"Magnified" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chinaman! His jet black lusterless hair was not shaven in the national manner, but worn long, and brushed back from his slanting brow with no parting, so that it fell about his white collar behind, lankly. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles, which magnified his oblique eyes and lent him a terrifying beetle-like appearance. His mephistophelean eyebrows were raised interrogatively, and he was smiling so as to exhibit a row of uneven ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... only a fleabite, youngster," he replied laughing. "I suppose you magnified it in your imagination from being sea-sick. The weather off the Cape of Storms, however; is a very different matter. It is quite in keeping ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... alone. Christian Legend, and traditional Folk-tale, have undoubtedly contributed to the perfected romantic corpus, but they are in truth subsidiary and secondary features; a criticism that would treat them as original and primary can but defeat its own object; magnified out of proportion they become stumbling-blocks upon the path, instead of ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... depredations made on the clergy; and in order to aggravate the enormity of his conduct, he appealed to the great charter, which Henry had so often ratified, and which was calculated to prevent for ever the return of those intolerable grievances. He magnified the generosity of their ancestors, who, at a great expense of blood, had extorted that famous concession from the crown; but lamented their own degeneracy, who allowed so important an advantage, once obtained, to be wrested from them by a weak prince and by insolent ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... happened was not of sufficient interest or importance to be recorded. The great religious historian, Eusebius, ingenuously remarks that in his history he carefully omitted whatever tended to discredit the church, and that he piously magnified all that ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... mantle of royalty and nobility, like dipsomania, excuses a multitude of sins, hypocrisy, and injustice, and inclines the world to overlook, disregard, or even condone, what in them is considered small vices, eccentricities of genius, but which in a private person are magnified into mountains of viciousness, and call forth an army of well meaning but inconsistent people to ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... although they immediately laid siege to the capital. This happened shortly previous to the 28th October 1788, as, in a letter from Mr Pagan of that date, he mentions, that he had just received accounts of the entire conquest of Sikim by the Gorkhalese, who, in this report, had considerably magnified ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... organ of the Grand Old Man, unheeding the attempts which were being made on its life by the Professor, armed with a long pointed weapon. It had walked into the Professor's parlour—that is to say, into his lantern—and taken up its temporary residence between the lenses, whence it was magnified a hundredfold ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... we do not!" the young man said reverently. "It is all God, Lois; perhaps not God as John Ward thinks of Him, a sort of magnified man, for whom he has to arrange a scheme of salvation, a kind of an apology for the Deity, but the power and the desire for good in ourselves. That seems to me to be God. Sometimes I feel as though all our lives were a thought of the Eternal, which would ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... which the 'Letters' aroused, even when these ceased to be read. Some small errors of fact (such as that of stating that all the prisoners were chained, whereas an exception was made of those undergoing life sentences) were magnified by the partisans of Ferdinand II.; but the truth of the picture as a whole was amply confirmed from independent sources. Baron Carlo Poerio (condemned to nineteen years' imprisonment) was chained to a common malefactor, the chain never being undone, and producing in the end a disease ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... there was no evidence of deliberate insincerity and malice on the part of the circulators of the scandal. The blame of the disastrous gossip fell on two of the Whig Ladies of the Bed-chamber; and just before the sad climax, the other event, which angry Tory eyes magnified to the dignity of a conspiracy, drew double attention to ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... indicating a desire to be free, were marked; and in the discussions of this large committee of a hundred men, every thing that had occurred during a few years past, in efforts among the slaves to learn to read and write, was magnified and construed as pointing toward a long and settled purpose among the slaves to rise in insurrection. A majority of this committee decided by whipping and other torture to compel confessions from all these marked slaves, and then to hang them. A number of the ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... commonplace observation in Ireland, when the impotence of the sordid sections was apparent: "How different it would all be if Parnell were alive." Too late did we have tributes to Parnell's capacity from friend and foe which magnified his gifts of leadership beyond reach of the envious. Even the man who was more than any other responsible for his fall said of Parnell (Mr Barry O'Brien's Life ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... slight and almost imperceptible motion of his hand, he has used a bit of looking-glass to dart a ray of reflected sunlight across a wide street or a large room. On the same plan, the extremely minute motion of a galvanometer, as it receives the successive pulsations of a message, is magnified by a weightless lever of light so that the words are easily read by an operator (Fig. 61). This beautiful invention comes from the hands of Sir William Thomson [now Lord Kelvin], who, more than any other electrician, has made ocean telegraphy an ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... rider, especially in the declivities towards the plains, where the horse is frequently over his knees in sand. In those parts there are also some extraordinary atmospheric mirrors, in which we beheld ourselves in reflection, riding over our own heads, and our figures magnified to gigantic proportions. Six leagues from Chancay, there are two wretched huts, forming the tambo, or inn, in which travellers obtain refreshment. From thence the road runs through a stony tract, partially strewn with large masses of rock, called the Piedras gordas, and leading ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... schools, separate railroad and street cars, political disfranchisement, debasing and abhorrent prison systems, and an unflagging campaign of calumny, by which the vices and shortcomings of the Negroes are grossly magnified and their virtues practically lost sight of. The popular argument that the Negro ought to develop his own civilization, and has no right to share in that of the white race, unless by favor, comes with poor grace from those who are forcing their civilization upon others at the cannon's mouth; ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... me," he magnified, so as not to be outdone in sensationalism, "that this feller has licked every man that they've turned him loose on between here and Sunkhaze, an' now is just grittin' his ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... to run, the blockade; not one has left the ports of France, or of the French West Indies, loaded with arms or ammunition for the insurgents. As for the barking of French papers, or of some second or third rate saloons, barkings thus magnified by American letter-writers, I know too much of Paris and of society to take notice of it. I am sure that the whole rebel tross in Paris, male and female, have not yet been admitted into any single saloon of the real good or high society in Paris, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... pikes. It was rough, yet as slippery as ice. If there was a foot of level surface, that space would be one to break through under a horse's hoofs. It was seamed, lined, cracked, ridged, knotted iron. This lava bed resembled a tremendously magnified clinker. It had been a running sea of molten flint, boiling, bubbling, spouting, and it had burst its surface into a million sharp facets as it hardened. The color was dull, dark, angry red, like no other red, inflaming to the eye. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... air from horizon to horizon. You could hear the officers speaking across the river; and dogs were like to shake the sky down with their barking. Echoes from the smallest noises were born in that magnified, glaring world. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you miss your usual exercise. You try to take a walk and you fail, and meantime, as I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep, though you are sufficiently kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... serious, and I must have patience. I know, from painful experience, how, when the nerves and brain are excitable from over tension and exertion, and anxiety and constant worry and wear, little matters are magnified. But already I feel myself so much stronger in nerve and courage that I look now complacently upon much which in the last two years would have cut me ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... constitute an adequate explanation; it must be supplemented by a consideration of certain inferences which are, in most instances, comparatively complex.[1] We know, e. g., that objects which appear to us unexpectedly at night, particularly on dark, cloudy nights, seem inordinately magnified. The process is here an exceedingly complex one. Suppose I see, some cloudy night, unexpectedly close to me a horse whose environment, because of the fog, appears indistinct. Now I know from experience that objects which appear from indistinct ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... innumerable manuscript copies, and every one was in raptures over it. Even the glory of Pushkin's "Evgeny Onyegin," which appeared at about the same time, did not overshadow Griboyedoff's glory. Strange to say, Pushkin, who had magnified Delvig, Baratynsky, and Yazykoff far above their merits, and in general, was accustomed to overrate all talent, whether it belonged to his own friends or to strangers, was extremely severe on Griboyedoff's comedy, and detected ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... His true character. They even went so far as to attribute much to Him that was ridiculous. One of the ancients said, "The utmost that a man can do is to attribute to the being he worships his imperfections and impurities, magnified to infinity, it may be, and then become worse by their reflex action upon his own nature." This was verified in the ancient mythical religion, without ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... Skinners could recover from the momentary surprise into which this curious incident had thrown them, a volley of powder and shot had been fired into their midst. Dashing like a frightened hare through the open door, McPherson beheld his assailants. His fears magnified their numbers, and, conceiving there was no hope in fight, he summoned his men to follow ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... violences in favor of monarchy by like violences in opposition to it. Never turn was more sudden, or less calculated to save appearances. Immediately he entered into all the cabals of the country party; and discovered to them, perhaps magnified, the arbitrary designs of the court, in which he himself had borne so deep a share. He was received with open arms by that party, who stood in need of so able a leader; and no questions were asked with regard ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... with having suffered her to shear him. But the same could not be said of the English nation, which had in his view most foully apostatized from its pure creed, and most perfidiously betrayed the high commission it had received from Heaven. "This extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed, to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship! To be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds! To ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... dreamt of co-operating; Haddick, in the end, was scarce 4,000 with four cannon; General Rochow, Commandant of Berlin, with his small garrison, had not Haddick skilfully slidden through woods, and been so magnified by rumor, might have marched out, and beaten a couple of Haddicks. As it was, Haddick skilfully emerging, at the Silesian Gate of Berlin, 16th October, about eleven in the morning, demanded ransom of 300,000 thalers (45,000 pounds); was refused; began shooting on the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... die, nor yet be born, unseen By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve Were magnified before us in the pure Illimitable space and pause of sky, Intense as angels' garments blanched with God, Less blue than radiant. From the outer wall Of the garden dropped the mystic floating gray Of olive-trees, (with interruptions green From maize and vine,) until 't was caught ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... impressions made upon them by the world without—the unusual sights of earth and sky—the accidental meetings with strange faces and figures (rare occurrences in those out-of-the-way places)—are sometimes magnified by them into things so deeply significant as to be almost supernatural. This peculiarity I perceive very strongly in Charlotte's writings at this time. Indeed, under the circumstances, it is no peculiarity. It has been common to all, from the Chaldean ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... at the expense of its environment. "A type of aspiring humanity," says Gissing, echoing the sentiments of many of us, "a sweet and noble figure, moving as a dim radiance through legendary Hellas." I fancy that the mist of centuries of undiscriminating admiration has magnified this figure out of all proportion and contrived, furthermore, to fix an iridescent nimbus of sanctity about its head. Such things have been known to ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... well known, and every line of these extracts will only serve to confirm the same opinion of all three. But it will, probably, be thought curious thus to be able to compare the notes of the opposite political parties, and their different account of the same trifling facts, magnified by the prejudices of both into ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... protagonists; and even so the chief figures, realistic though they are, remind me not so much of spirited pictures as of Gillray's caricatures. They are highly coloured, fantastic, horribly human and yet, somehow, grotesque. Everything is elongated, widened, magnified, exaggerated. The difficulty is, to my mind, to imagine boys so lawless, so unbridled, so fond at intervals of low delights, who are yet so obviously wholesome-minded and manly. I can only humbly say that it is my belief, confirmed by experience, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... stoop and an inconspicuous manner, he could see that the man was well over six feet high. He shut his teeth and went forward, whirling his stick impatiently. By the time he had substantially diminished the distance and magnified the two black figures as in a vast microscope, he had perceived something else; something which startled him, and yet which he had somehow expected. Whoever was the tall priest, there could be no doubt ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... what Leonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from what he is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; we cannot think of him as a mere individual, eating and drinking, living and competing, on equal terms with other men. We see him magnified by his own legend from the first, with people standing aside to watch and whisper as he passed through the streets of Florence or Milan. "There he goes to paint the Last Supper," they said to each other; and we think of it as already the most famous picture in the world before it was begun. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... at him till I thought his eyes were really of an uncommon size, and stuck out from his head like those of a lobster. I am sure my own eyes must have magnified as I stared. When church was out, I wanted my aunt to take me along and follow the traveler home. But she said the constables would take us up, if we did; and so I never saw this wonderful Arabian traveler again. But he ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... be desired to photograph four different species of acari on one plate, the image of each when magnified to the desired extent only covering about one-fourth the exposed area of the plate. First, a mat is prepared of card-board or thick non-actinic paper, which is adjusted to exactly fill the opening ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... not a sign of the dinghy. The schooner lay still in a pool of colourful water, the coral and weeds on the bottom in plain view, some of the swaying plants magnified by refraction. There was no air stirring, and from the far end of the island a morning haze was rising like smoke from flats which appeared to be ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... the tidings of my woes fills all the country-side, Like the sun shining on the hills of Nejed far and wide. His gesture speaks, but hard to tell the meaning of it is, And thus my yearning without end is ever magnified. I hate fair patience since the hour I fell in love with thee. Hast seen a lover hating love at any time or tide? One, in whose glances sickness lies, hath smitten me to death, For looks are deadliest of the things, wherein doth sickness bide. He shook his clustered ringlets down and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... sad to say it, but so it is," concluded Durtal. "As for Madame Guyon," he went on, "she was neither an original writer nor a saint; she was only an unwelcome substitute for the true mystics; she was presuming and certainly lacked that humility which magnified Saint Teresa and Saint Clare; but after all she burst into a flame, she was overcome by Jesus; above all, she was not a pious courtier, a bigot softened by ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Wherefore, seeing God has set grace on the throne, and ordered that it should proceed from this throne to the world; yea, seeing he has made it king, and granted to it, to it only, the authority and sovereignty of saving souls, he has magnified not only his love, but his wisdom and his prudence before the sons of men. This, then, is his great device, the master-piece of all his witty inventions; and, therefore, it is said, as was hinted before, in this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... politics by the Civil War. Notwithstanding the bad manners and excesses of ante-bellum politics, the leaders had been men of defined policy, only occasionally reaching high office through trickery or personal appeal. Now came the presence of an intense issue which smoothed out other differences, magnified a single policy,—the saving of the Union,—and gave opportunity to a new type of intense, patriotic, narrow mind. Men of this type dominated in the reconstruction days. As the sixties advanced, their number was recruited by men who had won prominence ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... gray-haired man of fifty or there-abouts had entered the hall from the rear and immediately came forward to meet us. His eyes were the extraordinary feature of his face, piercingly brilliant and enormously magnified by the spectacles that he wore. The lenses of the latter were nearly an eighth of an inch thick and evidently of the highest power. Even with their aid his powers of vision seemed imperfect. On hearing the few words of explanation vouchsafed by the unamiable Mr. Hoyt, he drew from his pocket ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... seems to have been a familiar figure on the streets of the old town. Mr. Brewster speaks of him as "the well-known idiot, Johnny Tilton," as if one should say, "the well-known statesman, Daniel Webster." It is curious to observe how any sort of individuality gets magnified in this parochial atmosphere, where everything lacks perspective, and nothing is trivial. Johnny Tilton does not appear to have had much individuality to start with; it was only after his head was cracked that he showed any shrewdness whatever. That happened early in his unobtrusive ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... not neglect the opportunity of practising his penmanship in such impromptus. Tradition also relates that he added to his list of stories and jokes humorous imitations from the sermons of eccentric preachers. But tradition has very likely both magnified and distorted these alleged exploits of his satire and mimicry. All that can be said of them is that his youth was marked by intellectual activity far beyond ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... Point. The air was strangely still and under the pale sunshine the sapphire waters were tinged with rose and lavender. They had long been accustomed to those tricks played with sea and clouds by the magician Mirage, and today the crest of each billow was magnified until, on the horizon the points seemed to leap up into the sky. Above a lucid space in the southwest a mass of silver and amethyst tinted clouds moved slowly and spread out like a platform. They sat on a flat boulder to watch the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... failed; but rumour magnified the sum received by the writer. Mrs. Piozzi, shortly after the publication of 'The Wanderer' and of Byron's lines, "Weep, daughter of a royal line," writes to Samuel Lysons, February ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... strangely upon them. It was owing to the presence of Mrs. Page. Previously in the parlor alone with their games they had overturned a chair; the boys had let more or less of their hoodlum spirit shine forth. But when circumstances could be possibly magnified to warrant it, the girls made the boys victims of an insufferable pride, snubbing them mercilessly. So in the dining-room they resembled a class at Sunday-school, if it were not for the subterranean smiles, gestures, rebuffs, ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... parts, because they both honoured truth only in their special way. However high might be the flight of reason, it drew matter in a loving spirit after it, and, while sharply and stiffly defining it, never mutilated what it touched. It is true the Greek mind displaced humanity, and recast it on a magnified scale in the glorious circle of its gods; but it did this not by dissecting human nature, but by giving it fresh combinations, for the whole of human nature was represented in each of the gods. How different is the course followed by us moderns! We also displace and magnify individuals ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Magnified by these reflections on the walls, haloed by the teeming praise and censure of the press, she seemed to dominate the entire city as she had come to absorb the best of his own life. What her private character really was no one ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... throng of women and girls, asked what was to do; and they told her of the young lady. So she walked up to her and, considering her closely, was amazed at her grace and loveliness and glorified God (magnified be His majesty!) for the fair forms He hath created. The sight hindered her from her bath, so that she went not farther in nor washed, but sat staring at the Princess, till she had made an end of bathing and coming forth of the caldarium donned her raiment, whereupon beauty ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... radiographed," added Craig. "Even when the sheet is folded in the usual way, it is possible by taking a radiograph stereoscopically, to distinguish the writing, every detail standing out in relief. Besides, it can be greatly magnified, which aids in deciphering it if it is indistinct or jumbled up. Some of it looks like mirror writing. Ah," he added, "here's ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... the Operations Division also needed increased strength, and that it was essential to relieve the First Sea Lord of the mass of administrative work falling upon his shoulders, which had unfortunately been greatly magnified ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... seemed about to perish from want of the genial dew of affection. She had not even the same advantage as I in the recollection of her parents; she clung to me, her brother, as her only friend, but her alliance with me completed the distaste that her protectors felt for her; and every error was magnified by them into crimes. If she had been bred in that sphere of life to which by inheritance the delicate framework of her mind and person was adapted, she would have been the object almost of adoration, for ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... of dawn they were started on what proved to be one of the longest marches in their experience. The weather was harsher than on any of the preceding days and the frozen snow surface of the roads presented in itself a factor that materially magnified the heavy labouring beneath full pack, arduous to a degree under the easiest of conditions. Before mid-day the constant vigilance and care necessary if a hard fall was to be avoided began to tell on the nerves, irritability ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... came, broken it around me, and left me alone and helpless to struggle against inevitable doom. Three of the six long weary months during which I waited for trial were thus passed in a state of agony bordering on the madness of despair. The hours seemed magnified into days, and the weeks into years; and, as they dragged their slow length along, my mental anguish received a new and terrible ally. Although I was as yet in the eye of the law an innocent man, the miserable allowance ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... then, lay before her in the contemplated change that was about to take place in the even tenor of her existence! A world of intrigue and folly—a world of infidelity and falsehood!—how would she meet it? It was a question she never asked herself—she thought London a sort of magnified Christiania, or at best, the Provencal town of Arles on a larger scale. She had heard her father speak of it, but only in a vague way, and she had been able to form no just idea even to herself of the enormous metropolis ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... tell of his housekeeper's conversion to progress and advancement. He did not suppress any of the details; in fact, he magnified them just a bit. ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... witches, ghosts, portents, are some of the various forms superstition has invented and magnified to disturb the peace of society as well as of individuals. The most extravagant of these need not be sought in the remoter ages of the human race, or even in the 'dark ages' of European history: they are sufficiently evident in the legislation and theology, as well as in the popular prejudices ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... struggle between two rival races or powers confined to the gods in Asgard alone. Just as their ancient foes were the Giants of Frost and Snow, so between the race of men and the race of Trolls was there a perpetual feud. As the gods were men magnified and exaggerated, so were the Trolls diminished Frost Giants; far superior to man in strength and stature, but inferior to man in wit and invention. Like the Frost Giants, they inhabit the rough and rugged places of the earth, and, historically speaking, in all probability represent ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... and the diver's helmets floated straight up to the skylights, along which they glided and vanished through a hole in the glass. The water, moving gently with the pulse of the swell, broke the beam of light and objects it touched were distorted and magnified. The top of the big low-pressure cylinder looked gigantic, and the thick columns appeared to bend. Long weed clung to the platforms, from which iron ladders went down, but so far as Lister could distinguish, all below was ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... the desert, eager to be on with it. The page with the wash of blood across it seemed to take on a new vividness in the stronger light. Under the stain, the letters of the words were magnified before his mind,—"And as ye would that men should do to you—" It seemed to him that the blood through which they came heated the words so ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... lay a yet fiercer political struggle. Philip's hosts were looming over sea, and the horrors of foreign invasion seemed about to be added to the horrors of civil war. The panic of the Protestants and of the Parliament outran even the real greatness of the danger. The little group of missionaries was magnified by popular fancy into a host of disguised Jesuits; and the invasion of this imaginary host was met by the seizure and torture of as many priests as the government could lay hands on, the imprisonment of recusants, the securing ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... incomprehensible merit; and majestic with divine qualities. And the hermitage was inhabited by hosts of great sages, subsisting on fruits and roots; and having their senses under perfect control; and clad in black deer-skins; and effulgent like unto the Sun and Agni; and of souls magnified by asceticism and intent on emancipation; and leading the Vanaprastha mode of life; and of subdued senses; and identified with the Supreme Soul; and of high fortune; and reciting Vaidic hymns. Then having purified himself and restrained his senses, that son of Dharma, the intelligent ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... one sees on the shore, are, on the Goodwin Sands, magnified from an inch to nearly three feet. Over these the boat now ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... instance, I believe, claimed as victories for the South by the Southern press if not by the Southern generals. The Northern press, as a whole, did not discourage these claims; a portion of it always magnified rebel success and belittled ours, while another portion, most sincerely earnest in their desire for the preservation of the Union and the overwhelming success of the Federal armies, would nevertheless generally express dissatisfaction with whatever victories were ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... between the two there was no gradation. For so long a time had he looked at the larger, broader situations of life that his mental vision had become all deformed and confused. He saw things invariably magnified beyond all proportion, or else dwarfed to a littleness that was beneath consideration. Normal vision was denied him. It was as though he studied the world through one or the other ends of a telescope, and when, as at present, his emotions were aroused, matters were only made the worse. The ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... Winchester taketh for his sermon of the worshipping of imaginations,—to wit, that the devil, seeing that idolatrous images would be put down, bent his whole device, in place of them, to erect and set up divers imaginations, to be adored and magnified instead of the former,—is, in some things, abused and misapplied by him. But well may I apply it to the point in hand; for that the ceremonies are the imaginations which are magnified, adored, and idolised, instead of the idolatrous images which ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... moon had risen full and round, so that the clouds of smoke that rose in the air appeared as white as snow. The air seemed full of the hiss and screaming of shot, each one of which, when it struck the galleon, was magnified by our hero's imagination into ten times its magnitude from the crash which it delivered and from the cloud of splinters it would cast up into the moonlight. At last he suddenly beheld one poor man knocked ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... estimating the weight of his little heir, and discontented lips had declared that the child was of too slender make to be ever worth so much to them as his father. Yet a whisper of the possibility had quickly been magnified to a certainty of such a largesse, and the multitude were thus stimulated to furious exertions to win the most favourable spot for gathering up such a golden rain as even little Prince Henry's counterpoise would afford; and ever as time waxed later, the throng grew denser ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she had done with the narrowness of the past, now she must think broadly, expansively, in all things—even in the trivial matter of social intercourse. A saving sense of humour sent a laugh bubbling into her throat which nearly escaped. It was such a little thing, but she had magnified it so greatly. What, after all, did it amount to—the awkwardness of a schoolgirl very properly ignored by a guardian who could not be other than bored with her society. Tant pis! She could at least try to be polite. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... step which Harry Warrington took towards Pennsylvania the reports of the British disaster were magnified and confirmed. Those two famous regiments which had fought in the Scottish and Continental wars had fled from an enemy almost unseen, and their boasted discipline and valour had not enabled them to face a band of savages and a few French infantry. The unfortunate commander of the expedition ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... are commonly put under the microscope, and then found to contain all manner of horrors, like the animalcules in Thames water.' This microscope was far too valuable an instrument in the contentions of party, ever to be put aside; and the animalcules, duly magnified to the frightful size required, were turned into first-rate electioneering agents. Even without party microscopes, those who feel most warmly for Mr. Gladstone's manifold services to his country, may often wish that ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... turned and came over to her. "No, it's for another reason. You need to say these things to some one. You have brooded over them to yourself till they are magnified out of all proportion. It's the best thing in the world for you to say them aloud." He drew up a chair, and sat down beside her. "Listen to me. You told me once, not very long ago, that I was your friend. Well, I want to speak to you to-night as that friend, and to play the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... resinous that it would not whittle, he smashed with the back of the axe into a lot of matchwood. With a handful of finely shredded birch bark he was now quite ready. A crack of the flint a blowing of the spark caught on the tinder from the box, a little flame that at once was magnified by the birch bark, and in a minute the pine splinters made a sputtering fire. Quonab did not even pay Van Cortlandt the compliment of using one of his logs. He cut a growing poplar, built a fireplace of the green logs around the blaze that Rolf had made, and the meal ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... their heads to the soles of their feet is their world, they can neither see nor hear beyond it. The good qualities of their neighbors are seen through the large end of a telescope, appearing very small and a long way off, while their own are magnified until they at last look upon themselves as being the personification of all that is good and holy, and it is very amusing to study such a one, to watch her manner of addressing others. From the lofty pedestal ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... land of tropical beauty under the clear, bracing, delicious warm weather of Australia. Fern trees springing up to the dimensions of trees indeed, with the very fern foliage she was accustomed to in low herbaceous growth at home; only magnified superbly. There were elegant palms, too, with other evergreens, and magnificent creepers; and floating out and in among them in great numbers were gay red-crested cockatoos and other tropical birds. The ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... and sparks flew in showers. The light of the sun was obscured by the wide roof of smoke, but beneath there was the lurid light of the fire. The men saw the faces of each other in a crimson glow, and in such a light the mind, too, magnified and distorted the objects that the eye beheld. The victorious soldiers themselves looked with awe upon the burning city. They had felt, in no event, any desire to plunder or destroy; and now it was alike their instinct and wish to save. Regiment after regiment stacked arms on Shockoe Hill, divided ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore, Just as the moon rose over the bay, Where, swinging wide at her moorings, lay The Somerset, British man-of-war: A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Across the moon, like a prison-bar, And a huge black hulk, that was magnified By its own reflection ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... night the horror of a great dread drove all sleep from Eben's eyes. As he lay in his bunk every sound seemed to be magnified, and he imagined that men would come for him and lead him away to trial. He felt quite sure that he had killed Jess and that he would be hung for murder. The girl's white face with the bloodstain upon it was ever before him, and he could not shut it from his mind. ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... while Valancourt proceeded to remonstrate and to entreat with all the energy that love and apprehension could inspire. But, as his imagination magnified to her the possible evils she was going to meet, the mists of her own fancy began to dissipate, and allowed her to distinguish the exaggerated images, which imposed on his reason. She considered, that there ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... that freedom from the trammels of space and time, which is of the very essence of immaterial or spiritual subsistence. Thus, by a gradual process of dehumanization, the mind would be instinctively led from the notion of a man magnified in all excellences and refined from all limitations, to the conception of spirit. But coexistently with this progress of the reason, the imagination would ever strain to clothe the thought in bodily form as far as possible, and would cling ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... in the land"—Oh, the smile which flashed on the faces of Anne and the Senator at this phrase!—"you become also the target of every journal in the country, of every comic paper, of every cartoonist. All your little faults, your blunders, past and present, are magnified. They sing of you in the music-halls. Oh, there would be no end to it! Ridicule is worse than abuse. It would hurt your friends more than you. You could not escape it, and no one could answer it. Is the prize ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... trifling in themselves: men, events, societies, phenomena, in no way otherwise more valuable than the myriad other things which flit around us like the sparrows on the housetop, should be glorified, magnified, and perpetuated, set under a literary microscope and focussed in the blaze of a literary magic-lantern—not for what they are in themselves, but solely to amuse and excite the world by showing how it can be done—all this is to me so amazing, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... He magnified the Maid; and Florence rejoiced in her Queen. But it was left for Giotto to make the queenship better beloved, in its ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... the weaknesses fostered by scheming flatterers and an injudicious education. Gerbert, who succeeded Bruno with the title of Sylvester II, encouraged his pupil in a career of puerile extravagances. While the new Pope extended his jurisdiction and magnified his office, the young Emperor was planning to revive in Rome the ancient glories of the Caesars. Otto built a palace on the Aventine; he imitated the splendour and travestied the ceremonial of the Byzantine court; he devised pompous legends to be inscribed on his seal and on his crown. ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... could not be the wind passing through the upper branches of the trees, for one thing. It seemed to Paul more like the snarling of an angry domestic cat, several times magnified. ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... governments the advantages of a system of checks and balances were of small importance, while its disadvantages were magnified. The state governments had no reason to sacrifice concentrated efficiency to safety, because in a Federal organization the temporary exercise of arbitrary executive or legislative power in one locality would not have entailed any irretrievable consequences, and could ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... book, there came Oengus son of Cremthann with kernes and with hounds, so that they chased him, and he found no sanctuary till he came under the cloak of Ciaran. The name of God and Ciaran's were magnified by the rescue of the book from the fox and by the rescue of the fox from the hounds. The book is what is now called ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... came a time at length when a change occurred in the soldier-life at Suakim. Events began to evolve themselves in rapid succession, as well as in magnified intensity, until, on one particular day, there came—metaphorically speaking—what is known among the ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy—the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above ...
— The Republic • Plato
... example? and he was not at that instant inclined to dwell on the occult virtues of the example he had set. To be honest, this elevation of a political puppet like Cecil Baskelett, and the starting him, out of the same family which Turbot, the journalist, had magnified, into Bevisham with such pomp and flourish in opposition to the serious young champion of popular rights and the Puritan style, was ludicrously effective. Conscienceless of course. But that was the way of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were wont to feel joy and rapture, transcendent bliss, in the presence of their Creator: their beatitude was measureless. Glorious ministers 15 magnified their Lord, spoke his praise with zeal, lauded the Master of their being, and were excellently happy in the majesty of God. They had no knowledge of working evil or wickedness, but dwelt in innocence 20 forever with their Lord: from the beginning ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... in the secretary's body tingling from undeserved abuse, the Manager had suddenly turned full upon him, in the corner of the private room where the safes stood, in such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses, looked straight into his own. And at this very second that other personality in Jones—the one that was ever watching—rose up swiftly from the deeps within and held ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... of the constitutional thrones of Italy with one another with a view to insuring her independence; and they ordered the papal banners to be decorated with pennons of the Italian tricolor. On March 21st the news of the revolution at Vienna, much magnified by report, arrived, and the excitement of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... mind they looked like a pair of gigantic fireflies gone loco with excitement and carrying on in the most astonishing manner. Indeed, he could easily picture it as a wild dance of make-believe insects on a greatly magnified scale. ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... a chulad?" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle. ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... description, see p. 94-96 [Chapter 4 Paragraphs 16-20].) No. 1 is the insect somewhat smaller than life, from the specimen having contracted in drying; they are a little larger than the common house-fly. No. 2 is the insect magnified; and No. 3 shows the magnified proboscis ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... seemed magnified to welcome Pierre Philibert, who was up betimes this morning and out in the pure air ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... long arm of this lever is wound upon a small pulley; a larger pulley on the same axis has wound upon it a second chain, which actuates a third pulley on the axis of the indicating needle. In this way the relative dilatation of the graphite is sufficiently magnified ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... their message of destruction. We are all partners in a gigantic Dance of Death such as Holbein never imagined. To him Death was the wily and insistent enemy of human activity and hope, a spy watching in the doorway for an opportunity to snap the thread of life. We have cajoled and magnified Death until he has outgrown all natural proportions; through centuries of war and preparation for war we have appealed to him to settle our national differences. We have outdone the earthquake and the cyclone in valid ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... distinction, confounding all alike in his resentments, and including all that bear the hated name in his maledictions. It is a fearful thing to awaken the anger of a nation; to excite in it a desire for revenge; and thrice is that danger magnified, when the people thus aroused possess the activity, the resources, the spirit, and the enterprise of the Americans. We have been openly derided, and that recently, because, in the fulness of our sense of power and sense of right, language ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... inveigh against the unfeeling metaphysician that, like a cruel spirit alarmed at the appearance of a dawning of mercy upon animals, could not rest satisfied with opposing the Cruelty Prevention Bill by the plea of possible inconvenience to mankind, highly magnified and emblazoned, but had set forth to the vulgar and unthinking of all ranks, in the jargon of proud learning, that man's obligations of morality towards the creatures subjected to his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Radicals, of course, saw in the King's opposition, Sweden's and the King's of Sweden, not the King's of the United Kingdoms fighting a battle against the destruction of the Union. It is in this way that the Consular Question became magnified into a question of National honour. The blow given to their honour by the disloyalty of the Radicals to the Union was entirely ignored. The Consular question became by degrees, the chief ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... to sully the character of a most honourable man." The report moreover read a sharp lesson to the promoters of the accusation against him. It declared that "If every effervescence of feeling upon every jovial or innocent occasion is, in these Provinces, to be magnified into crime by the testimony of secret informers—if there can longer exist a political inquisition which shall scan the motives of every faithful servant of the public—if the authorities in Canada shall humble the independence of the Legislature by scandalizing its members and causing them to be ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... to John's ears the first full crash of musketry fire in close deadly range. As company, regiment and brigade joined in volley after volley, it was like the sound of the continuous ripping of heavy canvas, magnified on the scale of a thousand. As the storm cloud swept over the smoke-choked field the rattle of musketry sounded as if an angry God rode somewhere in their fiery depths, and with giant hand was ripping the ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... You can; such fondness only wakes When time has raised the heart above The prejudice of youth, which makes Beauty conditional to love. Prepare to meet the weak alarms Of novel nearness; recollect The eye which magnified her charms Is microscopic for defect. Fear comes at first; but soon, rejoiced, You'll find your strong and tender loves, Like holy rocks by Druids poised, The least force shakes, but none removes. Her strength is your esteem; beware Of finding fault; ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... one approached it unguardedly. It is a whorled pandanus, with long sword-shaped leaves, spirally arranged in three rows, and hard, saw-toothed edges, very sharp. When unbranched as I saw them, they resemble at a distance pine-apple plants thirty times magnified. But the mournful looking trees along the coast and all about Hilo are mostly the Pandanus odoratissimus, a spreading and branching tree which grows fully twenty-five feet high, supports itself among inaccessible rocks by its prop-like roots, and is one of the first plants ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... was the talk of the town, and it grew in size with every repetition, and in the next day's paper it was magnified beyond all proportions. Fortunately, the printers got both the names of Browning and Sedgwick spelled wrong, which was all the comfort the young men had out ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... before him and the fever in his blood running high, Harry now forgot all about wounds and death. He had eye and thought only for the tremendous panorama passing before him, where everything was clear and visible, as if it were an act in some old Roman circus, magnified manifold. ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... burden is heavier because of the sad heart that beats under it. Every pain is keener because of the dispiriting which it brings with it. Every sorrow is made darker by the hopelessness with which it is endured. Every care is magnified, and the sweetness of every pleasure is lessened, by this pessimistic tendency. The beauty of the world loses half its charm in the eyes which see all things in the hue of despondent feeling. Slightest fears become terrors, and smallest trials ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... have been difficult to refuse forgiveness to those two feminine failings in her in thinking of her misfortunes, of the passion that had almost cost her her life. Was it not an imposing spectacle (still further magnified by reflection) to see in that vast, silent salon this woman, separated from the entire world, who for three years had lived in the depths of a little valley, far from the city, alone with her memories of a brilliant, happy, ardent youth, once so filled with fetes and constant homage, ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... again, he reflected with relief. She was no weak, dependent fool. He rode down the sodded lane, and as his horse picked his way carefully toward the avenue where the electric cars were shooting back and forth like magnified fireflies, he turned in his saddle to look once more at the cottage. One light gleamed from the room he had just left. He could see the outline of the woman's form standing by the open window. The place was lonely and forbidding enough, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... unfortunate volume, he had not thought that the Marquis, ordinarily very economical and who limited his purchases to the strict domain of ecclesiastical history, would have the least desire for that prayer-book. He had magnified the subject with a view to forming a legend and to taking advantage of ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... and, scarcely knowing what I was doing, I entered it. I spoke, but was frightened by the echo of my own voice. I dared not stay there long. Every sound was magnified so, and as the waves broke upon the shore their echo thundered around the walls of my grim resting-place, until it seemed filled with thousands of dark ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... credulity. But since I find you in this communicative vein, will you not push complaisance a half-inch further, and tell me what that thing is, suspended there in the sky above the crest of the Cornobastone—that pale round thing, that looks like the spectre of a magnified half-crown?" ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... at everything through her own bit of yellow glass or London fog, and seeing only what her prepossessions would let her see through a medium that distorted and magnified every object. As the spittoons at the Capitol had seemed to her far bigger and more striking than the dome, so now the gutters of New Orleans made an immense impression upon her and affected her most painfully, although the Mississippi ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... on the late Cabinet for its bloated size have certainly not led to any improvement in this respect, and one of the late Ministers has complained that the Administration has been further magnified until, if all its members, including under-secretaries, were present, they would fill not one but three Treasury Benches. Already this is a much congested district at question-time and the daily scene of a great push. Up to the ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... understood why Brent had them there—that they were as necessary to him as cadavers and skeletons and physiological charts to an anatomist. But they oppressed, suffocated her; she went out on the balcony and watched the effects of the light from the setting sun upon and around the enormously magnified Arc. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... and they bulk now in the retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time. I played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods; through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went; one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled, would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... steepness and smoothness of its sides, and the swell produced by its undulating motion. This was one of the largest we saw, and Mr. Hood ascertained its height to be one hundred and forty-nine feet; but these masses of ice are frequently magnified to an immense size, through the illusive medium of a hazy atmosphere, and on this account their dimensions have often been ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... necessary to say: "I will inform myself completely as to the Lake School before I am a year older." Without this precautionary steeling of the resolution the risk of a humiliating collapse into futility is enormously magnified. ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... passions, was an occasional event all through our Sarawak life, but it was no more alarming in 1858 than in former years. It was the breach in the general feeling of security under the Sarawak Government, which for a time magnified every little disturbance of the peace into ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall |
