"Pigmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no description. His honest eyes fire up, and sparkle, as if their depths were stirred by something bright. His broad chest heaves with pleasure. His strong loose hands clench themselves, in his earnestness; and he emphasizes what he says with a right arm that shows, in my pigmy view, like ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... high, in which are cut the steps of a not very solid staircase, forms here the curtain of the esplanade which carries the pigmy fort. The house of the commandant consists of a couple of huts placed in a square, and the soldiers occupy an oblong building a hundred feet away, at the foot of a ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... the ugly little fellow. Placing her heavy hand on his shoulder, she seized him with a grip, which made him feel like a pigmy, in the grasp of a giant. Having had a taste of Mary's anger, once or twice before, and catching a glance from the kindling eye of Uncle Morris, he yielded, and was led ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... great dome, Darl valiantly defends Earth's outpost against the bird-man of Mars and his horde of pigmy henchmen.] ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... among the small community of Boston; and to note at every turn the humanising tastes and desires it has engendered; the affectionate friendships to which it has given rise; the amount of vanity and prejudice it has dispelled. The golden calf they worship at Boston is a pigmy compared with the giant effigies set up in other parts of that vast counting-house which lies beyond the Atlantic; and the almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant, amidst a whole ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... oozing away. What is man, I thought, but a pigmy trapped in a bowl, bounded by an unknown beginning and headed for a concealed destination? It was sweet to be, but whether good or evil lay in the unseen, who knew? Uneasiness, which did not quite displace my earlier buoyancy, took hold ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... seventeen feet high, and the little viverra, a sort of weasel, of three inches. I believe there are thirty varieties of antelopes known and described; eighteen of them are found in this country, and there are the largest and smallest of the species; for we have the eland, and we have the pigmy antelope, which is not above six inches high. We see here also the intermediate links of many genera, such as the eland and the gnoo; and as we find the elephant, the rhinoceros, and Wilmot's friend, the hippopotamus, we certainly have the bulkiest ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... glimmering gray; and some there be From chance-dropped seed that rear them, as the tall Chestnuts, and, mightiest of the branching wood, Jove's Aesculus, and oaks, oracular Deemed by the Greeks of old. With some sprouts forth A forest of dense suckers from the root, As elms and cherries; so, too, a pigmy plant, Beneath its mother's mighty shade upshoots The bay-tree of Parnassus. Such the modes Nature imparted first; hence all the race Of forest-trees and shrubs and sacred groves Springs into verdure. Other ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... out of which we are fashioned, proceeding ever rationally and rhythmically to its appointed ends. We are all of us participators in a world of concrete music, geometry and number—a world, that is, so mathematically constituted and co-ordinated that our pigmy bodies, equally with the farthest star, throb to the music of the spheres. The blood flows rhythmically, the heart its metronome; the moving limbs weave patterns; the voice stirs into radiating sound-waves that pool of silence which we ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... up in his majesty; Ahchoogah was like a pigmy before him. "Tell him to go!" cried the policeman. "His mouth is full of lies and bad talk. Tell him to have the dug-out or the two canoes here by to-morrow morning or ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... to others the evil they did me.' Well, no! not at all: he said, 'Oh! if I were strong and bold, I would defend the weak against the strong; for I am weak, and the strong make me suffer.' In the mean time, as he was too much of a pigmy to prevent the strong from molesting the weak, he prevented the larger beasts from injuring ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... uncertainty. Is its cause something of absolute and substantive existence without me, or is it not? Is its cause something of the very same nature, as the thing that gave me a similar sensation in a matter of comparatively a pigmy and diminutive extension? ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... that the women were not, perhaps, more than seven feet, or seven and a half, or, it might be, eight, "but the men were, for the most part, about nine feet high, and very often more." Lieutenant Cumming, he said, being but six feet two, appeared a mere pigmy among them. But it seems, that, in after-times, on some one's questioning this diminutive lieutenant as to the actual size of these enormous goblins, the veteran frankly confessed, that, "had it been anywhere else but in Patagonia, he should have called them good sturdy ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... being, a pigmy in the midst of the architecture of nature, stands solitary on those icy waters and looks abroad to the horizon and sees mighty castles and temples of eternal ice raising up their pinnacles tipped by the pencil of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... has furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in the studs and signet-rings of the men; it is in the hired broughams, the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for one family that holds itself in the honor ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... change them in physical form, sometimes cause them to become of huge size, sometimes produce pigmy offspring ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... he understood all at once that a creature had come into his world, a pigmy in size, yet more to be dreaded than any foe he had ever known, was a miracle which nature alone could explain. It was a hearkening back in the age-dimmed mental fabric of Thor's race to the earliest days of man—man, first of all, with the club; ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... the smaller types have survived to our day; and a similar fact is to be observed in many of the earlier geological epochs, a group progressing and reaching a maximum of size or complexity and then dying out, or leaving at most but few and pigmy representatives. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... lay the cloud mass, which was all in movement, precipitating itself down the slope into the profound valley. It was a river of vapors, more than two miles, perhaps, in width, plunging, perhaps, two thousand feet into the abyss. Niagara, which I have often seen, is a pigmy cataract in comparison. The cloud mass tossed and heaved, whirled and poured in one enormous sheet over the precipice, breaking into spray as it struck against projecting rock masses. Every movement of whirling ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Wisbech as he gazed at the cars that they ran pigmy freight trains in the land he came from, and he was conscious of something that had a curious stirring effect on him in the clang and clatter of that giant rolling stock, as the engineer hurled ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the Man, the pigmy man, on it—and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;—it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that 'little world of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... deck once more as active as a boy and almost as impatient for the start for the Dark Continent. Ben slept at the Chester's home that night and if his dreams were not as populated with visions of elephants, leopards, deer, huge snakes and pigmy savages as theirs it was not any lack of interest in the coming expedition that was responsible ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... stage of all time, and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"—all save one, and he the nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... chief, bestowing upon Ivan Ivanovitch a glance such as a giant might cast upon a pigmy, a pedant upon a dancing-master: and he stretched out his foot and stamped upon the floor with it. This boldness cost him dear; for his whole body wavered and his nose struck the railing; but the brave preserver of order, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... mind, an illustrious historian, a very learned man, and you are pining away among the shelves of your imperial library. The greatest historian of the century is nothing but the custodian of a library, and is subordinate to a chief whom he must obey, although the latter is mentally a pigmy compared with him. Such a position is unworthy of your eminent abilities, or tell me, do you feel ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... Fox made a call for papers, Lord North opposed it, as liable to make discoveries prejudicial to the interests of the country. This drew down upon him a series of odious comparisons. Burke compared him to the "pigmy physician," who watched over the health of Sancho Panza, in the government of Barataria, and who snatched away every dish from his patient's well-supplied table, on various pretences, before he could get one mouthful. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that the scenery of Berkshire County closely approximates to mountainous. In other parts of the State the isolated hills generally present a rounded outline, and with a few exceptions do not inspire those strong emotions which one must necessarily experience while standing like a pigmy among the piled-up, craggy hills of northern Berkshire. Here is found the most lofty elevation in the State—Saddle Mountain—whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above tide water. Its name originated from the alleged resemblance ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... Perhaps in native strength none of her earlier authors equal Juvenal and Tacitus; none certainly exceed them. But they are the last barriers that stem the tide. After them the flood has already rushed in, and before long comes the collapse. In Suetonius and Florus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race; in Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarfishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold enough to respond to them. The good emperor would do so if he could; but in his perplexity ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... and the colonel began to laugh, which isn't to be wondered at when one remembers that Miss White is a tiny, wee bit of fluffy humanity who doesn't look a bit like what one would expect, the superintendent of a big hospital and looked a pigmy beside ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... him, a passage there which showed how perfectly the critic had mistaken the scope of his poetic philosophy, and exclaiming, with the most perfect naivete, how mortifying it was for men of original and profound genius to be misconceived and misrepresented by pigmy ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... been great and rare, just as I find myself now pigmy and vulgar by the standard of some past ages, wherein, if no other better qualities concurred, it was ordinary and common to see a man moderate in his revenges, gentle in resenting injuries, religious of his word, neither double nor supple, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... they now emerged on to fine open well-grassed river flats, lightly timbered, and separated by small spurs of ridges running into them. A chain of small lagoons was passed at 12 miles, teeming with black duck, teal, wood duck, and pigmy geese, whilst pigeons and other birds were frequent in the open timber, a sure indication of good country. At 13 miles a small creek was crossed, and another at 18, and after having made a good stage of 25 miles the party again camped on the Einasleih. At this point it had increased to ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... spanking wife at Portsmouth Gates, A pigmy at Goree. An orange-tawny up the Straits, A black at St. Lucie. Thus whatsomedever course I bend ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... cloud sea, scintillating with colour. It is enough to make a man throw away canvas and brushes into the bottomless precipices, enough to make one weep with despair at his utter and absolute impotence. Nature is God, Anna, and the greatest artist of us all a pigmy. When I think of those ateliers of ours, the art jargon, the decadents with their flamboyant talk I long for a two-edged sword and a minute of Divinity. To ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low. Will that become an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men of destiny, reversing ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... ancient edifice of brick; a pigmy stable stands beside it, with a gate intervening, and in the rear we have a lot big enough to graze one frugal horse, and a garden sufficiently large to employ us boys. Our father starts off immediately to find the keys; but in the face of a gathering of small lads in pinafores ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the precipice the Cliff ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... small selfe I greatly marueil'd then, Amonst all other, what strange kinde of men These Poets were; And pleased with the name, To my milde Tutor merrily I came, (For I was then a proper goodly page, Much like a Pigmy, scarse ten yeares of age) Clasping my slender armes about his thigh. O my deare master! cannot you (quoth I) Make me a Poet, doe it if you can, And you shall see, Ile quickly bee a man, 30 Who me thus answered smiling, boy quoth he, If you'le ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... farewell to the Casco and to Captain Otis, and our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy trading schooner, the Equator, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a muddy stream, and with its low banks, scattered flat sand-bars, and pigmy islands, a melancholy river, straggling through the centre of vast prairies, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel trees standing at long distances from each ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... lance of Truth We force to start amid her feign'd caress 5 Vice, siren-hag! in native ugliness; A Brother's fate will haply rouse the tear, And on we go in heaviness and fear! But if our fond hearts call to Pleasure's bower Some pigmy Folly in a careless hour, 10 The faithless guest shall stamp the enchanted ground, And mingled forms of Misery rise around: Heart-fretting Fear, with pallid look aghast, That courts the future woe to hide the past; Remorse, the poison'd arrow in his side, 15 And loud lewd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... could almost evoke the presence of General Joe Hooker, with his once grand proportions and noble mien, so deservedly famed as The Hero of Lookout Mountain. I afterward ascended another hill, which, although a pigmy in comparison with the Leviathan Lookout, would, in the monotony of our prairie country, be ranked as a mountain. It was upon its top were constructed the government water works, and upon which my brother William was employed for two years, ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... the lover after the consummation of the nuptials, of making a meal of the exhausted pigmy, who is henceforth good for nothing, is not so difficult to understand, since insects can hardly be accused of sentimentality; but to devour him during the act surpasses anything that the most morbid mind could imagine. I have seen the thing with my own eyes, and I have ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... typical man of that generation, both the victim and the hero of his time—a man who is almost a Titan in word and a pigmy in deed. He is eloquent as a young Demosthenes. An irresistible debater, he carries everything before him the moment he appears. But he fails ignominiously when put to the hard test of action. Yet he is not an impostor. His ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... foaming mouth, and flashing eye, He roars. All creatures hide or fly,— Such mortal terror at The work of one poor gnat! With constant change of his attack, The snout now stinging, now the back, And now the chambers of the nose; The pigmy fly no mercy shows. The lion's rage was at its height; His viewless foe now laugh'd outright, When on his battle-ground he saw, That every savage tooth and claw Had got its proper beauty By doing bloody duty; Himself, the hapless lion, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... is found in these old, dusty, leather-bound volumes, which is not in the inscriptions and not, alas, in the printed words. They are the chosen home of a race of pigmy spiderlings who love musty theology with an affection found in no one else nowadays. In these dingy homes they live and rear their hideous little progeny: for in the cold light of a microscope these tiny brown book-dwellers are not beautiful; they are flat, crab-like, goggle-eyed, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... can smooth a thorny path And work discovery of hidden worth. With modest mental gifts, but gentle mien He ill is fitted for promotion here. But it were matter of but little weight With Quezox as a mentor at his side, What he shall fashion in his pigmy state, For squirt from wisdom's fount can quench each flame. But Quezox? Can I trust this sable knight? He speaketh soft, but lurking in each smile Methinks I spy a double meaning there. 'Twere well to bring Dame Caution to the front And hold this fellow, as he runs, in leash; For he, while fat ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... with the lofty temperamental Upper Fall, the Lower Fall appears a smug and steady pigmy. In such company, for both are always seen together, it is hard to realize that the Lower Fall is twice the height of Niagara. Comparing Yosemite's three most conspicuous features, these gigantic falls ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... — N. littleness &c adj.; smallness &c (of quantity) 32; exiguity, inextension^; parvitude^, parvity^; duodecimo^; Elzevir edition, epitome, microcosm; rudiment; vanishing point; thinness &c 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy^, Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon^, urchin, elf; atomy^, dandiprat^; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my-thumb^; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling^, cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... hair with wrath. "Evil betide me that he should have ever made here his home;" he continued. "Who called him hither? I? No, no; I called for aught that might see fit to come, conditioned that it came in human guise; but yonder frothy fool, yon swarthy pigmy, I did not summon him. I called for anything of earth, but Heaven (to punish me) straight passed the unhallowed call to hell, that sent me up a demon." The apartment resounded with the last word, and still the old man's voice was heard like the departing rumble of ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... said I, "no doubt," as one humors an imbecile. "I confess, however," I added, "that this tiny human figure puzzles me. If it were an Indian we could set it down as evidence of some pigmy race in America, but it appears to be a European in ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her feeling of prideful confidence in the man that the north-bound freighter should punctually show her lights around the islands and that she should pause in her majestic sweep at the signal of this pigmy craft. The ship loomed huge and black and terrifying as the launch at length drew in beneath it; its sides towered like massive, unscalable ramparts. There was a delay; there seemed to be some querulousness on the part of the officer in command at being thus halted, some doubt about ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... Western meadowlark ringing over the hills and meadows. The wise, and rather murderous, magpie goes chattering about. Here and there the quiet bluebird is seen. The kingfisher is in his appointed place. Long-crested jays, Clarke's crows, and pigmy nuthatches are plentiful, and the wild note of the chickadee is heard on every hand. Above the altitude of eight thousand feet you may hear, in June, the marvelous melody ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... despicabili forma; Boccharis a most deformed prince as ever Egypt had, yet as [3613]Diodorus Siculus records of him, in wisdom and knowledge far beyond his predecessors. A. Dom. 1306. [3614] Uladeslaus Cubitalis that pigmy king of Poland reigned and fought more victorious battles than any of his long-shanked predecessors. Nullam virtus respuit staturam, virtue refuseth no stature, and commonly your great vast bodies, and fine features, are sottish, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Prussia during the Seven Years' War, in the American colonies and the United States, in Portugal, in Greece, in various republics of Central and South America, even the assignats of the French Revolution—seem pigmy frauds in comparison with the present vast inundation of counterfeit ...
— The Paper Moneys of Europe - Their Moral and Economic Significance • Francis W. Hirst
... hosts advanced, to meet each other in deadly conflict, the Trojans marched with noisy shouts, like the clamor of the cranes, when they fly to the streams of Oceanus, in the early morning, screaming, and bringing death and destruction to the Pigmy men; but the Achaieans came on in silence, ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... the public good, in humanitarian projects, Baxter was indeed a great man ... I loomed like a pigmy beside him. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Pigmy seraphs gone astray, Velvet people from Vevay, Belles from some lost summer day, Bees' exclusive coterie. Paris could not lay the fold Belted down with emerald; Venice could not show a cheek Of a tint so lustrous meek. Never such an ambuscade As of brier and leaf displayed For ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... practice among diminutive beings. Sir Robert Walpole suffered in the person of Flimnap the Lilliputian Premier, Tories and Whigs in the High-Heels and Low-Heels, Catholics and Protestants in the Big-endians and Small-endians. In the "Voyage to Brobdingnag," where Gulliver finds himself a pigmy among giants, the general object of the satire is the same, but its application becomes more bitter and universal. Characteristics of the human race hardly perceptible in their ordinary proportions, attain a disgusting and monstrous prominence when seen in the huge persons ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... about his poverty, seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his colossusship ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... just been crowned at Moscow at an expense of some millions, and whose emblem of authority is ornamented with rubies as large as eggs and ablaze with 2,564 costly diamonds—while half his people are feeding on fetid offal—is a weak-faced pigmy who would probably be peddling Russia's favorite drunk promoter over a pine bar had he not chanced to be born in the purple. Having been spawned in a royal bed—perchance the same in which his great gran'dame Catherine was wont to receive her paramours—he becomes the most powerful of princes— ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... sun was just setting and, as the cloud-banks lifted, strong shadows, intensely blue, pointed across the plain of snow. A small, black, energetic figure came out from among the firs and ran forward where the longest shadow pointed. It looked absurdly tiny and anxious; futile, in its pigmy haste, across the exquisite stillness. Joan, lying so still, was acquiescent; this little striving thing rebelled. It came forward steadily, following Joan's uneven tracks, stamping them down firmly to make a ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... in the Scottish prelude, which is of high quality in style and pathos. It is curious how utterly his powers desert him the moment he leaves his native heath: like Antaeus, he is a giant on his mother earth and a pigmy off it. His first published book was 'Better Dead' (1887); it works out a cynical idea which would be amusing in five pages, but is diluted into tediousness by being spread over fifty. But in 1889 came ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... seems to have been essential to the "making of the land," though their names afford no clue to the functions discharged by them. From over sea, seated in a gourd and wearing a robe of wren's feathers, there comes a pigmy, Sukuna Hikona, who proves to be one of fifteen hundred children begotten by the Kami of the original trinity. Skilled in the arts of healing sickness and averting calamities from men or animals, this pigmy ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger of Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and we turn to gather the first violets of February, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears everything to pieces, as if his ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... to all succeeding ages cursed: For close designs, and crooked counsels fit; Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit; Restless, unfix'd in principles and place; In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace: A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay. A daring pilot in extremity; Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high, 160 He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit, Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit. Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Africa for the Natural History Museum, where it now stands. It seems highly probable that this species occasionally exceeds 12 ft. in height. On the ground, between the great African elephant's fore and hind legs, in the museum, I placed a stuffed specimen of the smallest terrestrial mammal—the pigmy shrew-mouse. It is worth while thus calling to mind that the little animal has practically every separate bone, muscle, blood-vessel, nerve, and other structure present in the huge monster compared with it—is, in fact, built closely upon the same plan, and yet is so much ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... swore that the Fane-builder was no better than a midnight robber, and had despoiled other temples of all that adorned his own. The tale was as false and foul as they who coined it; but when they pointed to many pigmy fanes which now began to be reared about the city, and when men saw that they were built of like marbles as those which glittered in the temple of Adonais, they paused not to mark that the fairest stones in these new structures were but the imperfect sculptures which the true ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... were busied here and there, bulking grotesquely as they moved about the fire, seeming disheveled demons of the pit. Like some master imp torturing a pigmy over the flames, old Ben York was kneeling close beside the blaze, holding to the coals a hickory stick, which served as spit for the roasting of a squirrel. The brilliance shone full on the frowsy ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... periods, Such epic melodies, As holds the utterance of the earlier gods, The lords of song, one needs To sing the praise of these! No feeble music, tinklings frail of glass; No penny trumpetings; twitterings of brass, The moment's effort, shak'n from pigmy bells, Ephemeral drops from small Pierian wells, With which the Age relieves a barren hour. But such large music, such melodious power, As have our cataracts, Pouring the iron facts, The giant acts Of these: ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... at Balsora. After we had been at sea a few weeks, we were overtaken by a dreadful storm, and were obliged to cast anchor near an island which the captain had endeavored to avoid; for he assured us that it was inhabited by pigmy savages, covered with hair, who would speedily attack us in great numbers. Soon an innumerable multitude of frightful savages, about two feet high, boarded the ship. Resistance was useless. They took down our sails, cut ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... was at the full and made glorious patterns of light through the forest. Little voices of the night which he had not heard until now began to thrill and quiver under the soft light. It was as though the North Woods were filled with a secret, pigmy people who were moon worshippers; as though now they greeted their goddess with an elfin ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... once the pigmy clever To the stupid giant said: Things are not of highest value Which do highest rear their head; The sluggish horse is nothing better Than the ...
— Little Engel - a ballad with a series of epigrams from the Persian - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... Spanish Count d'Aranda to his royal master in 1782, "is born a pigmy. A day will come when it will be a giant, even a colossus. Liberty of conscience, the facility for establishing a new population on immense lands, as well as the advantages of the new government, will draw thither farmers and artisans from ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... first time in his life he felt humble. He perceived how misguided he had been ever to suppose that he could pit his pigmy wits against ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... soon— On this side Webster and on that Calhoun, The monstrous conflagration of their fight Startling the day and splendoring the night! Both are unconquerable—one is right. Will't keep the pigmy, if we make him strong, From siding with a giant in the wrong? When Genius strikes for error, who's afraid To arm poor Folly with a wooden blade? O Rabelais, you knew it all!—your good And honest judge (by men misunderstood) Knew ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... imitation that you almost feel like knocking for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know the "Open sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size, representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are costumed in the style of religious art, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... flatcars bound for new service further Pacificward. Of Frijoles there remained barely enough to shudder at, with the collector's nasal bawl of "Free Holys!" and everywhere the irrepressible tropical greenery was already rushing back to engulf the pigmy works of man. It seemed criminally wasteful to have built these entire towns with all the detail and machinery of a well governed and fully furnished city from police station to salt cellars only to tear them down again and utterly wipe them out four or five years after their founding. A forerunner ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... an hour before the dawn, when his eyes opened wide, and he sat up, listening. He heard it again, faint and far away, a feeble "pop-pop!" Then there were more, a sudden pigmy chorus of battle. He got to his feet, and ran to call the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... apparent that in the face of such a wind all the pigmy appliances that the populace could bring to act upon such a mass of combustion would be unavailing. As much as could burn that night was burnt, while some of that which would not burn crumbled and fell as a formless heap, whence new flames towered up, and inclined to the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... overlooked an immense plain, uncultivated, apparently unfertile, and without a sign of life as far as the eye could reach. Kara Dagh, in the south, lifted nearer us its cluster of dark summits; to the north, the long ridge of Uesedjik Dagh (the Pigmy Mountain) stretched like a cape into the plain; Hassan Dagh; wrapped in a soft white cloud, receded behind us, and the snows of Taurus seemed almost as distant as when we first beheld them from the ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... when the animals reigned on the earth they had killed all but a girl and her little brother, and these two were living in fear and seclusion. The boy was a perfect pigmy, never growing beyond the stature of a small infant, but the girl increased with her years, so that the labour of providing food and lodging devolved wholly on her. She went out daily to get wood for their ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... standing-room within the mighty head, which is 14-1/2 feet in diameter. A six-foot man standing on the lower lip could hardly reach the eyes. The index finger is 8 feet in length and the nose 3-3/4 feet. The Colossus of Rhodes was a pigmy compared ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... threw themselves into a task that no artist could possibly master. They approached their gigantic subjects with correspondingly large canvases, without ever giving the essential element, of their huge motives, namely, a certain feeling of scale, of monumentality, as compared to the pigmy size of the human figure. Really great pictures of the Yellowstone, the Grand Caon, and the lofty mountain-tops still remain to be painted. The daring and courage of these men has benefited our art very much in a technical sense. ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... on the soft pathway of the sandhills are pigmy figures of men that move about or sit squatting as if on the watch; and small as they are, low down in the hollows and far away, this wonderful silver moon reveals even their slightest gestures; for their white robes and black cloaks stand sharply out against the monotonous rose of the desert. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... imperial throne, So distant, O ye gods! from every one, The royal virtues are like many a star, From this our pigmy system rather far: Whose light, though flying ever since creation, Has not yet pitched upon our nation. [Footnote: Such was the sublime opinion of ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... stretched forth over the suffering land—it was the all-powerful minister, the curse of Spain, the butcher of the noble Torrijos and his unhappy companions, whom he, the insignificant student, had cast down from his high state! The giant had succumbed before the pigmy; the virtual ruler of the kingdom had fallen by the agency of one whom, a day previously, he might with impunity have annihilated. Events so extraordinary and of such rapid occurrence, were hard to comprehend; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... curiously foreshortened shadows on the gleaming white expanse. Here and there a group of men showed dark against a ledge. In the centre, one of the monster derricks held suspended in its chains a forty-ton block of granite just lifted from its eternal bed. Beside it a workman showed like a pigmy. ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... Fred's physique, among his friends he was known as Pigmy and Pee Wee, the former title sometimes being shortened ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... rich and the hope of the poor.—Which is the best of the beasts? Woman.—Hide thy virtues as thou hidest thy faults.—A dwarf brought a complaint to his king. "No one," said the king, "would hurt such a pigmy." "But," retorted the dwarf, "my injurer is smaller than I am."—A dolt sat on a stone. "Lo, a blockhead on a block," said the passers-by.—"What prayer make you by night?" they asked a sage. "Fear God by day, and by night you will sleep, not ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... moon-suits, shuffling clumsily across the copper plates. Hazily he knew he was with the others in an airlock; the hiss and the throbbing of pumps told him that. Under the great dome there was the latticework of a huge reflecting telescope; strange pigmy figures scuttled here and there, working at curious machines. There was the constant purr of many motors, the gentle pulsation of ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... wife of Kratu, Samnati, brought forth the sixty thousand Valakhilyas, pigmy sages, no bigger than a joint of the thumb, chaste, pious, resplendent as the rays of the Sun." WILSON'S ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... chickadees and nuthatches of various kinds, together with an occasional woodpecker. In the northern country we had come across a very few blue grouse and ruffed grouse, both as tame as possible. We had seen a pigmy owl no larger than a robin sitting on top of a pine in broad daylight, and uttering at short intervals ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... peavie. Roaring Dick, like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attacked the jam at a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... corruptions put themselves forth, and his desires for heaven seemed to fail.' In fact, while he compared himself with his former self, he was a religious giant; in comparison with these pious, long-standing Christians, he dwindled into a pigmy; and in the presence of Christ he became, in his own view, less than nothing, and vanity. He thus describes his feelings:—'I began to sink—my heart laid me low as hell. I was driven as with a tempest—my heart would be unclean—the Canaanites would ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... it had been sawn short off at the waist. Even in this state it reached from floor to ceiling; and thrusting itself forward, with that excessively wide-awake aspect, and air of somewhat obtrusive politeness, by which figure-heads are usually characterised, seemed to reduce everything else to mere pigmy proportions. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... heads, by way of an umbrella, whenever the clouds poured down a libation too liberal. To those curious in philology I convey the information, that in the word dinghy, the g was pronounced hard. This explanation is also necessary to do justice to the pigmy floater, as it was always painted in the gayest colours possible. It was quite a pet of the first-lieutenant's. Indeed, he loved it so much, that he took care never to oppress it with ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... left to myself for several hours in the morning; but I found ample and pleasant employment in surveying the comforts and beauties of my habitation. For I was not forced to perform the part of an insignificant pigmy in the vast abodes of the colossal race of man: I possessed a beautiful little house proportioned to my size, pleasantly situated on a table in the furthest corner of the schoolroom, and commanding an extensive view of ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that Nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according to where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers; all bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ultimate horizon of the world everything was sardonically ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... engulfed her. She could not rest her soul upon this pigmy. She felt revengeful rather toward him—revengeful, because he could sit there opposite her so capable and faithful, so truthful and decent, so utterly unlike the companion ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... the original was like, in a striking contrast to the tall, broad-shouldered, hale old man, whose iron frame had defied the storms of more than seventy winters; but I remember how he seemed to me a mere pigmy by the side of the generous, large-hearted woman whose tones and gestures had a protectiveness, a strength born of love and pity, that reassured us trembling little fugitives in spite of our ungracious reception. ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... season, the cloudless sun, gilded these few peaceful days. Susannah compared her child with other children, marvelled at the baby intercourse he held with them, at the likes and dislikes displayed among these pigmy associates; and the other mothers had like sources of interest in ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... length, some perhaps of the bulk of the rhinoceros, crawled along the plains of South America. They have become creatures of the past, and their places have been taken by others of a similarly curious formation, of which even the giant armadillo, when compared to them, is a mere pigmy. These creatures abound in all parts of the continent, from Paraguay to Venezuela; but, incased as they are in coats of complete armour, and running so quickly, and so rapidly digging into the earth, they can rarely be overtaken ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have here the germ of such passages as this which one ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... something more than a literary colossus. Pigmies can only claim pigmy honors. Size, after all, rules in this universe, because size and power go together. The large bodies rule the small. There is no impression of greatness in art without something that is analogous to size,—breadth, depth, height. The sense of vastness is never the gift of a minor poet. ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... about them indeed. And no longer concerning himself about nature what wonder is it that nature ebbs out of him. She has her revenge, for from whatever standpoint of idealism considered the average man shows but of pigmy stature. For him there is no before or after. In his material life he has forgotten or never heard of the heroic traditions of his race, their aspirations to godlike state. One wonders what will happen to him when death ushers ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell |
