there were any God or any immortality. In the processions, the relics, the grotesque garb, and the spiritual terrors wielded by the Roman Catholic priesthood, she could behold but barefaced deception. The papal system appeared to her but as a colossal monster, oppressing the people with hideous superstition, and sustaining, with its superhuman energies, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately espy you ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to the servants as it was needed. At first de Sigognac did not notice them, but chancing to glance in their direction, was astonished to recognise in the first the tragic Herode, and in the second the grotesque Blazius. Isabelle, seeing that her husband had become aware of their presence, whispered to him, that in order to provide for the old age of those two devoted and faithful friends she had thought it ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... It contained a pond and a canal, on a small scale; for a Dutchman would not be at home without a water prospect, even if it were only in miniature. At the end of the garden, overlooking the pond, there was a grotesque little summer house, large enough to accommodate the proprietor and his family. Here, of a summer afternoon, he smoked his pipe, drank his tea, coffee, or beer, while his wife plied her needle, and the children ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... too, whose youth was being embittered by unnecessary economies: Carnaby, who had so little pocket-money that he was a laughing-stock among his fellows—it was for Carnaby these sacrifices were being made! Strange traditions! Fetiches of family pride almost as grotesque to her thinking as those of any ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... This strange, grotesque dialogue I repeat textually almost; and, it may be conceived, it was entertaining in a high degree. 'Sheemin dee Fur' was the exact phonetic pronunciation, and the whole scene ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... or grotesque character of the Italian ballet, from which the English "Punch" takes ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the two boys, and the two slaves sat in a ring on the carpet, ate the fried fish, and blessed the Lord. Vivantius spoke of the torture he had undergone, and prophesied the speedy triumph of the Church. His language was grotesque, and full of word-play and rhetorical tropes. He compared the life of the just to a tissue of purple, and to explain the mystery ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... Gawtrey's. The host shook it cordially, and, without saying another word, showed his guest into a little cabinet where there was a sofa-bed, and they parted for the night. The new life upon which Philip Morton entered was so odd, so grotesque, and so amusing, that at his age it was, perhaps, natural that he should not be ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to leave us, one of the Brumer Islanders, standing on a large catamaran alongside, put himself into a grotesque attitude, and commenced beating with his hand upon a large tin can which someone had given him, at the same time going through some of the motions of a dance. He seemed to be a most amusing vagabond, for, upon our ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... century, or rather in a likeness of such dress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable,—simulacra, phantasms); and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness of the flitting wearer. Just as the male shape approached the female, the dark Shadow started ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... enough. He would sit all day in the lane at the front gate pottering with a bit of twig or a case-knife in the soft clay. From time to time passers-by observed that the child was not making mud-pies, but tracing figures, comic or grotesque as might happen, and always quite wonderful for their lack of resemblance to anything human. That patch of reddish-brown clay was his sole resource, his slate, his drawing-book, and woe to anybody who chanced to walk over little Dick's arabesques. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... slowly raising himself on his rheumatic fore-legs, the old dog heaved erect and waddled towards the piano. Even so no one paid any heed to him until, halting a foot or so from the hem of Tilda's skirt, he abased his head to the carpet while his hind-legs strained in a grotesque effort to pitch his body ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... embellishments. There were the stone-shafted casements and the deep bow-window of former times. The carved and panelled wood-work of the lofty ceiling had likewise been carefully restored, and its Gothic and grotesque devices painted and gilded in ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... for it was a great resource. There were illustrations of all kinds, from Lord Fordham's careful watercolours, and Mrs. Brownlow's graceful figures or etchings, to the doctor's clever caricatures and grotesque outlines, and the contributions were equally miscellaneous. There were descriptions of scenery, fragmentary notes of history and science, records more or less veracious or absurd of personal adventures, and conversations, and advertisements, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the next words came he could not find any strangeness in the fact which yet gave him so great a shock. He found that to his nether consciousness it had been long familiar—ever since that day when he had first jestingly proposed Don Ippolito as Miss Vervain's teacher. Grotesque, tragic, impossible—it had still been the under-current of all his reveries; or so now it seemed ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... literature and obscurity in life. Like the pagan deities who have shrunk in peasant mythology to be elves and pooks and suchlike mannikins, these creatures, banished from the polite reading of the Victorians, reappeared instantly in that grotesque microcosm of life which the Victorians invented as an outlet for one of their tightest repressions, the School Story. I shall not press the analogy between Lycas and Steerforth, but merely remind you how, years before you ever heard the name (unless it is mentioned there) of Petronius Arbiter, ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... substantially, would be the final impression left on the mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With all his powers of graphic expression, he could seldom write of it without exaggeration. It was the fascination of the grotesque rather than the picturesque that he felt. Kingsley, though scarcely so graceful and vivid a describer, had a keener and more constant sense of natural beauty. His vision was unclouded by the peculiar ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the scene of the fights in which my brothers had played such a noble part, I had another reception, and another fantasia was performed (but this time it was on foot), by the Coulouglis and the Beni Mzab, wearing great hats with ostrich feathers in them. Then came a grotesque imitation of the fantasia, performed by the colonial militia, all drunk, who fired their pistols off under my nose and blackened my face with powder. General Marey, commanding at Medeah, owned the Romance vintage in Burgundy, and gave us some to drink at dinner, which did not diminish ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... appearance. She could think of nothing else. Then she led the way still further to the rear, to a compound quite behind all the other compounds and other houses of the gorgeous mandarin's palace. The last stand of the defenders. They were scattered about the courtyard in all attitudes, in grotesque and uncouth positions, all dead. She pointed to a figure lying face downward, a thin, elderly figure, in blood-soaked black brocade, with a magnificent queu lying at right angles to the ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... was cruelly wounded by her sister's attack on her, but she could never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia's sense of humor was so tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta's injured conception of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the midst of denying hotly her sister's charges of snobbishness and social ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the unyielding brim of a tall, white felt hat, trimmed with green veiling. He likes to look imposing, and so he gets under that hat. This in many instances may account for the restiveness of his steed, which is as yet unaccustomed to the weight of a person with such a grotesque headgear. ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... trifle does not merit the attention you give it. I do not suffer in the least. Some water and a napkin are all that I need. I fancy that I resemble an Iroquois Indian who has just been scalped; my pride is really what is most hurt," he added, with a smile, "when I think of the grotesque sight I must present to the ladies whom I notice at ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... He attacks with just vigour the limitation of legal cruelty in this case to the cruelty of mere force importing danger to life, limb, or health, though he was shocked in after years, as well he might be, at the grotesque excess to which the doctrine of 'mental cruelty' has been carried in some States of the American Union. In this branch of the great controversy, at any rate, he speaks in a nobler and humaner temper than Milton, who writes with ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... know what has prompted me to be so frank and trustful with you. You look as if you wouldn't laugh at me. My dear young man"—and he laid his hand on my arm—"I am worthy of respect. Whatever my talents may be, I am honest. There is nothing grotesque in a pure ambition, or in a life devoted ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... delicacy, and which has escaped the rifling of speculators in furniture; and out of it rises a staircase of the same material, of a noble character, adorned occasionally with figures; armorial animals holding shields, and sometimes a grotesque form rising from fruits and flowers, all doubtless the work of some famous carver. The staircase led to a corridor, on which several doors open, and through one of these, at the moment of our history, a man, dressed in a dark cassock, and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... was a flare of torches and the grotesque play of shadows between the grotto-like walls of an abandoned coal mine. About her too ranged in the spectral formality of masked faces and black rubber coats; of peaked hats with low turned brims, stood the circle of ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... are circled with red, but in the battered little setting of their orbits they have the lustre of old sapphires. His nose, owing to the falling away of other portions of his face, has assumed a grotesque, unnatural prominence; it describes an immense arch, gleaming like a piece of parchment stretched on ivory. He has, apparently, all his teeth, but has muffled his cranium in a dead black wig; of course he's clean shaven. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... Rhine look like counterfeit money," asserted Chilvers, whose similes usually are grotesque. "Any time you hear an American raving over the wonderful scenery of Europe you can place a bet that he has never seen that ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... darkness ahead. Unconsciously I spurred on after it. For a hundred yards I galloped with nothing in sight. Then I caught a rapid view of the thing as it burst through a shaft of moonlight piercing the glade, and it showed as a man, a grotesque figure of a man in loose white pantaloons. He was frightened, horribly frightened, all hunched up with the frenzy to escape. An indistinct bundle was on his right shoulder. Like a curtain the dark snapped shut behind ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... would go down to the river, and then turned, still plunging, up a steep bank, when, finding that I must come off, I threw myself off on the right side, where the ground rose considerably, so that I had not far to fall. I got up covered with dust, but neither shaken nor bruised. It was truly grotesque and humiliating. The bear ran in one direction, and the horse in another. I hurried after the latter, and twice he stopped till I was close to him, then turned round and cantered away. After walking about a mile in deep dust, I picked up first the saddle-blanket and next my bag, and soon came ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... went round and round again in that narrow space. The anguish which passed from them to me filled me as with nausea toward man. They went on and on, always on, proud as poor swans, hallowed as it were by their desolation. They were covered with grotesque trappings, and the butt of dancing women. They raised their poor verminous necks toward God, and toward the miraculous leaves of ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... talent for modelling, but this he exercises more rarely. Usually, his figures are grotesque rather than beautiful, and he never allows them to remain longer than for a few moments, often changing them so rapidly under your eye that it seems like jugglery. He is fondest of doing this at twilight, and loves the ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... changed. At the sight of each dear and familiar object he was profoundly affected. His heart beat audibly, his emotion nearly suffocated him; an ache was in his throat. Unconsciously he quickened his pace until he almost ran, his long shadow making grotesque efforts to keep its place ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... new moon, with its waxing light, may represent the primitive nature-worship which spread over the earth; and the full moon, the deity who is supposed to regulate our reservoirs and supplies of water: the waning moon may fitly typify the grotesque and sickly superstition, which, under the progress of radiant science and spiritual religion, is readier every hour ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland! It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,—the pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay, grotesque pinatis—huge paper dolls filled with dulces, the childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile and ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... fourth books. Even the gentle Virgil breaks forth at times into earnest invective, tipped with the flame of satire: [2] Dido's bitter irony, Turnus' fierce taunts, show that he could wield with stern effect this specially Roman weapon. Lucan and Seneca affect a style which, though grotesque, is meant to be satirical; while at the close of the classical period, Tacitus transforms the calm domain of history into satire, more burning because more suppressed than that of any ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... be noted that even when the impression cannot be made to tally exactly with the expectation, the force of the latter often effects a grotesque confusion of the perception. If, for example, a man goes into a familiar room in the dark in order to fetch something, and for a moment forgets the particular door by which he has entered, his definite expectation of finding things in a certain order may ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... under a shelving rock, on the surface of which were still visible some old Bushman paintings, their red and black pigments having been preserved through long years from wind and rain by the overhanging ledge; grotesque oxen, elephants, rhinoceroses, and a one-horned beast, such as no man ever has seen or ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... horse's feet like music. Great mills and manufactories, with only a night-watchman's light in the lowest of their many stories, began to take the place of the gloomy farm-houses and gaunt trees that had startled him with their grotesque shapes. He had been driving nearly an hour, he calculated, and in that time the rain had changed to a wet snow, that fell heavily and clung to whatever it touched. He passed block after block of trim ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... more passive scholars as a matter of course, and by the sharper and less reverent disciples as a matter of fun. Indeed, if any personality is then evinced in the adaptation of these old world themes, it is generally connected with a more or less emphatic disparagement or grotesque distortion ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Potomac and James were agitated. The personnel of the man, not less than his renown, affected people. A very Punch of soldiers, a sort of Rip Van Winkle in regimentals, it astonished folks, that with so jolly and grotesque a guise, he held within him energies like lightning, the bolts of which had splintered the fairest parts of the border. But nobody credited General Sheridan with higher genius than activity; we expected to hear of him scouring the Carolina ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... sank away again, the room faded, the air was still and painted; like figures on a stage acting before an audience of one Maggie saw those grotesque ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Lawrence Brindister, who had entered just as she had discovered the strange ship. He shuffled up to the window, with a peculiar gait partly caused by the size of his shoes. His appearance, as he advanced in age, had become more grotesque. He wore a gay-flowered waistcoat, with knee breeches, and huge silver buckles on his shoes. His coat, which was much too large for his now shrunken figure, was trimmed with gold lace in a style already long gone out of ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... deck, Potter, who had been leaning moodily over the quarter-deck rail, puffing away at a strong cigar, sprang upright and advanced eagerly toward her, with one hand held out, and his cap in the other. She returned his somewhat grotesque bow with a cold stateliness for which Leslie felt that he could have hugged her; and then, seeing that the man would not be denied, she allowed her hand to rest in his for just the barest fraction of a second. As Leslie approached, he ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and sunlit path, visible to the world. His first part at Laura Keene's theatre was Dr. Pangloss. Then came Our American Cousin, in which he gained a memorable success as Asa Trenchard, and in which Edward A. Sothern laid the basis of that fantastic structure of whim and grotesque humour that afterward became famous as Lord Dundreary. Sothern, Laura Keene, and William Rufus Blake, of course, gained much of Jefferson's attention at that time, and he has not omitted to describe them. ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... of this discussion to say that plants which are simply odd or grotesque or unusual should be used with the greatest caution, for they introduce extraneous and jarring effects. They are little in sympathy with a landscape garden. An artist would not care to paint an evergreen that is sheared into some grotesque shape. It is only curious, and shows what ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... laden with the fish. The purple shades of twilight soon clouded the scene, deepened by the heavy masses of foliage, which cast a greater degree of obscurity upon their narrow path; for they had now left the oak-flat and entered the gorge of the valley. The utter loneliness of the path, the grotesque shadows of the trees, that stretched in long array across the steep banks on either side, taking, now this, now that wild and fanciful shape, awakened strange feelings of dread in the mind of these poor forlorn wanderers; ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... the sun's rising or setting when a myriad shades of reddish and bluish tints are painted on the hovering clouds, which assume various grotesque shapes above the shimmering waters; and even at night time when threading the channel marked by the twinkling beacon lights, or entering the harbor of a city resplendent with ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... walk, going down towards the ornamental water, where some children were sailing their boats. "That fellow is simply grotesque," he replied; "but how would you have sane people give any heed to that mysticism, that awakening of spirituality which is alleged by the same doctrinaires who started the bankruptcy of science cry, when after so brief an evolution it produces such insanity, both in art and literature? ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... bed, in the light of the wasting candle, which threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After a moment he asked: "How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted after ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... seen the film, and he watched in fascination as the launch crew scurried about their duties. Propellants and explosives people appeared, waddling in grotesque acid suits. Liquid oxygen boil off made a hazy lake in which men walked ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... from the spruce thicket they came upon the old bull. He had sought shelter behind a clump of balsam, and he stood over a growing pool of blood in the snow. He was still breathing hard. His massive head, grotesque now with its one antler, was drooping. Flecks of blood dropped from his distended nostrils. Even then, with the old bull weakened by starvation, exhaustion and loss of blood, a wolf-pack would have hung back before attacking. Where they would have ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... Hearing a mocking-bird in the garden, she went to the window and taxed his powers to the utmost, by running up and down difficult roulades, interspersed with the talk of parrots, the shrill fanfare of trumpets, and the deep growl of a contra-fagotto. The bird produced a grotesque fantasia in his efforts to imitate her. The peacock, as he strutted up and down the piazza, trailing his gorgeous plumage in the sunshine, ever and anon turned his glossy neck, and held up his ear to listen, occasionally ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... most faces hers looked out quaintly lovely as a pictured child's wearing its grandmother's bonnet. Everything draped itself about or clung to her in entrancing folds which however whimsical were never grotesque. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... remarkable for the largeness of their heads and the flimsiness of their bodies; while the men, if not exactly like those described by Pliny, or quoted from him (without acknowledgment) by our Sir John Mandeville, are at any rate too grotesque for human beings. If humanity offers to our study in daily life a variety in form, face, and feature, comprising eccentricities as well as excellencies, such specimens, nevertheless, as poor Smike or Mr. Mantalini were never designed in ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... on account of illness. You are not ill any more. Will you go back to the Treasury? No. You will never go back, because your powerful commonsense tells you that to return to the Treasury with an income of twenty thousand a year would be grotesque. And rather than be grotesque you would suffer. Again, rightly. Nothing is ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... feet the girl heard a crunching sound, a sort of a nibbling, as if some silent and very discreet terrier was at work upon the turf. She faltered back; here was no doubt another grotesque detail of this most unnatural episode. She did not run, because physically she was in the power of these events. Her feet chained her to the ground in submission to this march of terror after terror. As she stared at the spot from which this sound seemed to come, there floated through ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... after, "how dwarfed a growth of cold and night" do these miracle-plays show themselves! But at a time when there was no printing, little preaching, and Latin prayers, we cannot help thinking that, grotesque and ill-imagined as they are, they must have been of unspeakable value for the instruction of a people whose spiritual digestion was not of a sort to be injured by the presence of a quite abnormal quantity of husk and saw-dust in their food. And occasionally we find verses of true poetic feeling, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... advent of luncheon, she settled in her chair with a little shiver of happiness, blushing at her capacity for it, and at her acquiescence in the strangest conditions in which she had ever found herself in all her life,—conditions so bizarre, so grotesque, so impossible that there was no use in trying to consider them—alas! no point ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... as the net outcome of all her thought and culture. We only need to open an ordinary newspaper to find that the famous writer's folly is shared by many weaker souls; and the effect on the mind of a shrewd and contented man is so startling that it resembles the emotion roused by grotesque wit. The whole story of the ages tells us dismally what happens when unwise people choose to claim the measure of liberty which they think good; but somehow, though knowledge has come, wisdom lingers, and the grim old follies rear themselves rankly among ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... that "Woman's War," which was so entirely unnecessary, Anne d'Autriche held her court in the Palace of Compiegne and received Christine de Suede on certain occasions when that royal lady's costume was of such a grotesque nature, and her speech so chevaleresque, that she caused even a scandal in a profligate court. Anne d'Autriche, too, left Compiegne practically a prisoner; another menage a trois ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... couch-covers together. All along the sides of the gymnasium hall there were little curtained booths, while the four corners of the gallery were turned respectively into a gypsy tent, a witch's den, the grotesque abode of an Egyptian sorceress, and the businesslike offices of a dapper little French ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... certainty, and our friends were amongst those who received an invitation to meet all the world of Goslington and a fragment of the world of London, about to be brought into strange conjunction at W—Castle. What shapes! grotesque, and gay, and gorgeous—ghosts of things departed—started up before the sparkling eyes of Emily, as she put the reviving talisman into F—'s hand. No wonder that her charmed sight failed to discover what was, however, sufficiently apparent, that her husband's ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... longer possible. He was on the march to execution, and into the darkness of his brain danced John Raikes, with his grotesque tribulations. It was the harsh savour of reality that conjured up this flighty being, who probably never felt a sorrow or a duty. The farce Jack lived was all that Evan's tragic bitterness could revolve, and seemed to be the only light in his mind. You ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are familiar to most readers. They differ from the mines in German South-West Africa and the Congo in that they are deep level excavations. The Kimberley mine, for example, goes down 3,000 feet. To see this almost grotesque gash in the earth is to get the impression of a very small Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It is an awesome and terrifying spectacle for it is shot through with green and brown and purple, is more than a thousand feet wide at the top, and converges to a ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... profit out of whites and blacks. In the afternoon Mr. Graham brought me two neolithic stone-implements. We then set out for the 'palace,' a large congeries of houses and huts, guided by a mighty braying of horns and beating of drums, and by Union Jacks, with the most grotesque adjuncts of men and beasts, planted in the clean and sandy street-road. King Blay received us in his palaver-hall, and his costume now savoured not of Europe, but of 'fetish.' He had been 'making customs,' or worshipping after ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... indignation. But his forehead was full, shapely, and noble. The largeness of his nose, tilted a little to one side, gave sculptural strength to his face. His great mouth with its fleshy underlip, supplemented the nose. Both were material for grotesque caricature. He looked like an educated gawk, a rural genius, a pied piper of motley followers. He was a sad clown, a Socratic wag, a countryman dressed up for a state occasion. But he was not a poor man defending the cause of the poor. There was nothing of the dreamer in his make-up, the eccentric ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... park with avenues of trees leading away in all directions. Directly in background of stage there is a sheet of water fringed by willow and poplar trees. On the right and left is a high box hedge formed in curves with the top clipped in grotesque shapes mostly of birds. A statue is placed in the centre of each hedge, and beneath the ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... other grade consists in covering the whole tusk with a succession of boldly carved grotesque figures—human, animal, and symbolic—giving the tusk a rich embroidered-like look, the thick ends being finished off with a suitable diamond pattern belt and the tip finished with an equally appropriate ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Marigny, "but that, I feel sure, existed only in Miss Ames' fancy. Her mind, upset by the vision, had strange hallucinations, and the jam was one—you know we often have grotesque dreams." ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... at least—imperishable work behind them. The old blind father and the bereaved husband read the confused eulogy and criticism, sometimes with a sad pleasure at the praise, oftener with a sadder pain at the grotesque inaccuracy. Small wonder that it became impressed upon Mr. Bronte's mind that an authoritative biography was desirable. His son-in-law, Mr. Arthur Bell Nicholls, who lived with him in the Haworth parsonage during the six weary years which succeeded Mrs. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... than the studied movements of the most accomplished actress, Cherry stuffed the proceeds of her first attempt into the pocket of her guardian, and then, throwing herself into position, went through the wild and grotesque movements of the tarantella, with a life and freshness that drew from the spectators a ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... eyes—but the you that I had dreamed about and fashioned as my lover—my delight—Can I whisper to John all my joy and tenderness as I watch the growing up of my little one? No! the thing is monstrous, grotesque—I will not face the pain of it all. John gave you to me—he must have done so—it was some compact between you both for the family, and if I did not love you I should hate you now, and want to kill myself. ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... the middle of a garden: at a little distance are two subterraneous grottos, which were the burial-places of the liberti of Augustus. There are all the niches and covers of the urns and the inscriptions remaining; and in one, very considerable remains of an ancient stucco Ceiling with paintings in grotesque. Some of the walks would terminate upon the Castellum Aquae Martioe, St. John Lateran, and St. Maria Maggiore, besides other churches; the walls of the garden would be two aqueducts. and the entrance through one of the old gates of Rome. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... representing Our Lord in the centre of the angelic host, the Adoration of the Magi, and a figure of St. John; this work is believed to be of the thirteenth century. The central pillar of this chapel, with the curved fluting in the column and the quaintly grotesque devices of the figures carved on the capital, is well worthy of close examination. The grate that we see here was erected by the French Protestants, large numbers of whom fled to England during the persecution which was instituted against their sect in 1561. They were welcomed by Queen ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... frame, placed close to the wall, and holding a stout wooden panel. In the centre of this, at the height of a man's chest, was a stuffed leathern pad, on which was painted a grotesque face, evidently intended for that of a negro, and above it was a dial bearing numbers that ranged from 1 to 300. The single pointer on this dial indicated the number 173, a figure at which Mark ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... The master saw those grotesque eyes like those of a sea-monster, fixed on him, with an ironical gleam behind the heavy lenses. The grafter! He had already heard of that studio, as splendid as a palace, behind the Retire What Renovales had in ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... be other than the pygmy tyrant of a great people. Grandeur, even in infamy, is utterly inconsistent with the calibre of the man. As dictator, he is a buffoon; let him make himself emperor, he will be grotesque. That will finish him. His destiny is to make mankind shrug their shoulders. Will he be less severely punished for that reason? Not at all. Contempt does not, in his case, mitigate anger; he will be hideous, and he will remain ridiculous. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... hundred feet and more, their trunks seamed and scarred, their clouds of dusky green plumes tossing far overhead; the hemlocks were no less massive in girth, but they were twisted into all manner of grotesque shapes, and their feathery branches hung low, making a dense canopy over the heads of the picnickers. Here, under one of these hemlocks, the cloth had been laid, and decorated with ferns and hemlock tassels. Then the baskets were unpacked, and the ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... to weather the gales of poverty by stooping to all sorts of illustrative work, whose execution we fancy must have been often a severe trial to him. Any youth aiming at "high art," and feeling, though poor, too proud to bend in order to feed the taste, (grotesque and unrefined enough, it must be allowed,) of the good public, which artists somewhat naturally estimate rather contemptuously, might get a lesson of patience by looking over an endless series of the most variedly ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... 201, 202). They wore large wooden masks elaborately carved, and bearing great lateral projections like horns or antlers, in addition to full war dress.[215] They advanced down a long pebblebank, keeping step and making grotesque movements with heads and arms, which seemed to imply a mixture of caution and curiosity. After dodging about for some time, they came near and inquired: "Who are you? Whence do you come? What is your business?" Having obtained ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... it must be acknowledged that much even of his wit is the mere filth-throwing of a naughty boy; or at best the underbred jocularity of the "funny column," the topical song, or the minstrel show. There are puns on the names of notable personages; a grotesque, fantastic, punning fauna, flora, and geography of Greece; a constant succession of surprises effected by the sudden substitution of low or incongruous terms in proverbs, quotations, and legal or religious formulas; scenes in dialect, scenes of excellent fooling in the vein of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the razor, he began to be a little restive, when over he went into the tub, where he floundered for some short time. He was drawn out, the bandage removed from his eyes, and he appeared not a little surprised to see so many grotesque figures around him. He soon recovered himself and entered into the ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... meeting. The lake was not large, but it lay like a gem amidst its setting of great dark pines. The shore where the plotters were lying was sandy, and from all appearance they had spent much of the night in a wild carousal. They were huddled in various grotesque shapes, ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... hardly likely to endure, attract our attention. In these eccentric movements the power of Christ's personality is manifest, and yet it appears amid circumstances so peculiar that the phenomena in themselves are grotesque. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... to attract the attention of the reader, in the dingy files of some newspaper of 1812-15, is the grotesque names under which many of the privateers sailed. The grandiloquent style of the regular navy vanishes, and in its place we find homely names; such as "Jack's Favorite," "Lovely Lass," "Row-boat," "Saucy Jack," or ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... suppose that she was protecting me!" he thought. "She is the man and rejoices that I, the weak comrade, should be protected from danger. . . . What a grotesque situation!" . ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... condemned as extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted like a buck-handled knife; and ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... through like ladies to see a sight which enchanted us. A most magnificent cavern, cool and dark, though some light penetrated in from above somewhere, the ground was covered with fine dry sand, the numerous grotesque shapes and oddities all around the cavern seemed almost made on purpose for little private habitations and snug corners. It was so large in size that it had nothing of the musty feeling of the little caverns below, but was airy, and ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... dividing the passage. Pepin, who had somewhat relaxed his efforts, now began to ply his paddle again with redoubled vigour. His hair stood on end, the veins swelled on his forehead, and his body was hunched forward in a grotesque fashion. Once he turned and, looking swiftly over his shoulder, cried something to Dorothy. But the thundering of the waters was now so great that his voice was drowned. The canoe was heading straight for the rock, ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... called "cornue,"—perhaps with reference to horns and hoofs. He rubbed his eyes to clear his sight, and a thousand diverse sentiments passed through his mind at the spectacle before him. On each side of the door was a face framed in a species of loophole. At first he took these two faces for grotesque masks carved in stone, so angular, distorted, projecting, motionless, discolored were they; but the cold air and the moonlight presently enabled him to distinguish the faint white mist which living breath sent from two purplish noses; ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... in closest and most intimate relations to him. What a story that is which he has given to us of a great soul—faithful always in the greatest? Yes, but no less faithful in the least. There seems a strange, almost grotesque impossibility in the thought that such an one should ever have come to be regarded as ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... working-girl, Whom the poet-kings of poverty, Have anointed queen of their chimeras," etc. The election of a queen of the washerwomen, or, rather, of a reine des blanchisseuses, has long been one of the important ceremonials of the Mi-careme festivities, and grotesque accounts are given of the intrigues, the rivalries, the heart-burnings, which this choice entails, of the adventures of the sovereign and her attendant ladies in assuming their somewhat unwonted toilettes for this great occasion, and of the still greater efforts of the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... drink, friend?" I asked, thinking his keen appreciation of my grotesque speech deserved a treat, and wishing to draw him out ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... absurd incongruity between the real condition and the outward seeming of a man or woman who knows what life is, and purposes to discharge its duties, enjoy its joys, and bear its sorrows, and who is clad in a trivial, grotesque, or extravagant costume.—These, then, are the elementary requisites of dress: that it be comfortable and decent, convenient and suitable, beautiful in form and color, simple, genuine, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... There is a piercing cry and a roll of war-drums, and suddenly the edges of the forest are full of leaping and dancing forms. The plateau is alive as with an army. Pipes play, shells rattle, and drums roll, and the fantastic forms with grotesque motions pass and repass ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping towards the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... public of our theatres. No doubt a few of the social reformers are sprinkled over the audiences. There are a few in the boxes as well as in the galleries who discern the realities and who hear the true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas. But with the overwhelming majority it is quite different. For them it is entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one will underestimate the shady influence of such voluptuous ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... to go at once to you and break down all barriers and bear you away.... I thank Heaven you have so good a friend in 'Madame.' I long for the time to come when I may greet her as one of my best friends for your sake. In the mean time, I have selected an Indian cabinet, the grotesque delicate work of which would please your quaint fancy, which I trust she will accept, if you will join me in the gift. I shall have an opportunity of sending it in a few weeks.... Mrs. Eldridge, my dear old housekeeper, has just been in. She wishes to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the presentation of slavery alone, in its most dreadful forms, would be a picture of such unrelieved horror and darkness as nobody could be induced to look at. Of set purpose, she sought to light up the darkness by humorous and grotesque episodes, and the presentation of the milder and more amusing phases of slavery, for which her recollection of the never-failing wit and drollery of her former colored friends in Ohio gave ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... suspense was over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning sense ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... cells of the human body: it may feel the throes of war and famine, rejoice in the comforts of peace and plenty: it may appreciate the growth of civilization as its passage from childhood to maturity. If this at first sight appears a grotesque supposition, we must remember that it would appear equally so to ascribe such possibilities to the individual brain, were it not for the irrelevant accident of this particular form of complex standing in such relation to our own subjectivity that we are able to ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... you tricks like that, when, for the gratification of a sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the stuff, you would risk everything. In excess it played hell with the nerves. That was why those eyes of hers.... Damn them! Why couldn't a man put them out of mind and out ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... small help from fancy, be transformed Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly. The Zephyrs, fanning, as they passed, their wings, Lacked not for love fair objects whom they wooed With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque, Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age, From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth In the low vale, or on steep mountain side; And sometimes intermixed with stirring horns Of the live deer, or goat's ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the terrible Raoul is grotesque. His movements are jerky, as if produced by imperfect machinery; his gait rejects all idea of order, and proceeds by spasmodic zig-zags and sudden stoppages, which knock him violently against peaceable citizens on the streets and boulevards of Paris. ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... permanently applicable to a whole continent. If the United States were to-day a consolidated republic like France, recent events in California might have disturbed the peace of the country. But in the federal union, if California, as a state sovereign within its own sphere, adopts a grotesque constitution that aims at infringing on the rights of capitalists, the other states are not directly affected. They may disapprove, but they have neither the right nor the desire to interfere. Meanwhile the laws of nature quietly operate to repair the blunder. Capital flows away from California, ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... exactly one;[66] and that he escaped from it with all the alacrity which we may presume to be expected by a prisoner when the bars of his jail have been opened for him. Whether we blame him or praise him, we can hardly refrain from feeling that his impatience was grotesque. There certainly was no desire on Cicero's part either to go to Cilicia or to remain there, and of all his feelings that which prompted him never to be far absent from Rome was the most ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... solemn style of architecture which I cannot describe, because it differed from any other that I know. It was not Egyptian and not Greek, although its solidity reminded me of the former, and the beauty and grace of some of the columns, of the latter. The profuseness and rather grotesque character of the carvings suggested the ruins of Mexico and Yucatan, and the enormous size of the blocks of stone, those of Peru and Baalbec. In short, all the known forms of ancient architecture might have found their inspiration here, and the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... Rome, compared with ours, was narrow and superficial; their ideas of Nature were crude and often grotesque; they lacked sympathy; the Greek had no sense of sin; the Roman none of the mercy which tempers justice. In their eyes the child was not holy, woman was not sacred, the slave was not man. Their notion of liberty was political and patriotic merely; the human soul, standing forth alone, and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... window. The interior of the cottage was lighted up by a lurid glow, coming from what I afterward discovered to be a chemical furnace. By its rich light I could distinguish a great litter of retorts, test tubes and condensers, which sparkled over the table, and threw strange, grotesque shadows on the wall. On the further side of the room was a wooden framework resembling a hencoop, and in this, still absorbed in prayer, knelt the man whose voice I heard. The red glow beating upon his ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... although at first an overwhelming sense of the uselessness of the attempt, the almost grotesque absurdity of expecting to hear from beyond the limits of the earth's atmosphere any word transmitted through a mechanical invention, upon the earth's crust, made me feel somewhat ashamed of my preparations, yet I arranged every portion of the receiver and exercised my best skill to ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... knew not how, through roofless halls, over disjointed fragments of fallen pillars, Sybil reached a flight of steps. A door, studded with iron nails, stayed her progress; it was an old, strong oaken frame, surmounted by a Gothic arch, in the keystone of which leered one of those grotesque demoniacal faces with which the fathers of the church delighted to adorn their shrines. Sybil looked up—her glance encountered the fantastical visage. It recalled the features of the sexton, and seemed ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... "Death?" She dismissed the grotesque suggestion with a shrug, then straightened up, breathing freely and deeply. "It is an easy swim," she remarked, occupied with her wet hair under the knotted scarlet; "the fog confused me; that ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... the troublous completeness of the many- sided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge? Fortunately unreal is his world when he will have it so; and there we may laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, without remorse, without reluctance. If great creating Nature has not assumed for herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the right of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... scribbling of a scribe who was incapable of even designing a good initial letter.[2769] I shall not attempt to reconstruct the iconography of the Maid.[2770] The bronze equestrian statue in the Cluny Museum produces a grotesque effect that one is tempted to believe deliberate, if one may ascribe such an intention to an old sculptor. It dates from the reign of Charles VIII. It is a Saint George or a Saint Maurice, which, at a time doubtless quite recent, was taken to represent the Maid. Between the legs of the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... scene, painful as it was, had its grotesque features, which, in a less interested observer than Nicholas, might have provoked a smile. Mrs. Squeers stood at one of the desks, presiding over an immense basin of brimstone and treacle, of which delicious compound she administered a large installment to ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of wine with us. He was a plain decent well-behaved man, and expressed his gratitude to Dr. Johnson for having once got him permission from Dr. Taylor at Ashbourne to play there upon moderate terms. Garrick's name was soon introduced. JOHNSON. 'Garrick's conversation is gay and grotesque. It is a dish of all sorts, but all good things. There is no solid meat in it: there is a want of sentiment in it. Not but that he has sentiment sometimes, and sentiment, too, very powerful and very pleasing: but it has not its full proportion ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... One reason why she is so intolerable to me is that she is a grotesque caricature of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... those, of course, who regard marriage from the old-fashioned and grossly immoral standpoint of Melancthon and other theologians, and who consider a wife as the divinely ordained vehicle for the chartered intemperance of her husband, it will seem grotesque in the highest degree that a physiological inquirer should attempt to advise them how often to seek the embraces of their wives; but those who regard woman from the standpoint of a higher ethics, who abhor the notion that she should ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and unbroken, the black trunks of the trees among it looking like pillars of ebony in the ivory-paved courts of a temple. Up in the sky winter was passing with all his somber train, the clouds flying rapidly in great grotesque masses, and seeming to touch the tops of the trees like a ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... which he ended a spree. He had rolled up his coat for a pillow, and had thrown one arm across his purple, bloated face. Only the weak, helpless, open mouth could be seen. His muscular hands were relaxed, and the whole prostrate figure was pathetic in its unconsciousness of will and grotesque unhumanness. Fate had been too strong for Tom Davis. His birth and all the circumstances of his useless life had brought him with resistless certainty to this level, and his progress in the future could only ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... at all cared to see, and in addition to these the forest was alive with monkeys of several varieties, to say nothing of other animals whose quick movements would not permit him to identify them. Insects, as might be expected, swarmed in countless millions, some of them being most grotesque in form and colour. Butterflies of unusual size flitted about from flower to flower, and the upper branches of the trees were fairly alive with birds of the most brilliant plumage, among which he noticed two or three varieties of ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... the Ure, it bears away again to the little village of Carperby. It has a triangular green surrounded by white posts. At the east end stands an old cross, dated 1674, and the ends of the arms are ornamented with grotesque carved heads. The cottages have a neat and pleasant appearance, and there is much less austerity about the place than one sees higher up the dale. A branch road leads down to Aysgarth Station, and just where the lane takes a sharp bend to the right a footpath goes across ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... bacteriology and microscopical research, while the exposure was made and the plate developed. Here, after an interval, we were joined by Polton, who bore with infinite tenderness the dripping negative on which could be seen the grotesque transparency of ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... Lucretius.—Very curious. A peristyle forming a sort of platform, occupied with baubles, which they have had the good taste to leave there; a miniature fountain, little tiers of seats, a small conduit, a small fish-tank, grotesque little figures in bronze, statuettes and images of all sorts,—Bacchus and Bacchantes, Fauns and Satyrs, one of which, with its arm raised above its head, is charming. Another in the form of a Hermes ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... during the whole of the previous night, and now had slumbered in his chair from time to time. But his sleeping had been of that painful, wakeful nature which brings with it no refreshment. It had been full of dreams, in all of which there had been some grotesque reference to the property, but in none of them had there been any memory of the Squire's terrible death. And yet, as he woke and woke and woke again, it can hardly be said that the truth had come back upon ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... with mock fights, feints, sudden wrestlings. They would seize one another by the head and grind their knuckles into one another's wool. Occasionally, one would leap up and fall into one of those grotesque shuffles called "breakdowns." It all held a certain ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... and it was Margaret who decided on a horse for this little girl, a golliwog for that, for the rector's wife a copper warming-tray. "We always give the servants money." "Yes, do you, yes, much easier," replied Margaret, but felt the grotesque impact of the unseen upon the seen, and saw issuing from a forgotten manger at Bethlehem this torrent of coins and toys. Vulgarity reigned. Public-houses, besides their usual exhortation against temperance reform, invited men to "Join our ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... veiling. He likes to look imposing, and so he gets under that hat. This in many instances may account for the restiveness of his steed, which is as yet unaccustomed to the weight of a person with such a grotesque headgear. ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... on each side by the steep banks of the lakelets. Those sterile shores, washed by water, which was covered with large green patches, had no other ornament than aquatic trees devoid of foliage, the twisted trunks and hoary heads of which, rising from the reeds and rushes, gave them a certain grotesque likeness to gigantic marmosets. These ugly growths seemed to waken and talk to each other when the frogs deserted them with much croaking, and the water-fowl, startled by the sound of the wheels, flew low ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... Jimsy King with emphasis but without passion. The statement was too grotesque for ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... his father's sermons and parish talks, come to mind. Most of these are approved, but some seem strangely grotesque. To Oswald's tense perception the general tenor is along severely orthodox lines, but as to occult verities the style appears flippantly superficial. Many comments upon "rewards of virtue" and "refined ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... A dancing Bear grotesque and funny Earned for his master heaps of money, Gruff yet good-natured, fond of honey, And cheerful if the day was sunny. Past hedge and ditch, past pond and wood He tramped, and on some common stood; There, cottage children circling gaily, He in their midmost ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... he was in such a state of nervous excitement that he acted like a schoolboy. Once he persuaded me to go out on foot with him, muffled in grotesque costumes, with masks and instruments of music. We promenaded all night, in the midst of the most frightful din of horrible sounds. We found a driver asleep on his box and unhitched his horses; then, pretending we had just come ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fog groped his way to the door opening on the river steps, bolted it, groped his way back and stood scratching his head. A grin, grotesque in the wavering light, contorted the long lower half of the face for a moment and ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... My wearied body and overstrained mind awakened all my imagination into preternatural activity. Ideas, visions, almost inspirations, floated before it with startling vividness. Most of them were grotesque enough, some were ghastly, some recalled thoughts and sensations that had for years been buried in the debris of my past life. But, behind and above them all, hovered the shape of that awful woman, and through them gleamed the memory of her entrancing loveliness. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... is the curly-crested toucan (Pteroglossus Beauharnaisii). The feathers on its head consist of thin, horny blades of a lustrous black colour, curled up at the ends, and resembling shavings of steel. The curly crest assumes, indeed, the grotesque form of a coachman's wig dyed black, and produced apparently by ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... door-way of a neighbouring stable was another party watching the rain, nearly as picturesque; and before them was dancing, in grotesque attitudes, a half-crazed old woman, at whose vagaries the lookers-on indolently smiled. Our admiration of the beautiful children quite won the hearts of the mothers, who had, apparently, at first regarded us with a somewhat haughty air, and a few little silver pieces completed our conquest; we, therefore, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... to a long and recriminatory correspondence in the columns of The Tittersham Observer. The Rev. Eldred Bolster, Vicar of Little Titley, writing in the issue of May 9th, characterises them as grotesque and preposterous fabrications. He points out, to begin with, that the Nether Wambleton Parish Magazine only contains eighteen pages, of which no fewer than sixteen are provided from London and have no reference ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... is 665 ft. in length, 640 ft. in breadth and more than 100 ft. high. Besides the imposing proportions of its chambers, the cavern is remarkable for the variegated beauty of its stalactite formations, some resembling transparent drapery, others waterfalls, trees, animals or human beings, the more grotesque being called by various fanciful appellations. These subterranean wonders were known as far back as 1213, but the cavern remained undiscovered in modern times until 1816, and it is only in still more recent times that its vast extent has been fully ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of habit still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o'clock he quitted the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a grotesque shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished the two candles ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... room. In the lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling unnatural patches of—paint. The reflections slid over the liquid black mass of her hair, died in the lustrous creamy folds of her garment. She was at once grotesque and impressive, like a figure in a Chinese pantomime watched from the western auditorium of his inheritance. His fondness for her, his admiration, had not lessened. He surveyed his position, the presence ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is so. I know what miserable associations cluster around this instrument of popular power. I know that the arena in which it stands is trodden into mire by the feet of reckless ambition and selfish greed. The wire-pulling and the bribing, the pitiful truckling and the grotesque compromises, the exaggeration and the detraction, the melo-dramatic issues and the sham patriotism, the party watch-words and the party nick-names, the schemes of the few paraded as the will of the many, the elevation of men whose only worth is in the ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... as we see, for some years previous to the Great Exhibition of 1851, yet that decidedly gave a considerable impetus to the more correct and artistic delineation of animals, especially in what may be called the grotesque school instituted by the Germans, which, though it may perhaps be decried on the score of misrepresenting nature in the most natural way possible, yet teaches a special lesson by the increased care necessary to more perfectly render the fine points required in giving animals that ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... really alarmed at the grotesque yet ghastly expression of that striped and sodden face, with the straight black hair, and the head lolling and rolling on the shoulder. Without a word, he took Hazlet by one arm, while Suton held the other, and D'Acres carried the legs, and as quickly as they could they hurried along with their ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... produced. It was crowned by a statuette of Hercules, with other most exquisite figurines at the four corners, set upon feet of crouching sphinxes, half women and half panthers, and was further enriched by reliefs of laughing boys holding garlands, by grotesque masks and foliages of the most graceful and ingenious design that could possibly ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... proof of this. Hence the fathers were left to their own wits in giving general directions, and to the taste of white 'artists,' and allowed even Indians to suit themselves. You will find this all through ancient Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Indians loved the gaudy, loud, grotesque, and as it was the main thing for the fathers to gain the Indians in any lawful way possible, the taste of ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... neglected, but it has some of the German vein in its strata,—the patience, the learning, the homely delineation, and even some traces of the mixture of the humorous and the terrible which form that genius for the grotesque so especially German—you find this in their legends and ghost-stories. But in Holland activity destroys, in ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... peculiar features of low Paris is the shop for the sale of articles at the uniform price of one son. One before which I paused in the Rue Mouffetard was presided over, by two women—evidently grandmother and granddaughter. The former was as grotesque a type of the jolly old vendeuse of Paris as it would be possible to find. A low, winey humor twinkled in her little black eyes, hidden in wrinkly wads of fat; her nose glowed with good feeling; her toothless mouth smirked good-naturedly. A worn ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... p. 241). Probably the sculptures were like many still to be seen in the temples of that date in Southern India, where the base of the pillar is elaborately carved with grotesque figures ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... blazed cheerfully upon the hearth, round which were clustered, in uncouth attitudes of old Etruscan sculpture, the grim and grotesque figures of the household Gods. Two lamps of bronze, each with four burners, placed on tall candelabra exquisitely carved in the same metal, diffused a soft calm radiance through the room, accompanied by an aromatic odor ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... development of membranous appendages of the part of the face in which the nostrils open is one of the most curious peculiarities of a vast number of Bats, in many of which these singular nose-leaves almost rival the ears in size, while their structure often renders them most grotesque. We have two Bats thus adorned in Britain, namely, the Greater and the Lesser Horseshoe Bats, but most of the leaf-nosed species are inhabitants of warmer regions, and it is there that they run out into the most remarkable eccentricities ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... an impassable gulf between him and Greek religion, and a still wider gulf between him and Christianity. The attempts which are occasionally made, especially in this country, to dress up the Labour movement as a return to the Palestinian Gospel, are little short of grotesque. The contrast is well summed up by Belfort Bax, in a passage quoted by Professor Gardner. 'According to Christianity, regeneration must come from within. The ethics and religion of modern socialism on the contrary look for regeneration from without, from material conditions ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... except when it is especially called to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it was not always with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginations to conceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. We find them grotesque. The solution of the problem of physical maintenance so as to banish care and crime, so far from seeming to us an ultimate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything like real human progress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent and needless harassment ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping towards the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind there was a dull sound of dripping about the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... politicians paid no railroad fares. Many of them got passes for their families and their friends; and it was certainly to be expected that they should listen to the requests of those who granted these favors. The situation became grotesque when a great ruler, seeking a nomination to office with the proclaimed purpose of enforcing the laws against rebates and passes, required the railroad managers to furnish him free transportation on ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the abbey formed a quadrangle, surrounded by the cloisters, and in this inner court was a curious fountain, carved with exquisite skill by some gothic artist in one of those capricious moods of sportive invention that produced those grotesque medleys for which the feudal sculptor was celebrated. Not a sound was heard except the fall of the fountain and the light echoes ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... of the year 1845. The copper-plate engravings of lovely ladies, who had flourished in that day, were yellow and spotted with mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties faded and commonplace. Even the little clusters of verses (in which the poet's feeble candle shed its sickly light upon the obscurities of the artist's meaning) had ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... stupor manifested by Stirn, when that functionary beheld the extraordinary substitute which fate and philosophy had found for Lenny Fairfield. Instead of the weeping, crushed, broken-hearted captive whom he had reluctantly come to deliver, he stared speechless and aghast upon the grotesque but tranquil figure of the doctor enjoying his pipe, and cooling himself under his umbrella, with a sangfroid that was truly appalling and diabolical. Indeed, considering that Stirn always suspected the Papisher ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imagined that France possessed a submerged Constitution that might be extracted from her annals had a difficult task. Lanjuinais desired to sail by a beacon and to direct the politics of 1789 by a charter of 864. There was a special reason, less grotesque than the archaeology of Lanjuinais, which made men averse to the Declaration. Liberty, it was said, consists in the reign of the national will, and the national will is known by national custom. Law ought to spring from custom, and to be governed by it, not by independent, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... tingling. Once more, for the third or the fourth time since he had come upon these men, he was struck with the odd notion that it was not real; that he was witnessing a play in which the actors did not know their lines and were missing their cues. It was the grotesque bordering on ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... by some fantastic luck in the old fantastic civilisation of China, I were raised from the Yellow Button to the Coral Button, or from the Coral Button to the Peacock's Feather. Precisely because these things would be grotesque, I might hardly feel them as incongruous. Precisely because they meant nothing to me I might be satisfied with them, I might enjoy them without any shame at my own impudence as an alien, adventurer. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... was taken by eight immense, needle-pointed spines, set in pairs, of which the chief pair had a length of over two feet. The monster's hide was set thick with scales and knobs of horn, brilliantly colored in black, yellow, and green, that his grotesque bulk might be less noticeable to his foes among the sharp shadows and patchy lights of the fern jungles where ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... truth, which he had hitherto hidden with such delicacy and care, but he cast the idea aside. "Do you really take me for a man who sells himself?" he asked coldly. "I, who came here but a little while ago, palpitating and trembling to tell my love! Wasn't I more than mad, more than grotesque? For, after all, I have your fortune. I'm paid. I have ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... to the river's edge; and beyond these could gain tantalizing glimpses of the mouth of the Rock, its waters gleaming like silver between grassy banks. The opposite shore appeared dark and gloomy in comparison, with great rock-crowned bluffs outlined against the sky, occasionally assuming grotesque forms, which the boatmen pointed ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... were all grimy from their work among the smoke and the gases. And through the grime the sweat had run down like little rivers making courses for themselves in the soft dirt of a hillside. They looked grotesque enough, but there was nothing about them to make me feel like laughing, I can tell you! And they all grinned amiably when the amazed and disconcerted Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour came tumbling in among them. We all felt right at hame at once— and I the more so when a chap I had met and ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... generations. But those who preserved it to the present day had avoided the lamentable plastering which disfigures so many others. The walls were built with fine large stones, on which time had left its melancholy impress. There was no grotesque painting on them to mar their quiet beauty, and the dim light that filtered through at that early hour gave them a vague ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's Inn—something solid, immovable, and grotesque—is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Honorable John went on to discuss the politics of Lockmanville, and to lay bare the shameless and grotesque corruption in a town where business interests were fighting. The trouble was, apparently, that the people were beginning to rebel—they were tired of being robbed in so many different ways, and they went to the ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... by the fifty, and ate as he felt inclined. He forbade all pruning of trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground, hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic landscapes. But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly advises ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... tarnished gold. The mouldings and traceries sprang up from the four corners, and all terminated in the centre, in which grinned a Medusa's head, with her circling snakes, in high preservation, and of great and ghastly beauty. There were other grotesque visages, sprinkled here and there over that elaborate roof; but look at that Medusa from what point you might, the painted wooden eyes were cast with a stolid sternness upon you. When I had a bedfellow, it was always some castaway like myself—some poor wretch who could not go home and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... mystery of these Icebergs, we float down again to Tropical Seas and Islands; and as we linger under the shade of palm and banana tree, the rude chant of the negro strikes the ear in the grotesque and characteristic framework of the 'Bananier,' the plaintive melody of 'La Savane' sighs past on the evening breeze, Spanish eyes flash out temptingly from the enticing cadence of the 'Ojos Criollos,' and Spanish guitars tinkle in the soft moonlight of the 'Minuit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hedger, a fisherman, a country mason,—people of that kind I rather like to talk with. I could live a good deal with them. But the London vulgar I abominate, root and branch. The mere sound of their voices nauseates me; their vilely grotesque accent and pronunciation—bah! I could write a paper to show that they are essentially the basest of English mortals. Unhappily, I know so much about them. If I saw the probability of my dying in a London lodging-house, I ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... was against such an hypothesis. He therefore assumed that the other planets revolved about the sun, while the sun, moon, and stars revolved about the earth as a centre. Geometrically this is much the same as the Copernican system, but physically it involves the grotesque demand that the whole system of stars revolves round our insignificant little earth every twenty-four hours. Since his previous small book on the comet, Tycho had evidently considered more fully its possible astrological significance, for he foretold a religious ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... did not strike him as particularly grotesque. He felt it was a natural question, and he only regretted that it had been put, because, though he had driven more than one young man to righteousness along the path of terror, in this present case the truth came too late save to add another horror to death. He believed in all sincerity that as ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... had a natural manner which surpassed all the art in the world. Grotesque and terrible, he threw the table into consternation by his sincerity. Madame Martin, whom he amused, complimented him ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... necessitated by this train of accidents. In the super-universe from which I come, such derangements of the celestial machinery simply do not happen. For this reason, our evolution has unfolded harmoniously along one line of development, whereas yours has branched out into diversified and grotesque expressions of the Life-Principle. Your so-called highest manifestation of this principle, namely, your own species, is characterized by a great number of specialized organs. Through this very specialization of functions, however, you have forfeited your ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Queen ever realized the full size of those tanks, or even saw the lids which Mr. Phillips had mentioned. The light was very dim. The situation, in spite of the grotesque appearance of the tanks, was exceedingly romantic. Long stalactites hung, faintly gleaming, from the roof. The water, strangely blue, mourned against the stones of the beach, sighed through the deep recesses of the cave. The world and all ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... the fish he obtains. These gatherings afford much delight to the children, of whom a great number accompanied their elders in the prahus. Women and children were in holiday attire, and, in spite of the grotesque ornaments of big rings in the split, distended ear-lobes, the latter were unusually charming. They had bracelets of brass and silver around their wrists and ankles; some of them wore necklaces of antique beads in dull colors, yellow, dark brown, or deep blue. Such a necklace may cost over ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... service of porcelain of Chinese make adorned her table, pleasing the fancy with its grotesque pictures,—then so new, now so familiar to us all. The Chinese garden and summer-house, the fruit-laden trees, and river with overhanging willows; the rustic bridge with the three long-robed figures passing over it; the boat floating upon ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity—I use the word in its literal sense—of most things, and the humour followed in accordance with the above definition. The method was simple. Chesterton invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd. He then placed it in an abrupt juxtaposition with the normal, instead of working from the normal to the actual, in the usual manner. Just as the reader was beginning to protest against the reversal of his accustomed ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... new-art mode. In front her shirtwaist appeared cool and white, at the sleeves it flowered alarmingly into something like an India shawl. A string of massive amethysts completed a discord as elaborate as a harmony of Richard Strauss. Her whole impression was almost as inviting as it was grotesque. One could not chat with her without liking her, and it is to be suspected that only a very guileless or austere male could like her without proceeding to ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... to human faces. I am apt to believe, that they took the first hint of their dress from a fair sheep newly ruddled. 'Tis with pleasure I recollect my dear pretty country-women: and if I was writing to any body else, I should say, that these grotesque daubers give me still a higher esteem of the natural charms of dear Lady R——'s auburne (sic) hair, and the lively colours of her unsullied complexion. I am, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... circumference through the stables at Laxton! I, as it happened, could report to Lord Massey their earlier condition; he to me could report their immediate changes. I won him easily to an interest in my own Irish experiences, so fresh, and in parts so grotesque, wilder also by much in Connaught than in Lord Massey's county of Limerick; whilst he (without affecting any delight in the hunting systems of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire) yet took pleasure in explaining to me those characteristic features of the English midland ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... rendering of the immortal fifteenth century satire, assigned on no very solid evidence to Antoine de la Salle, the Quinze Joyes de Mariage, the resemblance being kept down to the recurrence at the end of each section of the same phrase, "in Lob's pound," which reproduces the less grotesque "dans la nasse" of the original. But here, as later, the skill with which Dekker adapts and brings in telling circumstances appropriate to his own day deserves every acknowledgment. Dekker's Dreame is chiefly verse and chiefly pious; and then at a date somewhat later than that of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... would have been as well to try to train woodbine to draw water or to educate cattails to write Greek. The little boy spent all of the day idling; it was a curious, Oriental sort of idling. Callers at Heartholm grew disapprovingly accustomed to the sight of the grotesque face and figure peering through the shrubberies; they shrugged their shoulders impatiently, coming upon the recumbent child dreamily gazing at his own reflection in the lily-pond, looking necromantically out from the molten purple ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of war, Lincoln was keenly appreciative of anything that disclosed the comic or grotesque side of men or happenings,—largely, doubtless, for the relief afforded him. At the beginning of Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, in June, 1863, when the Union forces under Colonel Milroy were driven out of Harper's Ferry by the Confederates, great consternation and alarm were caused by reports ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which our ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... bent over the parchment, upon which the grotesque outline of a griffin began to grow, twisted round a very conventional tree, with the stem issuing from its mouth, and its elongated tail executing marvellous spiral curves. The illuminator was taken by surprise the next instant, and the curve ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... supporting a gothic building, varying in height and thickness, and here and there intersected by wide and deep chasms and glens, running far inland between the mountains. Loose stones above, have in some places the appearance of statues, and the superior region exhibits all kind of grotesque shapes. It is by far the most singular and picturesque chain of mountains on this coast. To the highest part of it we gave the name of St. Pauls, as it is not unlike that cathedral when viewed at a distance, with its dome and ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch
... firs and pines rising to the clouds, where eagles soar and scream and rear their young. Flocks and herds now graze upon the banks; here lies the scattered village, and its whole population, half civilized men, and matrons and maidens in antique, grotesque attire, crowd the shores. Now the pinnacles and the battlements of a great city rise to view. Armies were gathered at several points to entertain the imperial pleasure-party with all the pomp and pageantry of war. ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... new life as pantomimes. A bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence from which he will frantically dance himself free during the midnight storm; Rosalind and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and shepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous brevity of grenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous "attitude of the scissors" in the arms of Laertes; and all the speeches in "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... were cool, and at times chilly. This fire was never allowed to go out, but burned night and day, although, of course, it reached its full height and beauty after dark, when the flames shot up high and sent grotesque shadows dancing under and among the trees, and on the sandy beach which had been selected as the ideal location ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... form is so fleeting and so subject to the dictates of fashion as opera. It has always been the plaything of fashion, and suffers from its changes. To-day the stilted figures of Hasse, Pergolesi, Rameau, and even Gluck, seem as grotesque to us as the wigs and buckles of their contemporaries. To Palestrina's masses and madrigals, Rameau's and Couperin's clavecin pieces, and all of Bach, we can still listen without this sense of incongruity. On the other hand, operas of ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... to the camp for the remaining pans and when he turned back he saw Wabi leaping in a grotesque dance about the rock while Mukoki stood on the edge of the pool, his dredge poised over it, silent ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... like ogives, through the orifices of which shone the blue sky; monstrous serpents coiled in groups like the spirals of a solomonic column; gigantic negroes, heads down and hands on the ground, the roots like fingers thrust deep into the soil, their feet in the air, grotesque stems with bunches of leaves springing from them. Some, vanquished by the centuries, were lying on the ground, sustained by forked branches, like old men trying to lift themselves with ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... one grows intoxicated by breathing the odor of faded roses, Rodolphe again became so by reviving in recollection that past life in which every day brought about a fresh elegy, a terrible drama, or a grotesque comedy. He went through all the phases of his strange love from their honeymoon to the domestic storms that had brought about their last rupture, he recalled all the tricks of his ex-mistress, repeated all her witty sayings. He saw her going to and fro about their little household, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... soldiers resting on their knapsacks, and their arms stacked in the dark corners,—of the Governor and his satellites, some of them in brilliant militia array, seated around the lighted table,—and of the grotesque eloquence with which either the Governor or some of his prominent people would now and then burst out into an oratorical tirade, all thrown away on his sleepy auditors, and lost to the world for want ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... vegetables: their guns supplied them with an abundance of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their situation, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... skipped along to the winning-post like a young lamb. A great cheer was echoed from cliff to cliff. Uncle Jake has not spoken his mind all his life for nothing. Seacombe does not unanimously like him, but it has the sense to be rather proud of him. A veterans' race is usually a sad spectacle, a grotesque memento mori: for ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Anybody that has ever seen a grove of olives knows that their beauty is not such as strikes the eye. If it was not for the blue sky overhead, that rays down glorifying light, they would not be much to look at or talk about. The tree has a gnarled, grotesque trunk which divides into insignificant branches, bearing leaves mean in shape, harsh in texture, with a silvery underside. It gives but a quivering shade and has no massiveness, nor symmetry. Ay! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... silent, for the strange echoings of our voices had an unearthly, terrible effect upon our nerves; and more than once I started at the grotesque shadow of myself upon the wall. The roar of the great waterfall came humming through the rift above our heads, while below the waters hissed, and bubbled, and lapped against the rocks in a curious, whispering, awe-inspiring fashion; and then moved by the same ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... all done with. As for friendship, it was impossible, grotesque. Let him go home, appease Letty, and mend his life. He constantly realised now, with the same surprise, as on the night before his confession, the emergence within himself, independent as it were of his ordinary will, and parallel with the voice of passion or grief, of some ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a man. It is a question, however, whether the day of the woman's magazine, as we have known it, is not passing. Already the day has gone for the woman's magazine built on the old lines which now seem so grotesque and feeble in the light of modern growth. The interests of women and of men are being brought closer with the years, and it will not be long before they will entirely merge. This means a constantly diminishing necessity for the distinctly ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... his face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams, one cheek all bushy as if with a swollen flame, the other denuded and sunken, with the untouched long moustache on that side asserting itself, lonely and fierce. And while he stared thunderstruck, with the gaping scissors on his fingers, I shouted my discovery ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... the devil was made to appear with horns, hoof, and tail, to figure with grotesque malignity throughout the play, and to be reconsigned at the close to his dark abode by the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, for the quays immediately to swarm with jerseys and red caps. Each beret was the owner ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... over Tommy for several hours, making such a noise as set Lady Eleanor's peacocks screaming till they could scream no more. The boy was at first rather terrified, but as his helpers became more vehement and their antics more grotesque, he lost his fright and was intensely amused. Finally the whole congregation rose and, headed by the preacher, rushed out of the house with wild cries that the evil spirit had left Tommy and that they would hunt it out of the village. None ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... sight of this coast, had indeed skirted it closely all the way, yet my memory of its more prominent landmarks was extremely vague. I had made no effort to impress them on my mind. Therefore at first I could identify nothing, but finally, out of the grotesque, shifting shadows, dimly appearing against the slightly lighter sky beyond, there suddenly arose, clearly defined, the gaunt limbs of a dead tree, bearing a faint resemblance to a gigantic cross. I recalled that Sam had chanced to point this out ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... to her brother's arm, for though she knew everything was to be as weird and grotesque as possible, yet it was delightful to feel ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... on many occasions on the point of taking his own life, but was observed so closely and guarded so well by his companion Mariotto that he lived to be an old man—finished the course of his life at the age of sixty-four, leaving behind him the name of a good and even rarely excellent master of grotesque-painting in our own times, wherein every succeeding craftsman has always imitated his manner, not only in Florence, but also in ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... anything. Myers approaches the subject with no such a priori requirement. If he finds any positive indication of "spirits," he records it, whatever it may be, and is willing to fit his conception to the facts, however grotesque the latter may appear, rather than to blot out the facts to suit his conception. But, as was long ago said by our collaborator, Mr. Canning Schiller, in words more effective than any I can write, if any conception ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... comes apace, With wondrous speed to take his place; Costly, yet so grotesque his gear, All start amazed as he draws near. Crosswise the guards before his face, Entrance to bar, their halberds hold— Yet there he is, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... narrow, upright frame, placed close to the wall, and holding a stout wooden panel. In the centre of this, at the height of a man's chest, was a stuffed leathern pad, on which was painted a grotesque face, evidently intended for that of a negro, and above it was a dial bearing numbers that ranged from 1 to 300. The single pointer on this dial indicated the number 173, a figure at ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... the velvet jacket, the cascading necktie, the throat-revealing collar, and the overlong hair which the conventions of the theatre have established as the livery of the artist. The details of this grotesque foppery presented themselves to Annette only vaguely; it was at the man himself as he straddled in the middle of the polished floor, staring at her, that she gazed with a startled attention a face like the feeble and idiot countenance of ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... raised at the outset by the protest of the Dutch governor, could not long be postponed. It was suddenly precipitated on the arrival of Governor Rising, in 1654, by his capture of Fort Casimir, which the Dutch had built for the practical assertion of their claim. It seems a somewhat grotesque act of piety on the part of the Swedes, when, having celebrated the festival of Trinity Sunday by whipping their fellow-Christians out of the fort, they commemorated the good work by naming it the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... we are also learning to appreciate the sublimity and divinity of the natural. The universe and organic life are no less wonderful and awe-inspiring because, distinguishing some of the natural laws that govern their evolution, we have abandoned the grotesque theories held by primitive men. Similarly we do not to-day demand, as did our forefathers, a supernatural origin for our sacred books before we are ready to revere and obey their commands. With greater insight we now can heartily sing, "God moves in a natural way his wonders to perform." Our ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the "properties" with which her own mind had ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and grotesque appearing birds attain a length of about 48 inches. The plumage varies from white to a deep rosy red. It requires several years for them to attain the perfect adult plumage, and unlike most birds, they are in the best of plumage during the winter, the colors becoming faded as the nesting ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... perhaps, we may safely say that not one of the kinds known would be considered unworthy of cultivation except by those who despise Cactuses of whatever kind. Their flowers are conspicuous both in size and brilliancy of colour; and in the curious, grotesque, and even beautifully symmetrical shapes of their stems, one finds attractions of no ordinary kind. The stem of E. Visnaga shown at Fig. 48 may be taken as an instance of this—apart from the cluster of star-like, bright yellow flowers seen nestling upon the top of their spine-protected ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... a hand shade the uppermost part of the lamp. Then there was a pause, and then a figure came across the porch, a short figure casting grotesque shadows, a bit stiff, a bit unsteady, like the rings of light that went out in circling waves behind it. It was Uncle Buzz. He came and stood on the topmost rotting step. He bowed. With one hand holding the wavering lamp, the other ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... return to the Veda, and compare these crude and somewhat grotesque legends with the language of the ancient Aryan poets. In the hymns of the Rig-Veda the separating and keeping apart of Heaven and Earth is several times alluded to, and here too it is represented as the work of the most valiant gods. In ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... only fit for the bath-room; while the men, lounging about in pyjamas, go barefoot with the utmost sangfroid. The sarong, as worn by the slender and graceful Malay, appears a modest and appropriate garb, but the grotesque effect of native attire on the broad-built Dutchwoman affords conclusive proof that neither personal vanity nor a sense of humour pertain to her stolid personality. Dutch Puritanism certainly undergoes startling transformations under the tropical skies, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... began to dance. Were there ever feet less suited to dancing? That they should dance was the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases about the ankles. Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms; consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque. It pierced the heart. What right had the Boche to leave these people so comic after he had squeezed the life-blood ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... and was really alarmed at the grotesque yet ghastly expression of that striped and sodden face, with the straight black hair, and the head lolling and rolling on the shoulder. Without a word, he took Hazlet by one arm, while Suton held the other, and D'Acres carried the legs, and as quickly as they ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... lofty Teneriffe, Palma, Ferro, Provence, or at the Celtiberian shores, With gazing pleasure and astonishment, At Paradise (seat of our ancient sire) He thinks himself arrived: the purple grapes, In largest clusters pendent, grace the vines Innumerous: in fields grotesque and wild, They with implicit curls the oak entwine, And load with fruit divine his spreading boughs: Sight most delicious! not an irksome thought, Or of left native isle, or absent friends, Or dearest wife, or tender sucking babe, His kindly ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... dragged, off, she didn't know which, didn't care as long as she was off. The ground seemed to come up to meet her. Why didn't things stand still? Even the unsuspicious "Dolly" appeared to be performing grotesque antics. Mary took a step, just one. It was not necessary for her to take more to realize that she was very stiff. "Heavens!" She slowly gathered up her coat and hat, and limped painfully out of the Academy. Now she could realize that ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... such. Hence the witty and intellectual ladies of our comedies and novels are all in the fashion of some particular time; they are like some old portraits which can still amuse and please by the beauty of the workmanship, in spite of the graceless costume or grotesque accompaniments, but from which we turn to worship with ever new delight the Floras and goddesses of Titian—the saints and the virgins of Raffaelle and Domenichino. So the Millamants and Belindas, the Lady Townleys and Lady Teazles ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... some few of the patrons of the games had already taken their departure, the doors opened oftener and oftener, letting the geometrical shaft of the yellow light flare out across the waters, and the grotesque shadows of those who departed stood out against the night and waters as the men shivered in the wind and bent to feel their way into ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... forget they ever had parents. It is quite the natural and proper thing, born as they were born,—it would never do for them to have any over-filial regard for us. Imagine Humphry weeping for my death, or yours! What a grotesque idea! And as for Rupert and Cyprian,—it is devoutly to be hoped that when we die, our funerals may be well over before the great cricket matches of the year come on, as otherwise they will curse us for ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous, sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say, the necessary result of the intercommunion of ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... portraits. This preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily have resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine, or in the overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in many a village of the Alps, in something merely morbid or grotesque, in the Danse Macabre of many French and German painters, or the grim inventions of Durer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth century were saved by the nobility of their Italian culture, and still more by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's Inn—something solid, immovable, and grotesque—is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... supersession by a young and as yet almost unknown musician. True, he was not a very distinguished man himself. He had composed a large amount of music, chiefly sacred, including thirty-nine masses and twelve "Oratorios for Good Friday," besides some grotesque pieces intended as burlesques of the musical life of Vienna. Not one of his works has any real musical value; but, as is usually the case with the talent which stops short of genius, he thought a great deal of himself, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... does not know that there is any better way than hers. She does not see that her child is mortified and harmed when she says to her, in the presence of strangers, "How do you suppose you look with your mouth open like that?" "Do you want me to show you how you are sitting?"—and then a grotesque imitation of her stooping shoulders. "Will you sit still for one minute?" "Do take your hands off my dress." "Was there ever such an awkward child?" When the child replies fretfully and disagreeably, she does not see that it is only an exact reflection of her own voice and manners. ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... gallery, in seats which Heath habitually frequented when the music given was orchestral, when he wished to see as little as possible and to hear perfectly. He enjoyed hearing a fine orchestra without watching the conductor, whose necessary gestures, sometimes not free from an element of the grotesque, hindered the sweet toil of his imagination, held him back from worlds he desired ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... about an equal proportion of males and females, many of them being men and their wives; but they are all bound by their laws not to cohabit together. Their religious observances are wholly confined to singing and dancing of the most grotesque kind, and this repeated so constantly as to occupy much time; yet these people become rich and powerful wherever they settle themselves. Whatever they manufacture, whatever their farms produce, is always in the highest repute, and brings ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... instinct for reality, the same confident recognition of the superficial cheapness and commonness of the stuff she handles; but in her stories she also attests the right to be named with them for the gift of penetrating to the heart of life. No one with the love of the grotesque which is the American portion of the human tastes or passions, can fail of his joy in the play of the obvious traits and motives of her Hebrew comedy, but he will fail of something precious if he does not sound ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... their general purpose, and fall away. This simile applies to the majority of people. Not only poetry and romance, but history also, gives us instances wherein men and women differ and break away from accepted types, some in absurd or grotesque ways, others through the sheer force of gifted selfishness, and others still in natural, noble development of ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... greyness of the night sight and smell lost their keenness, and familiar objects assumed unnatural forms, grotesque ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels, that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly young: young when he began work, ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... was fond of disguising their sense to the eye, though not to the ear. Thus Lady Snuphanuph, looks a grotesque, but somewhat plausible name—snuff-enough—a further indication of the manners and customs. So with Lord Mutanhed, i.e. "Muttonhead." Mallard, Serjeant Snubbin's Clerk, I have suspected, may have been some Mr. Duck—whom "Boz" had known—in ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... the boys were enemies, holding no communication. For a time letters full of boyish bravado and boastful narratives of the new and larger experience—grotesque descriptions of their widening lives and the new worlds they had conquered—passed between them; but these gradually became less frequent, and with William's removal to another and greater city ceased altogether. But ever through it all ran the song of the mocking-bird, and when the dreamer opened ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... wrought in the edifice were mournful and grotesque. What was now the Hall, had evidently been the atrium; the round shield, with its pointed boss, the spear, sword, and small curved saex of the early Teuton, were suspended from the columns on which once had been ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and the angels into his folk-tales, and does so without the least idea of treating them disrespectfully. He makes them talk in his own language because he has no other language; and if the talk seems a little grotesque and irreverent, it is due to the low level of the narrator's literary culture, and not to any intention, on his part, of treating God and the angels with levity. The whole aim of the story is a moral and religious one. The narrator ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... fascination. Reducing their new theory to practise, the Greek artists turned their attention to perfecting the details of the art they had borrowed. To works originally repellant from their very crudeness, they supplied finish and perfection of the parts. The ideal was still before them; the grotesque monsters might fascinate the beholder, but, however skilfully executed, however perfected in finish, the impression produced was but transitory, and failed to satisfy the craving of the soul Beauty was found to be the only abiding source of ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... the people joined hands and danced around it. The whole day was given up to merriment, every one dressed in holiday clothes, doors and windows were adorned with green boughs and flowers, the bells rang, processions of people in grotesque dresses were arranged, and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Babylonian art and literature what Greece had done for Egyptian, whose dominant idea was that of working for eternity a . Hellas and Iran instinctively chose as their characteristic the idea of Beauty, rejecting all that was exaggerated and grotesque; and they made the sphere of Art and Fancy as real as the world of Nature and Fact. The innovation was hailed by the Hebrews. The so-called Books of Moses deliberately and ostentatiously ignored the future state of rewards and punishments, the other world which ruled the life of the Egyptian ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... offence to the eye; big texts seemed to squirm, like semi-paralysed eels, over the chancel arch and round the East window. The latter, off which Jimmy could hardly take his eyes, was a veritable triumph of the Victorian tradition. Its colouring was gruesome, its design grotesque; and yet it was a source of great pride to the congregation as a whole, having been put in to the memory of a banker who had left nearly a million. They no more dreamed of doubting its artistic merits than they did of questioning the religion ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... seek assistance, and left the dark room with the dead man lying in the pool of yellow light, and the parrot perched on the body, muttering to itself. It was a strange mingling of the horrible and grotesque, and the whole scene was hit off in the phrase applied to it by Vandeloup. It was, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... attacked by the said Divs, giants or demons, who imprison them in cages hung to the highest trees, and here the captives are visited by their friends who feed them with the sweetest of scents. I have already contrasted them with the green-coated pygmies to which the grotesque fancy of Northern Europe has reduced them. Banu in Pers. a princess, a lady, and is still much used, e.g. Banu-i-Harim, the Dame of the Serraglio, whom foreigners call "Queen of Persia," and Aram-Banu"the calm Princess," a nickname. A Greek story ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... question that came to him was why could not a steam locomotive propel cars filled with people as well as cars filled with coal. Accordingly he set to work and had several coach bodies mounted on trucks, installing a lever brake at the front of each one beside the coachman's box. In front of the grotesque procession he placed a steam locomotive and when he had fastened the coaches together he had the first passenger train ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... vernacular name was Francis Dujon. He lived much in England, as librarian to Howard, Earl of Arundel. He bequeathed to the Bodleian his Anglo-Saxon and Northern collections. Among these is a beautiful Latin Psalter (Jun. 27) of the tenth century, with grotesque initials and interlinear Saxon. This book has been called "Codex Vossianus," because Junius obtained it from his relative, Isaac Voss. Among these also is the unique Cdmon, a MS. of about A.D. 1000, which had been given to Junius by Archbishop Usher, and of which the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... not exactly name my bottle," he went on to say, "but it stood for the person to me. It was a sort of physical manifestation—rather a grotesque one, perhaps—of a spiritual presence which had not really left me since a ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... Day's cocoa, the lanterns were all lit now, and the effect, on fans and pictures and on brilliant bits of color, were grotesque and almost bizarre. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... thoughts would roll across her heart like a crushing weight, and she knew that no thirst for tea, no hunger for flour-bread, no shivering in thin garments, would ever drive her to part with it. For the grotesque, carven thing was the very birthright of her boy. Every figure, hewn with infinite patience by his sire's, his grandsire's, his great-grandsire's, hands meant the very history from which sprang the source ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... in one respect, grace, form, expression; but he has everywhere sense and meaning, perfect costume and propriety. His personages always belong to the class and time represented, and are strictly versed in the business in hand. His grotesque compositions in particular, his Nymphs and Fauns, are superior (at least, as far as style is concerned) even to those of Rubens. They are taken more immediately out of fabulous history. Rubens' Satyrs and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... discoursing in a deep, sonorous voice to the assembly—descanting, with seeming fluency, upon a picture which he held in his hand, his tawny, gipsy-like face only half shown by the flame of a flaring naphtha lamp, and his features rendered grotesque by the play of lights and shadows. The party from the park, however, had very little opportunity for seeing what manner of man he was; for no sooner did he catch sight of Mr. Jardine's tail hat over the circle ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... grotesque combinations, the things of to-day and the things of endless yesterdays, as Esther slept in the narrow little bed next to Dutch Debby, who squeezed herself into the wall, pretending to revel in exuberant spaciousness. It was long before she could get to ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Scattered through the groves, which were free from underbrush, and whose surface was carpeted with the tufted grass, were seen the huts of the mountaineers in every variety of the picturesque, and even of the grotesque. Some were formed of the well tanned robes of the buffalo; some of boughs, twigs and bark; some of massive logs. Before all these huts, fires were burning at all times of the day, and food was being cooked and devoured by these ever-hungry men. Haunches of venison, prairie chickens, and trout from ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... and his own death; treating him very much, in fact, as English royalty, during the last generation, treated another Irish bard whose song was even more sweet, and his notions of Irish history even more grotesque, than those of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... speakers, and what hearers! What would I not give to have been there, had I not learned it all from the bright eyes of Amaryllis, and may one day make a Table-talk of it!—Peter Pindar was rich in anecdote and grotesque humour, and profound in technical knowledge both of music, poetry, and painting, but he was gross and overbearing. Wordsworth sometimes talks like a man inspired on subjects of poetry (his own out of the question)—Coleridge ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... by light and shade, and of course powerfully assisted by the creative state of the eye under this nervous apprehensiveness, I continued to shape into images of Agnes forms without end, that upon nearer approach presented the most grotesque contrasts to her impressive appearance. But I had ceased even to comprehend the ludicrous; my agitation was now so overruling and engrossing that I lost even my intellectual sense of it; and now first I understood ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... drawings hung against the walls, while on the tables, on the hanging shelves, and in elegant glass cupboards, there were a thousand knick-knacks; small vases, statuettes, groups in Dresden china, and grotesque Chinese figures, old ivory, and Venetian glass, which filled the large room with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in their nightshirts, and of common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously at work on women's tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours, the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its grotesque travesties of passionate conviction—lies with their wigs on—the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism. A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had once been obliged to make a convulsive ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... For she like Ethne was overtaxed that night. That calm pale face of hers hid the quick passions of the South, and she had been racked by them to the limits of endurance. There had been something grotesque, something rather horrible, in that outbreak and confession by Durrance, after Ethne had fled from the room. He was speaking out his heart to an empty chair. She herself had stood without the window with a bitter longing that he had spoken so to her and ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... the evening, however, was the minstrel show. On a raised wooden platform sat the performers with blackened hands and faces. They wore grotesque garb and each one fingered a guitar, ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... there came into view, moving slowly, Ned and Koku. Their portable lights were glowing, and then, in order to see them better, Tom turned out the exterior searchlights. This made the two forms, in their rather grotesque dress, stand out in bold relief amid the swirling green waters ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... equivalent of Echo Caon, and is equal or superior in everything except color. The brilliant red of the Echo cliffs is wanting. The towers and walls of Castle Caon are yellowish-gray. But their forms are incomparably various and grotesque—in some instances sublime. The valley of Green River at this point is a cheerless sage-brush desert, as it is further north. To be sure, this uninviting stream, a couple of hundred miles further south, having united with the Grande, and formed the Rio ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... unrelenting struggle for supremacy into which, through her relation to Ditmar, she had been projected, and the significance of which she had now begun to realize. She surveyed Holster critically. He was short, heavily built, with an almost grotesque width of shoulder, a muddy complexion, thick lips, and kinky, greasy black hair that glistened in the sun. His nasal voice was complaining, yet distinctly aggressive, and he emphasized his words by gestures. The veins stood out ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to the fairer reader, this grotesque personage had yet formed those ties which ordinary mortals are apt to consider their especial monopoly,—he was married, and had one child. What is more strange yet, his wife was a daughter of quiet, sober, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... though they feel deeply the wrongs which they have suffered from it, and speak of them occasionally with solemnity and earnestness. Still the feeling is so absurd and ludicrous in itself, and is exhibited in so many grotesque positions, even when oppressive, that the sufferer cannot help laughing at it. Mr. Jordon has held his present office since 1832. He has had an extensive opportunity, both as a justice of the police court, and as a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... brought him in a forest-leaf, and the ancient and half-putrid chunk of roast pig, could redeem in the slightest the grotesque hideousness of her. When he had eaten weakly for a space, he closed his eyes in order not to see her, although again and again she poked them open to peer at the blue of them. Then had come the sound. Nearer, much nearer, he knew ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... could not interpret, but the tone the whole village could, and she blushed, crowding paters on aves, until her voice sometimes became as distinct as Saint-Castin's in resolute opposition. It was so grotesque that it made her laugh. Yet to a woman the most formidable quality in ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... gives it its importance. The doctrine of race, and of sympathies springing from race, must have taken very firm hold indeed of men's minds before it could be carried out in a shape which we are tempted to call so grotesque as this. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Dante's adoration of Beatrice—a parallel that Comte himself was the first to hit upon. It is no doubt the worst kind of cynicism to make a mock in a realistic vein of any personality that has set in motion the idealising thaumaturgy of the affections. Yet we cannot help feeling that it is a grotesque and unseemly anachronism to apply in grave prose, addressed to the whole world, those terms of saint and angel which are touching and in their place amid the trouble and passion of the great mystic poet. Only an energetic and beautiful ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... fuller prominence, the carpet-bag revealed further details of its overburdened proportions. At one end a flannel shirt cuff protruded in limp dejection; at the other an ancient collar, with the grotesque attachment known as a "dickey," asserted its presence. No wonder the manager frowned his annoyance. "The Safe" was in low enough repute among its patrons at that moment without any burlesque ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... anything beautiful, appropriate, or tender. A lion, ill done, and yet to some degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ. In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is to be seen. Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is the most pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... their places in the trenches. But first they were given a little talk by one of the officers, who explained the necessity of donning gas masks at the first alarm. Other instructions were given, and then, when it was seen that every man had everything he needed, from the first-aid kit to the grotesque-looking gas mask, the trip to the first-line trenches ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... chimneys of the Lodge might be distinguished in grotesque masses, changeless and unvarying, against the ever-shifting darkness of the sky. A pale star sometimes looked out as if by stealth, but was obscured almost ere its brightness could be developed. The wind, as it rushed by, broke into short and irregular ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance, wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... freedom of this curious piece of Turkish construction, where, among storks and ibises gravely perched on one stilt, you examine the relics of Roman history, preserved by its very destroyers, according to the grotesque providence that watches ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... contrivance for opening and shutting the jaws, and the figure pursues and bites every body it can lay hold of, and does not release them except on payment of a fine. It is generally accompanied by some men dressed up in a grotesque manner, who, on reaching a house, sing some extempore verses requesting admittance, and are in turn answered by those within, until one party or the other is at a loss for a reply. The Welsh are undoubtedly a poetical people, and these verses often display a good ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... phenomena through their primary causes because a knowledge of man's nature is the radical cure for his ills. The greatest obstacle man has to contend against is his emotional nature. Not that it is inherently degraded or sinful—the grotesque superstition some religious moralists have maintained; but man's emotional nature masters, more often than not, man's rational nature, and leads man astray. When the emotions are unrestrained and undirected by knowledge and intelligence, they violently attach themselves to ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... not what they sought. It was affecting to see the deep silent sorrow of the Indian women and of the children, who knew no other mother, and clung fondly to their bosems from whence they were not torn without bitter shrieks. I shall never forget the grotesque figures and wild looks of these young savages; nor the trembling haste with which their mothers arrayed them in the new clothes they had brought for them, as hoping with the Indian dress they would throw off their ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... that if by chance a carriage lost its place in the line it was impossible to recover it, and it was immediately obliged to leave the street, and re-enter by one of the extremities. Besides the warfare carried on below, the balconies on each side were crowded with people in gay or grotesque dresses, who had sacks of bon-bons before them, from which they showered vollies upon those beneath, or aimed across the street at each other: some of them filled their handkerchiefs, and then dexterously loosening ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... is adorned with statues, and extends along the shore to the Tomb of Virgil, and the mole. It is crowded every evening with Neapolitans in equipages, some elegant, and some grotesque. ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... children ascribed to him were Oengus, Bodb Dearg, Danu, Brigit, and perhaps Ogma. The euhemerists made him die of Cethlenn's venom, long after the battle of Mag-tured in which he encountered her.[282] Irish mythology is remarkably free from obscene and grotesque myths, but some of these cluster round Dagda. We hear of the Gargantuan meal provided for him in sport by the Fomorians, and of which he ate so much that "not easy was it for him to move and unseemly was his apparel," as well as his conduct with a Fomorian ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... display that he freed himself from responsibility? Did he hope to turn aside the blow which threatened Jesus by conceding something to the hatred of the Jews,[1] and by substituting for the tragic denouement a grotesque termination, to make it appear that the affair merited no other issue? If such were his idea, it was unsuccessful. The tumult increased, and became an open riot. The cry "Crucify him! crucify him!" resounded from all sides. The priests becoming increasingly urgent, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... bleak Labrador coast and there in saving life made expiation. In dignity, simplicity, humor, in sympathetic etching of a sturdy fisher people, and above all in the echoes of the sea, Doctor Luke is worthy of great praise. Character, humor, poignant pathos, and the sad grotesque conjunctions of old and new civilizations are expressed through the medium of a style that has distinction and strikes a note ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... well named, for it was a great resource. There were illustrations of all kinds, from Lord Fordham's careful watercolours, and Mrs. Brownlow's graceful figures or etchings, to the doctor's clever caricatures and grotesque outlines, and the contributions were equally miscellaneous. There were descriptions of scenery, fragmentary notes of history and science, records more or less veracious or absurd of personal adventures, and conversations, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at everywhere as an absurd reactionary he was held in the highest Buda-Pest circles to be a perilous innovator. He actually spoke about conciliating the Austro-Hungarian Slavs: not so Count Tisza. "What is happening in Austria," exclaimed the grim Calvinist a few months before, "are strange, grotesque displays of the ridiculous symptoms of the presumptuous mentality of people ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... which concluded the trial," says Hazlitt, "lasted seventy-two hours. It might naturally be supposed that silence, restraint, a sort of religious awe, would have pervaded the scene. On the contrary, everything bore the marks of gaiety, dissipation, and the most grotesque confusion. The farther end of the hall was converted into boxes, where ladies, in a studied deshabille, swallowed ices, oranges, liqueurs, and received the salutations of the members who went and came, as on ordinary occasions. Here the doorkeepers on ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... ends, that reigned from centre to circumference through the stables at Laxton! I, as it happened, could report to Lord Massey their earlier condition; he to me could report their immediate changes. I won him easily to an interest in my own Irish experiences, so fresh, and in parts so grotesque, wilder also by much in Connaught than in Lord Massey's county of Limerick; whilst he (without affecting any delight in the hunting systems of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire) yet took pleasure in explaining to me those characteristic features of the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... direction were not to be obtained without very special inducement. At "calling" moose he was acknowledged to have no rival. When he laid his grimly-humourous lips to the long tube of birch-bark, which is the "caller's" instrument of illusion, there would come from it a strange sound, great and grotesque, harsh yet appealing, rude yet subtle, and mysterious as if the uncomprehended wilderness had itself found voice. Old hunters, wise in all woodcraft, had been deceived by the sound—and much more easily the impetuous bull, waiting, high-antlered and eager, for the love-call of his ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... opened and, as I turned, I found myself looking into the wrathful eyes of a stunted little man with an enormous head. Any one who has once seen Zalnitch can never forget him. His wizened, misshapen body is a grotesque caricature of a man's, which, surmounted by his huge head with its bushy hair, makes him look for all the world like some scientist's experiment. In the doorway to Zalnitch's private office stood Schreiber, a heavy-jowled, unsmiling mastiff ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... heretofore could only be wrought upon through the medium of the senses? Was then the zeal so pure, which glowed in the bosoms of the stormy fanatics, who with axe and hatchet overthrew without discrimination the ornaments of churches and the grotesque creations of superstition,[11] and before whose gloomy looks the most delicate works of art, from which the grandeur of innocence and the blessedness of love beamed down upon ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... chamber filled with soldiers in great buff jerkins,—those were pleasures not to be always found at will, and were to be made the most of when met with. Such pleasures, moreover, savouring of the unforeseen, the adventurous, and the grotesque, solely determined Mademoiselle's conduct in the outset. But on the second Fronde breaking out, when the struggle of the Parliament with royalty had become a quarrel between princes and ministers, Mademoiselle felt that the honour of her ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... to be seriously damaged. And I was to be murdered. And then you were to get the concern cheap from my executors, and to float me dead since you could not float me living. What folly, Ravengar! What stupendous folly! Even if the fanciful and grotesque scheme had succeeded as far as my death, it could not have succeeded ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... walked between the two boys, he presented an appearance that was almost grotesque. He was without his hat, which had floated down the stream and had not been recovered. His hair was plastered down on both cadaverous cheeks, his shirtfront was a mass of pulp, and his wet clothes clinging closely to him brought into full relief every bony angle of his figure. One ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... statuettes of the Assyrians possess even less artistic merit than their statues. They are chiefly images of gods or genii, and have most commonly something grotesque in their appearance. Among the most usual are figures which represent either Mylitta (Bettis), or Ishtar. They are made in a fine terra cotta, which has turned of a pale red in baking, and are colored with a cretaceous coating, so as greatly to resemble Greek pottery. Another ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... petrol lamp shone full on Droulde's earnest, dark countenance as he looked Juliette's infamous accuser full in the face, but the tallow candles, flickering weirdly on the President's desk, threw Tinville's short, spare figure and large, unkempt head into curious grotesque silhouette. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Hugh on the drive, rapturous at seeing them again, rather absorbed in his new dog. But Brock, then fourteen, was in the house alone, quiet, his fresh, dear face red with tears, and a black necktie of his father's, too large for him, tied under his collar. Of all the memories of her boys, that grotesque black tie was the most poignant and most precious. It said much. It said: "I also, O, my mother, am of my people. I have a right to their sorrows as well as to their joys, and if you do not give me my place in trouble, I shall do what I can ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... other's masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... the limericks of a few years before. The guests grouped themselves at little tables, and some, with shears and pages cut from old natural histories, geographies or poultry and live stock journals, created grotesque illustrations for the verses descriptive of the hippopotamustang and the kangarooster and other strange beasts which Catherine and Alice concocted during the afternoon. Others labored over historical combinations and the deeds of Bathrobespierre were sung in limpid ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... forward and with a steady hand readjusted the shade of a lamp which was in danger of burning. Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair with an indrawn sobbing breath. The action at such a moment seemed grotesque. His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away amongst the wounded places of his ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect, to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the sun began to peep through the angles of the wooden gable fronts, projecting nearly midway across the street, streaming athwart the frosty air, and giving a beautifully variegated and picturesque appearance to the grotesque ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... So-and-So?" Memory could supply no duplicate to this picture. It was like but one other face in the world, the one from which it had been faithfully copied. It was originally meant for a handsome face, but the features were exaggerated until they became grotesque and coarse in the extreme, and the thick, bushy, iron-grey hair and whiskers, and clay-coloured complexion, put the finishing strokes to a portrait, which might be considered the very ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... five and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They looked grotesque—unearthly—denizens of some underground pit. They were good-humoured and full ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... walls were set with carvings and perforated work. Here hung bars of musical bells; there stood great jars and vases; everywhere were fantastic furnishings of silks and costly metals. Feathery green bamboos grew in dragon pots. In the corners stood grotesque figures in armor. ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... preposterously working once more, playing the part of a cog on the wheel. Another day, it seemed, of that grotesque nonsense, even after the world's Greatest Pitcher had sat not twenty feet from him the night before, eating raspberry ice. But events could not long endure that strain. Before the day was over Breede would undoubtedly "fire" him, with two or three badly ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... figure stood before them, his seamed and weather-beaten face set in stern lines. But there was a glint of laughter in his eyes as he noticed the grotesque and sometimes tortuous positions of some of the boys as they braced themselves in what they considered ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... rendered difficult by inaptitude and incompetence. I wanted to jump up and cry to him: "Get out of the way, man, and let me do it for you! I can do it while you are wiping hairs from your pen on your sleeve." I was sorry for him because he was ridiculous—and even more grotesque than ridiculous. I felt, quite acutely, that it was a shame that he could not be for ever the central figure of a field of mud, kicking a ball into long and grandiose parabolas higher than gasometers, or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... water-colors, and drawings hung upon the walls, while on the tables, on the hanging shelves, and in elegant glass cupboards, there were a thousand knickknacks: small vases, statuettes, groups in Dresden china, grotesque Chinese figures, old ivory, and Venetian glass, which filled the large room with their precious ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... involuntary prominence by being democratic amid aristocratic surroundings. Others, on the contrary, but with the same result, continue to live the life to which they were born, even when placed amid surroundings that make their actions all but grotesque. An example of this latter class was Scotty Baker, whose ranch, as the wild goose flies, was thirteen miles west of ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... one of the wildest men; his fate, which was tragical, is now to most readers rather of a ghastly grotesque than of a lamentable and pitiable character. Few know, or have ever considered, in how wild an element poor Peter was born and nursed; what a time he has had, since his fifteenth year especially, when Cousin of Zerbst and he were married. Perhaps the wildest and maddest any human ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the wheels, and he became more and more irate. The high price of whisky was one source of complaint—it appeared, according to one of them, that it was all going to France, which caused a shortage for those at home. Then the military situation. . . . Impossible, grotesque. . . . Somebody ought to be hanged for having allowed such a thing to happen. After four years to be forced back—inexcusable. What was wanted was somebody with a business brain to run the Army. . . . In the meantime their money was being wasted, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... a spring back fifty feet from the entrance where a shaft of sunlight struck the rock through some obscure slit in the rock, had no thrill for him. But the floor was of fine, white sand, and the ceiling was knobby and grotesque, and he was quite willing to sit there beside the spring and eat two sandwiches and talk foolishness with Honey, using that part of his mind which was not busy with the complexities of winning money on the speed of his horses when three horses represented his entire ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... expect all the brothers of the Order of St. John to be at my service when I call upon them to protect German ways and German customs." The Kaiser's crusading appeals are not hypocritical or consciously insincere: they are simply many centuries out of date—a grotesque medley of medieval romanticism and royal megalomania. What was possible for the warrior knights in North-East Germany five or six centuries ago is a tragic absurdity and an outrageous crime to-day among a spirited and sensitive people like the Poles—still ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... passed. The towers of the Oriental College and the pine trees about it had gone, and very far away, lit by a vivid red glare, the common about the sand pits was visible. Across the light huge black shapes, grotesque and strange, moved ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... was quite deserted; not a trace of natives, nor any track that could betray the existence of man. The stream was fringed with tall bushes, or glided along sloping banks, so that nothing obstructed the view of the low range of hills which closed the eastern end of the valley. With their grotesque shapes, and their outlines lost in a deceptive haze, they brought to mind giant animals, worthy of antediluvian times. They might have been a herd of enormous whales, suddenly turned to stone. These disrupted masses proclaimed their essentially volcanic character. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... to examine, in high delight, the new and strange objects which surrounded her. Meanwhile her mother and I stood together, looking at each other by the light of the lamp, with an assumed composure which hid our true faces like a mask. In that horrible situation, the grotesque and the terrible, always together in this strange life of ours, came together now. On either side of us, the one sound that broke the sinister and threatening silence was the lumpish snoring of ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... it is most beautiful as well. You are, in effect, at the bottom of the ocean—or rather, at the bottom of many oceans in one. No light comes to you except through the grottos about you—grottos haunted by weird forms of the deep, from graceful to grotesque, from almost colorless to gaudy-hued. To your dilated pupils the light itself has the weird glow of unreality. It is all like the wonders of the Arabian Nights made tangible or like a strange spectacular dream. If one were in a great diving-bell at the bottom of the veritable ocean he could hardly ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... history of Cesare Borgia, with intent to do just and honest work, must find it impossible to tell a plain and straightforward tale—to present him not as a villain of melodrama, not a monster, ludicrous, grotesque, impossible, but as human being, a cold, relentless egotist, it is true, using men for his own ends, terrible and even treacherous in his reprisals, swift as a panther and as cruel where his anger was aroused, yet with certain elements of greatness: ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Council, and often under British convoy.[269] The fact was noteworthy, as bearing upon the contention of the United States Government soon after, that the Non-Intercourse Law was adequate security for the action of American merchant vessels; a grotesque absurdity, in view of the embargo experiences. That it is not consonant with national self-esteem to accept foreign assistance to carry out national laws is undeniable; but it is a step further to expect another nation to accept, as assured, the efficiency of an authority ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... condition compels between the sculptural decoration of the incrusted style, and that of the solid stones of the North, which may be hacked and hewn into whatever cavernous hollows and black recesses we choose; struck into grim darknesses and grotesque projections, and rugged ploughings up of sinuous furrows, in which any form or thought may be wrought out on any scale,—mighty statues with robes of rock and crowned foreheads burning in the sun, or venomous goblins ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... resistance by the Church of England. Yet his priests could not keep him from Arabella Sedley. While he was risking his crown for the sake of his soul, he was risking his soul for the sake of an ugly, dirty mistress. There is something delightfully grotesque in the spectacle of a man who, while living in the habitual violation of his own known duties, is unable to believe that any temptation can draw any other person aside from the path ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Colonel Bosley said he knew there was a joke up, and humored it; and after putting all sorts of grotesque questions to the man, he was allowed to go on his ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling unnatural patches of—paint. The reflections slid over the liquid black mass of her hair, died in the lustrous creamy folds of her garment. She was at once grotesque and impressive, like a figure in a Chinese pantomime watched from the western auditorium of his inheritance. His fondness for her, his admiration, had not lessened. He surveyed his position, the presence here, in his room at Java Head, of Taou Yuen, with amazement; all the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... finished, graceful and truly classical. It would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales, "The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... without further conversation; they were all hungry, and the boys were still very fagged. As they approached the blazing mass, the figure seemed to leap more wildly still among the flames, the cries to grow hoarser and more grotesque. All about was heavy blackness. The slender branches of the burning pine writhed and hissed; they might have been a pyramid of rattlesnakes caught in spouting flame. Overhead the stars had disappeared beyond a heavy cloud of smoke. It was a sight to strike terror to ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... the mark as usual, Corinna reflected. It was his way, she had observed, to cover a mental disturbance with pretended hilarity. There was, as always when he was unnatural and ill at ease, a touch of coarseness in his humour, a grotesque exaggeration of his rhetorical style. With his mind obviously distracted he told several anecdotes of dubious wit; and while he related them Miss Spencer sat primly silent with her gaze on her plate. Only Corinna laughed, as she ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... language. To all who understand the ways of the East, it is as witty, and as full of what is popularly called "chaff" as it is possible to be. There is not a dull page in it, and it will especially please those who delight in the weird and supernatural, the grotesque, and ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... carved wood of quaint pattern, and some of them quite ancient, were to be had at very moderate prices; pipes and pipe-bowls of the weirdest description; halibut fish-hooks, looking like anything at all but fish-hooks; Shaman rattles, grotesque in design; Thlinket baskets, beautifully plaited and stained with subdued dyes—the most popular of souvenirs; spoons with bone bowls and handles carved from the horns of the mountain goat or musk-ox; even the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Railroad corporation extended to him all graces. A special car, the Pullman in embryo in reality, was at his beck, and a train for his numerous friends if he spoke. On the other hand, his rival, becoming more and more democratic in his leaning to the grotesque, gloried in traveling even in the caboose of a freight-train. He had no brass bands and no canteen for all comers; on one occasion his humble "freighter" was side-tracked to let the palace-cars sweep majestically by, a calliope playing ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... expressions, and difficult allusions, he imperils his clearness. In the presence of genuine emotion, he is always as simple in style as he is serious in attitude; but there are times when he seems to revel in the extravagant and grotesque. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... there, we were interested in and enjoyed the gathering of ten or fifteen native boys around the ship diving for centimes or francs thrown by the passengers, their dexterity as divers, securing every penny, was as clever as grotesque. They remained in the water six or eight hours during the ship's stay. A few hours brought us to Aden, a very strongly fortified appendage to the British Empire at the south end of the Red Sea. For armament and strategical locality it is the Gibraltar ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... the chimney, afforded a kind of screen; and presently he stood within a chamber which the dark and painful genius of Crabbe might have delighted to portray. The walls were whitewashed, and at sundry places strange figures and grotesque characters had been traced by some mirthful inmate, in such sable outline as the end of a smoked stick or the edge of a piece of charcoal is wont to produce. The wan and flickering light afforded ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... crouched in a position of grotesque fright, the fear-sweat streaming down his face, Frederik Grimm peered about him through the flickering gloom. The place seemed peopled with elusive Shapes. His teeth clicked together as his loosened jaw was nerve-racked. He shivered from ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... ladies, who were retiring. Miss Peyton detained him for a moment, to inquire into the welfare of Captain Singleton. Frances smiled with something of natural archness of manner, as she contemplated the grotesque appearance of the bald-headed practitioner; but Sarah was too much agitated, with the surprise of the unexpected interview with the British colonel, to observe him. It has already been intimated that Colonel Wellmere was an old acquaintance of the family. ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of those of antecedent and succeeding generations. It has a naked material relation to the other fact, that he uses legal phrases oftener than any other dramatist or poet; but with his plastic power over those grotesque and rugged modes of speech it has nought to do whatever. That was his inborn mastery. Legal phrases did nothing for him; but he much for them. Chance cast their uncouth forms around him, and the golden overflow from the furnace of his glowing thought fell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... in the light of a bonfire this dance is most grotesque and terrible. The naked black bodies, gleaming in the fire, the blood-curdling yells, and the demoniacal figures of the howling, leaping dancers, remind one ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... shelving rock, on the surface of which were still visible some old Bushman paintings, their red and black pigments having been preserved through long years from wind and rain by the overhanging ledge; grotesque oxen, elephants, rhinoceroses, and a one-horned beast, such as no man ever ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... subdued city, satiated with victory and peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart; and in it a woman, carefully wrapped up—the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest—some kind of an ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... as he rowed, looked down at the two men sleeping under-foot. The cook's arm was around the oiler's shoulders, and, with their fragmentary clothing and haggard faces, they were the babes of the sea, a grotesque rendering of the old ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... with which the sand was strewn. It was a wretched repast, but still it was better than nothing. The opposite coast formed one vast bay, terminating on the south by a very sharp point, which was destitute of all vegetation, and was of a very wild aspect. This point abutted on the shore in a grotesque outline of high granite rocks. Towards the north, on the contrary, the bay widened, and a more rounded coast appeared, trending from the southwest to the northeast, and terminating in a slender cape. The distance between these two extremities, which made the bow of the bay, was about ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... and earth were united in a state of chaos until a divine man, whom they call P'an-ku, the "ancient founder," rent them asunder. Pictures show him wielding his sledge-hammer and disengaging sun and moon from overlying hills—a grotesque conception in strong contrast with the simple and sublime statement, "God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light." P'an-ku was followed by a divine being named Nue-wa, in regard to whom it [Page 71] is doubtful whether to speak in the feminine ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... grieve your mistress?" remonstrated Major Favraud, lifting at the same time an admonitory finger, at which recognized signal, a part of past instructions probably, the parrot burst forth at once in a series of the most grotesque and outre oaths ear ever heard, ending (by the aid of some prompting from his teacher) by dismally croaking the fragment of a popular song ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... writers of the past century, especially by Hoffmann and his fantastic Kreisleriana, their influence upon the writing of Old Fogy is not difficult to detect. He loved the fantastic, the bizarre, the grotesque—for the latter quality he endured the literary work of Berlioz, hating all the while his music. And this is a curious crack in his mental make-up; his admiration for the exotic in literature and his abhorrence of the same quality when it manifested itself in tone. I never entirely understood ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... did Jay Gould see? He saw, in the first place, that society, as it was organized, had neither patience nor compassion for the very poverty its grotesque system created. Prate its higher classes might of the blessings of poverty; and they might spread broadcast their prolix homilies on the virtues of a useful life, "rounded by an honorable poverty." But all of these teachings were, in one sense, chatter and nonsense; ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... under the shadow of this too prepotent monarchy. There are certain limiting restrictions imposed upon Germans through the Imperial activity, that must finally be bad for the intellectual atmosphere which is Germany's ultimate strength. For example, the Emperor professes a violent and grotesque Christianity with a ferocious pro-Teutonic Father and a negligible Son, and the public mind is warped into conformity with the finally impossible cant of this eccentric creed. His Imperial Majesty's disposition to regard ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a common complexion runs through the whole range of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... was as inarticulate as Cromwell. Like the great Protector he "lived silent," and like him he was often misunderstood. Stories which have been repeated by writer after writer attribute to him the most grotesque eccentricities of manner, and exhibit his lofty piety as the harsh intolerance of a fanatic. He has been represented as the narrowest of Calvinists; and so general was the belief in his stern and merciless nature that a great poet did not scruple to link his name ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... a tall person clothed in what seemed to be a magnificent feather cloak, and, walking around and about him, a number of grotesque forms adorned with hideous masks and basket-like head-dresses ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... deeply absorbed as a spectator. The crash and swing of the great drama made him lean forward, intent-eyed, his face working in small contortions. Sometimes he prattled, words coming unconsciously from him in grotesque exclamations. He did not know that he breathed; that the flag hung silently over ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... It was a grotesque, old-fashioned, castellated sort of a sentry-box, made of a smoky-colored wood, and with a grating in front, that lifted up like a portcullis. And here would this Danby sit all the day long; and when ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... plumber's wooden triangle. This preliminary operation having been completed, there then began a regular riot all over the ship. The yards were suddenly manned with red devils, black monkeys, and every kind of grotesque monster, while the whole ship's company, officers and men promiscuously mingled, danced the cancan upon deck. In order that the warmth of the day should not make us forget that we had arrived in his dominions, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... sketched. Garbed appropriately, in shawl and sabots, she would have passed for some European plowwoman of Amazonian proportions. Allegheny! It was a suitable name, indeed, for such a mountainous person. Her size was truly heroic; she would have been grotesque, ridiculous, except for a certain youthful plasticity and a suggestion of tremendous vigor and strength that gave her dignity. Her ample, ill-fitting dress failed to hide the fact that her robust body was ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... one arm across his purple, bloated face. Only the weak, helpless, open mouth could be seen. His muscular hands were relaxed, and the whole prostrate figure was pathetic in its unconsciousness of will and grotesque unhumanness. Fate had been too strong for Tom Davis. His birth and all the circumstances of his useless life had brought him with resistless certainty to this level, and his progress in the future could only be an ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... sickly. For nights, in spite of fatigue, he could not sleep. His mates sang and talked and bandied jests and sarcasms of esoteric meaning. Some of the recruits from factories or farms satirized their officers for peculiarities common to their social caste and gave grotesque imitations of their mode of speech. Doggie wondered, but held his peace. The deadly stupidity and weariness of it all! And when the talk stopped and they settled to sleep, the snorings and mutterings and coughings began and kept poor Doggie awake most of the night. The irremediable, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... trifles to present to the queen of the occasion. There was a time when Pauline would have been highly delighted with these gifts, but that time was not now. She felt the impossible tidies, the ugly pin-cushions, the hideous toilet-covers, the grotesque night-dress bags to be more burdens than treasures. What could she possibly do with them? The gold chain and locket were another matter. She felt very proud of her chain and her little heart-shaped locket. She was even mad enough to fasten the chain round her neck that morning ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... not been struck quite dumb by Aunt Maria's grotesque face, with its wrinkles, they must surely have shouted aloud! The third little mouse had sought ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... myself to this imperative though inglorious course, my heart warmed once more to the jovial young squire. He would laugh, but not unkindly, at my grotesque dilemma; at the thought of his laughter I began to smile myself. If he gave me another chance I would smoke that cigar with him before starting home afresh, and remove, front my own mind no less than from his, all ill impressions. ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... room, lighted only by the embers of a fire that was dying on the large hearth at its farther extremity; the walls curiously papered, and the flickering firelight bringing out its grotesque pattern; someone sitting in a large armchair by the fireplace. All this we saw as we crowded together into the room after the driver and expressman. "Hello! be you Miggles?" said Yuba Bill to ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... side of Lagny, and then stood on this side of the Marne, and whistled and shrieked a long time before we began to wiggle across the unfinished bridge, with workmen hanging up on the derricks and scaffoldings in all sorts of perilous positions, and all sorts of grotesque attitudes. I was glad when ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... strange song of the same name in the Scottish Gallovidean Encyclopaedia, from which I borrow some of the maledictory epithets. Grotesque they may be, but they are justified by the vocabulary of our old witch-sibyls used in curses and incantations, as we find in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... old, strange, mysterious creeds and faiths, shrouded in the mists of antiquity, and stalk dimly and undefined along the line which divides Time from Eternity; and forms of strange, wild, startling beauty mingled in the vast throngs of figures with shapes monstrous, grotesque, and hideous. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... events, the Orang-outang has a certain sense of humor which is not possessed by animals in general. He is very fond of imitating people, and sometimes acts in the most grotesque and amusing way, but, like many human wits of whom we read, his manner is always very solemn, even ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... to his plane, leaped in, and soared southward. His face was a grotesque mask of madness, and his cries rang ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... giving one a higher idea of the possibilities of the human race: but to lump a vast and complex system together, to concentrate unknown races, dead and living, negroes, Chinamen, Homeric heroes and palaeolithic men, into one definite conception, and to worship it, seemed to Hugh an almost grotesque thought. He could conceive of a species of Pantheism, in which the object of one's awe and worship was the vast force underlying all existing things; but even so it seemed necessary to Hugh to focus it all into one personal force. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the dull, flame-shot obscurity, the Legionaries ran about like ghouls in their hoods and round, hollow eye-holes; masked faces, indistinct in the smoke, loomed grotesque and horrible as Ku-Klux where the bayonets were at work digging out the enemy from blind burrows, turning them up from their ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... each minute, pressed against the still locked front doors. Those in the van flattened their noses against the glass in grotesque fashion. ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... a happiness that never altogether failed, vanish into a snug cottage in Hampstead or Surbiton. She saw the rain of her independence, of her delicious solitariness, of the life that began and ended in her sense of the strange, and the beautiful and the grotesque in a world of curious slaveries, of which it suited her to be an alien spectator, amused and free. She foresaw long conflicts and discussions, pryings which she could, not resent, justifications which would be forced upon her, obligations which she ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... exterior of the cabin was like the others on the plantation, the interior had a rude, grotesque elegance about it far in advance of any negro hut I had ever seen. The logs were chinked with clay, and the one window, though destitute of glass, and ornamented with the inevitable board-shutter, had a green moreen curtain, which kept ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... and ate as he felt inclined. He forbade all pruning of trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground, hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic landscapes. But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... to find that you, at least, have hit on another than Sir Everard Valletort: one, in fact, who will render the promotion more general than it would otherwise have been. Seriously, I should be sorry if any thing happened to our worthy Major, who, with all his bustling and grotesque manner, is as good an officer and as brave a soldier as any his Majesty's army in Canada can boast. For my part, I say, perish all promotion for ever, if it is only to be obtained over the dead bodies of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... methods of verbal jugglery which cannot be explained without the help of numerous examples. The collection published by Takumi includes a good deal of matter in which a Western reader can discover no merit; but the best of it has a distinctly grotesque quality that reminds one of Hood's weird cleverness in playing with grim subjects. This quality, and the peculiar Japanese method of mingling the playful with the terrific, can be suggested and explained only by reproducing in Romaji the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... was so uncouth and grotesque as to filch from death its rightful dignity, and his ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... perhaps, less responsive to the will of the people than that of almost any of the civilized nations. Our Constitution and our laws served us well for the first hundred years of our existence, but under the conditions of to-day they are not only obsolete, but even grotesque. It is nearly impossible for the desires of our people to find expression into law. In the latter part of the last century many will remember that an income tax was wanted. After many vicissitudes, a measure embodying ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... interior of the cottage was lighted up by a lurid glow, coming from what I afterward discovered to be a chemical furnace. By its rich light I could distinguish a great litter of retorts, test tubes and condensers, which sparkled over the table, and threw strange, grotesque shadows on the wall. On the further side of the room was a wooden framework resembling a hencoop, and in this, still absorbed in prayer, knelt the man whose voice I heard. The red glow beating upon his upturned face made it stand out from the shadow like ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... within an old and venerable cathedral, where the dim yellow light fell with a rich but solemn glow upon the fretted capitals, or the grotesque tracings of the oaken carvings, lighting up the fading gildings of the stately monuments, and tinting the varied hues of time-worn banners. The mellow notes of a deep organ filled the air, and seemed to attune the sense to all the awe and reverence of the place, where the very ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... North Africa, and to this meager diet ethnologists have ascribed many of the peculiar characteristics of the people who live upon it. Buckle, who finds in the constant consumption of rice among the Hindoos a reason for the inclination to the prodigious and grotesque, the depression of spirits, and the weariness of life manifest in that nation, likewise considers that the morbid temperament of the Arab is a sequence of vegetarianism. He points out that rice contains an unusual amount of starch, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... lay sleeping in various easy, off-hand attitudes on the schooner's deck, was one who merits special attention—not only because of the grotesque appearance of his person, but also because he is one of the principal ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... impassioned beauty in the speaker—who, as she crossed the illumined square of the window-frame, showed as a tall, thin woman of forty years, with squinting eyes, and a face whose misshapen features stood out like the hasty drawing for a grotesque. When she reached him Christopher turned from the porch, and they walked together slowly out into the moonlight, passing under the aspen where the turkeys stirred and ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... began to be a little restive, when over he went into the tub, where he floundered for some short time. He was drawn out, the bandage removed from his eyes, and he appeared not a little surprised to see so many grotesque figures around him. He soon recovered himself and entered into ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... semi-paralysed eels, over the chancel arch and round the East window. The latter, off which Jimmy could hardly take his eyes, was a veritable triumph of the Victorian tradition. Its colouring was gruesome, its design grotesque; and yet it was a source of great pride to the congregation as a whole, having been put in to the memory of a banker who had left nearly a million. They no more dreamed of doubting its artistic merits than they did of questioning the religion ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... children, and sing to him every day, especially the song of Clontarf and his own death; treating him very much, in fact, as English royalty, during the last generation, treated another Irish bard whose song was even more sweet, and his notions of Irish history even more grotesque, than ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... been aroused by arguments a little less profitable than those of an assembly of deaf persons convoked to decide upon the merits of the work of some distinguished musician. Here she imbibed a fund of ideas, which, applied to the forms of society of to-day, are as grotesque as would be those of a child shut up until twenty years of age in an ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... in grotesque man-trousers, reefed and rolled, intruded himself and his baby-charge in her way. Gloria gazed down into the boy's face with a sort of fascination. He was so small, yet had such a protecting way ...
— Gloria and Treeless Street • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... entered softly. She went towards the bed, and saw that the mysterious and awful change, which tells that the inexorable decree is gone forth, and the "arrow fastened," was fast settling on old Mabel's features. Yet there was nothing uncouth or grotesque in that shrivelled and swarthy face, because FAITH, which leads death captive, had shed over them a supernatural calm, which ennobled them with a solemn sweetness. Her poor old hand, so long withered and helpless, dropped beside her; the other, around which her rosary was wrapped, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... ambassador himself reaching the land with much difficulty. The vessel was plundered of her whole cargo by the neighbouring peasantry; but the ambassador and his train were hospitably entertained by the queen-regent of Scotland, and forwarded on their way to London, where their grotesque figures and the barbaric pomp of their dress and equipage ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the afternoon looking for ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... constantly crosses. It is on that account that we see the taste, still coarse, seize that which is new and startling, the disordered, the adventurous and the strange, the violent and the savage, and fly from nothing so much as from calm and simplicity. It invents grotesque figures, it likes rapid transitions, luxurious forms, sharply-marked changes, acute tones, a pathetic song. That which man calls beautiful at this time is that which excites him, that which gives him matter; but that which excites him to give ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... numerous wooden bridges, and were much struck with the brilliant fire-flies which were flitting about among the trees. On re-entering the town, we passed large arched gateways leading to particular quarters, and remarked in that inhabited by the Chinese, the grotesque-looking houses, lit up with large paper-lanterns, of gaudy colours, and Chinese inscriptions or monsters on them, and the long rows of Chinese characters up and down the door-posts, or over the windows. After the quiet of the sea, our senses ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... weep for a little while, and drink a great deal to drown her tears, and then forget. They were nearly at the hut now. She could see it, a grotesque shadow thrown ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... beyond. Most arithmetically minute are all the Brahman's pictures, and he never stops to hint at a doubt. His hells are twenty-two in number, each applying a new variety of physical and moral pain. We men of the West smile at the grotesque dogmatism of the Orientals; and yet we have no right to smile. In our way we are as keen about the great question as the Brahmans are, and for us the problem of problems may be stated in few words—"Is there a future life?" All our philosophy, all our laws, all our hopes and fears are concerned with ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... quarter of the city there stood a brownstone house, with grotesque turrets, winding steps, and glaring polished red tiles. There was a touch of the Gothic, of the Renaissance, of the old English manor; just a touch, however, a kind of blind-man's-buff of a house. A very rich man lived here, but for ten months in the year he and his family ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... singular people. Their literature is neglected, but it has some of the German vein in its strata,—the patience, the learning, the homely delineation, and even some traces of the mixture of the humorous and the terrible which form that genius for the grotesque so especially German—you find this in their legends and ghost-stories. But in Holland activity destroys, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shiny and thick with grease, stretched over a small round body, that contrasted strangely with his lean and bony face. And all this formed a jovial, grotesque ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... have been as well to try to train woodbine to draw water or to educate cattails to write Greek. The little boy spent all of the day idling; it was a curious, Oriental sort of idling. Callers at Heartholm grew disapprovingly accustomed to the sight of the grotesque face and figure peering through the shrubberies; they shrugged their shoulders impatiently, coming upon the recumbent child dreamily gazing at his own reflection in the lily-pond, looking necromantically out from the molten purple of a wind-blown beech, or standing ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of the existence of worlds—worlds occupied by an impracticability called "man." It will be recollected how the wiser spirit William cast well-merited ridicule upon this insanely impossible phantasy of a disordered mind; nay, even condescended to crush, by perspicuous and irrefutable logic, the grotesque ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... itself these grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... expressed his gratitude to Dr. Johnson for having once got him permission from Dr. Taylor at Ashbourne to play there upon moderate terms. Garrick's name was soon introduced. JOHNSON. 'Garrick's conversation is gay and grotesque. It is a dish of all sorts, but all good things. There is no solid meat in it: there is a want of sentiment in it. Not but that he has sentiment sometimes, and sentiment, too, very powerful and very pleasing: but it has not its full proportion ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... contemplating with closed eyes upon the height of his Patmos rock, the sublime visions of the Apocalypse; but as soon as the face of the good priest became animated, the charm was broken. It was but an expressive mask, flexible, at times grotesque, where were predicted the fugitive and shallow impressions of a soul gentle, innocent, and easy, but not imaginative or exalted. It was then that the monk and the anchorite suddenly disappeared, and there remained but a child sixty years old, whose countenance, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... Why grotesque; why amazing? [Sitting in the low-backed arm-chair.] All that is amazing about it is that Philip should lack the superior courage which enables a man, in special circumstances, to sink his pride and ignore ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... In many parts, the recent restorations are quite evident; but other, and much the larger portions, can scarcely have been touched for centuries: for there are still the gargoyles, perfect, or with broken noses, as the case may be, but showing that variety and fertility of grotesque extravagance which no modern imitation can effect. There are innumerable niches, too, up the whole height of the towers, above and around the entrance, and all over the walls: most of them empty, but a few containing the lamentable remnants of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... dismal croak he flew off to the skeoe, and, seating himself on the topmost point of its ruinous gable, commented in very uncomplimentary terms upon the ways of mankind. As his opinions were expressed aloud, and accompanied by many grotesque and expressive gestures, he created a good deal of amusement, although Mr. Adiesen remarked gravely enough, "We ought not to have allowed Thor ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... was one of the workers who had slipped noiselessly round the corner of the pile and now stood, grotesque and menacing, his uncovered eyes glowering at the intruder, the black barrel of his Browning pistol covering ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... him were of great merit. The room, without being inconveniently crowded, was amply stored with furniture, every article of which bespoke a refined and luxurious taste: easy chairs of all descriptions, most inviting couches, cabinets of choice inlay, and grotesque tables covered with articles of vertu; all those charming infinite nothings, which a person of taste might some time back have easily collected during a long residence on the continent. A large lamp of Dresden china was ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... swallow her up, and the men who watched wondered more and more what had become of the elegant figure, grotesque in such a setting, which had vanished into the narrow doorway—and which did not reappear. Even Inspector Kelly, who knew so much about Chinatown, did not know that the cellars of the three houses left and right of Ah-Fang-Fu's were connected ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... preacher, whose determined conviction that he himself is right in every act and word is as a triple defence around him. This conviction keeps Knox from perceiving what he is by no means incapable by nature of seeing, the grotesque conceit, for instance, which is in his prayer for the Queen. During the course of the controversy he repeats the form of prayer which he is in the habit of using—being far too courageous a soul to veil any supposed fault. And this is the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... literary art; and if we are to let hymnology witness, it has received as little as it has asked in times past. To call upon Christ's name, to bless God for goodness and mercy, suffice it; and no form of words enabling it to do this seems to be found too feeble, or affected, or grotesque. For anything more, the inarticulate tones of music are as adequate to devotion as the sublimest formula that Milton or Dante could have shaped. It is only since religion has been so much philosophized, and has in so great degree ceased to be a passion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... that instinctively broke from Clarence's lips was so sincere and unaffected that the man was disconcerted, and at last joined in it, a little shamefacedly. The grotesque blunder of being taken as a fugitive from justice relieved Clarence's mind from its acute tension,—he was momentarily diverted,—and it was not until the boatman had departed, and he was again alone, that it seemed to have any collateral significance. Then an uneasy recollection ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had been constrained to dub themselves "architects," and adopt modern methods; and here and there stood evidences that the ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... Sally dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland! It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,—the pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay, grotesque pinatis—huge paper dolls filled with dulces, the childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile and the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the part of the village where the revelers were making merry about a fire. As she approached she saw the villagers and their guests squatting in a large circle about the blaze before which a half-dozen naked warriors leaped and bent and stamped in some grotesque dance. Pots of food and gourds of drink were being passed about among the audience. Dirty hands were plunged into the food pots and the captured portions devoured so greedily that one might have thought ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... remote date, and evidently formed from the relics of some monastery or religious house. Here and there, the fancy or interest of the owner had induced him to remodel the structure; and an ill-designed and ungraceful mixture of the modern with the ancient gave to the whole somewhat of a grotesque appearance, that was heightened by the noble trees, which had once towered in majesty and beauty, being in many places lopped and docked, as if even the exuberance of nature was a crime in the eyes of the present ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... frog-fish, sea-devil (Lophius piscatorius), a fish well known off the coasts of Great Britain and Europe generally, the grotesque shape of its body and its singular habits having attracted the attention of naturalists of all ages. To the North Sea fishermen this fish is known as the "monk," a name which more properly belongs to Rhina squatina, a fish allied to the skates. Its head is of enormous size, broad, flat and depressed, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... artificial heat is employed to promote the drying of the precipitated dye; but this is not essential to the manufacture. Marco's account, though grotesque in its baldness, does describe the chief features of the manufacture of Indigo by fermentation. The branches are cut and placed stem upwards in the vat till it is three parts full; they are loaded, and then the vat is filled with water. Fermentation soon begins and goes on till in 24 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... mirth and tears, of the tragic and grotesque, of cap and crown, of Socrates and Rabelais, of AEsop and Marcus Aurelius, of all that is gentle and just, humorous and honest, merciful, wise, laughable, lovable and divine, and all consecrated to the use of man; while through all, and over all, an overwhelming sense of obligation, of chivalric ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... manual work and of the rule of silence; their elaborate cookery and nice taste in wines; their interest in the cut and material of their clothes and the luxury of their bed coverlets: the extravagance of the furniture in their chapels, and even the grotesque architecture of their buildings. He especially censures the magnificent state in which the abbots live and with which they travel about, and he declares himself emphatically against that exemption of monasteries from episcopal control which was one of the most prized privileges of the Cluniac Order. ...
— 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
... however, that the conclusion of the Adelphi, in which a certain magician summoned a black-robed, steeple-hatted demon from the nether world, who, after commanding a minion to give a pickle-back to sundry grotesque personages, did castigate their ulterior portions severely with a large switch, was a striking amelioration and betterment upon the preceding scenes, and evinced that TERENCE possessed no deficiency ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... little sister, but I knew that Ellen Ember, with her crown of bright hair, went about Friendship streets singing aloud, and leaping up to catch at the low branches of the curb elms, and that she was as picturesque as a beautiful grotesque on a page of sober text. I had not learned where the Oldmoxons had moved, but I knew of them that they had left me a huge fireplace in every room of my house. I could have repeated little about Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, save that her black week-day ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... Lebeau, the boatman, the trapper, the hunter, the fighter, From the unlucky French of Gallipolis he descended, Heir to Old-World want and New-World love of adventure. Vague was the life he led, and vague and grotesque were the rumors Wherethrough he loomed on the people, the hero of mythical hearsay,— Quick of hand and of heart, insouciant, generous, Western,— Taking the thought of the young in secret love and in envy. Not less the elders shook their heads and held him for outcast, Reprobate, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... aims also at fun; laughter mingles with agility; grotesque yet graceful gestures are flung in, and ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... have more sense in this particular direction. On the other hand, color may be large, but appreciation of form, size, etc., may be deficient. The individual may try to paint a picture and get the colors all right, but if form is deficient his figures will be grotesque in their absurdity; or he may have good sense as to form and color, and get the sizes of his objects all wrong. Mechanical skill depends in a great measure upon these "Perceptive Faculties," as they are called: that is, those portions of the brain that comprehend and give ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed face, turned-up moustaches, great prominent eyes, and a "stupendous ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... stationed himself where he could see all avenues of approach to the house, and waited. Twenty minutes went by, and then Sam became suddenly alert and attentive, for the arc-light revealed a small, grotesque figure slowly approaching along the sidewalk. It was brown in colour, shaggy and indefinite in form; it limped excessively, and paused to rub ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... traditionary language, which, giving play to the lighter fancy, chilled the imagination, and singularly limited the view. Indeed, it so amused and allured the fancy by its diversity that the mind scarcely cared to rise from this fantastic and grotesque world to seek the sublime principles of Infinity, of Unity. If the ancients had regarded nature as a vast system of signs designed to manifest the ideas of the Great Artist; if they had at all understood the marvellous Unity of the Divine Works, it would have been worse than idle ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mysterious light moving about the yard,—a light that fell now on the bare wall, now on the front steps, making threads of gold of the twisted iron railings, then on the posts of the leaning fence, against which hung three feathery objects,—grotesque and curious in the changing shadows,—and again on some barrels and ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... one might love San Marco!" Caterina said, as she turned her glowing face frankly to the old man; "he was never a person, but just a grotesque image ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... residence, adjoining the Premier's palace, bloomed the most charming garden I saw in Siam, with shrubberies, fountains, and nooks, designed by a true artist; though the work of the native florists is usually fantastic and grotesque, with an excess of dwarfed trees in Chinese vases. There was, besides, a cool, shaded walk, leading to a more extensive garden, adorned with curious lattice-work, and abounding in shrubs of great variety and beauty. Koon Ying Phan had a lively love for flowers, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... were monkeys, learning tricks of all kinds, another source of amusement. Some were most tenderly loved and even kissed extravagantly, as they nestled against the callous bosoms of their masters, gazing fondly at them with womanish eyes, half-grotesque and half-touching. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... half inclined to suggest that "there may be something in it." Here is a character who suddenly discovers that by concentrating his mind on certain ideas he can inject or project them into others. And forthwith he sets half a dozen couples making love to each other in most grotesque surroundings. They climb trees and become engaged. They put on strange Panlike costumes and prance about the woods—always charming, always well bred, always with a touch of romance that makes the reader read on to the end and finally ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... cause in this brainless world, a world rotten with hypocrisy. A poet polishes words until they glitter with beauty, charging them with fulminating meaning—straightway he is called mad by men who sweat and toil on the stock exchange. Have you ever, my dear Quell, watched those little, grotesque brokers on a busy day? No? Well, you will say that no lunatic grimacing beneath the horns of the moon ever made such ludicrous, such useless, gestures. And for what? Money! Money to spend as idiotically as it is garnered. The world is crazy, I tell you, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... than any other dinosaurs, of the great quadrupeds of Tertiary and modern times, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, titanotheres and elephants, as in the horns they suggest the bison. For this reason although less gigantic than the Brontosaurus or Tyrannosaurus, less grotesque perhaps, than the Stegosaurus, they are more interesting than any other dinosaurs. While thus departing far from the earlier type of the beaked dinosaurs (the Iguanodonts) they are evidently descended ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... every face and form in the assemblage. The fantastic magician of the fire threw humps on to straight backs, flattened good round breasts, wrote wrinkles on smooth faces, turned eyes and lips into shining gems, made white teeth yellow, cast a grotesque spell of the unreal on young shapes, of the horrible upon old ones. A sort of monkey coarseness crept into the red, upturned faces; their proportions were distorted, their delicacy destroyed. Essential lines of figures were concealed by the inky shadows; unimportant features ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... piece of human machinery that ever responded to the impulses of youth and health. But then, his face! What pencil could faithfully delineate features at once so comical and lugubrious—features that one moment expressed the most solemn seriousness, and the next, the most grotesque and absurd abandonment to mirth? In him, all extremes appeared to meet; the man was a contradiction to himself. Tom was a person of few words, and so intensely lazy that it required a strong effort of will to enable him to answer the questions of inquiring friends; ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
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