"Dwarfish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confined chiefly to the Delta region and the vicinity of Memphis, the city of the pyramid builders. It is not improbable that the Memphite god Ptah may have been introduced into Egypt by the invading broad heads. This deity is a world artisan like Indra, and is similarly associated with dwarfish artisans; he hammers out the copper sky, and therefore links with the various thunder gods—Tarku, Teshup, Adad, Ramman, &c, of the Asian mountaineers. Thunderstorms were of too rare occurrence in Egypt to be connected with ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... palustre which provided a beverage in smell much resembling rhubarb, notwithstanding which we found it refreshing and were gratified to see this plant flourishing abundantly on the sea shore though of dwarfish growth. ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... stuck in their hats around which green veils were twisted, wonderfully like the characters in lilliputian pantomimes whose comicality consists solely in the size of their heads compared with their short legs and dwarfish movements. They smoked and drank outrageously. Sometimes the man in the fez, himself hardly able to stand, brought them home horribly ill. And yet Jansoulet loved his little ones, especially the youngest, who, with his long hair and his doll-like aspect, reminded him of little ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... every tree in the big orchard back to a three-foot stub, unless there was very good reason for leaving a few inches (never more than six), and I turned my back on him and walked away as I said these cruel words. It seemed a shame to cut these bushy, long-legged, handsome fellows back to dwarfish insignificance and brutish ugliness, but it had to be done. I wanted stocky, thrifty, low-headed business trees, and there was no other way to get them. The trees in the lower, or ten-acre, orchard, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... me—to what cares I am wedded! to what labours I am bound! what instruments I must use! what disguises I must assume! to tricks and artifice I must bow my pride! base are my enemies—uncertain my friends! and verily, in this struggle with blinded and mean men, the soul itself becomes warped and dwarfish. Patient and darkling, the Means creep through caves and the soiling mire, to gain at last the light ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Negritos, a fact due, no doubt, to the influence of crossing. Farther south, in the Nilgherry Hills, and in the neighbourhood of the Todas and Badagas, dwell the Kurumbas. and Irulas (children of darkness). Both are weak and dwarfish, the latter especially so. They inhabit, says Walhouse,[A] the most secluded, densely wooded fastnesses of the mountain slopes. They are by popular tradition connected with the aboriginal builders of the rude stone monuments of the district, though, according to ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... and when I learned I should there meet General Laurance, I consented to go. Before leaving Paris, I saw the only child of that hideous iniquitous sham marriage; and, darling, when I contrasted you, my own pure pearl, with the deformed, dwarfish, repulsive daughter, whom the Nemesis of my wrongs gave to Cuthbert, in little Maud Laurance, I almost shouted aloud in my great exultation. You so beautiful, with his own lineaments in every feature, disowned for that misshapen, imbecile heiress of his proud ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... broader by inches and taller by half a head, dwindled, seen in juxtaposition with this man of the iron will and the leader's temperament, to a flabby, dwarfish, and petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in, and read him, and dropped him, and fastened on the little Englishwoman, as the great boots tramped heavily across the floor, and the great voice ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Pycnanthemum pilosum, Chrysopsis villosa, Amorpha canescens, Tephrosia Virginiana, Lithospermum canescens; between which the immigrated Mullein (Verbuscum thapsus) may be found. The pebbly fragments of the entire slope, which during spring-time were sparingly covered with dwarfish herbs, such as the Androsace occidentalis, Draba Caroliniana, Plantago Virginica, Scutellaria parvula, are now crowded with plants of taller growth and variegated blossoms. Rudbeckia hirta, with its numerous radiating blossoms of a lively yellow, and the closely allied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... seed has been sown three days, it will be up, when the pots must be unplunged, placed on the surface, and some water given to them. They will now require upwards of an inch of air, both night and day, which will cause the plants to grow stuggy, or dwarfish, and prevent their drawing. In about three days give them some more water in the morning, and they will be ready to ...
— The art of promoting the growth of the cucumber and melon • Thomas Watkins
... are paying for it. He has just given Markland two hundred pounds for a paltry little tale that would scarcely swell out to a volume. Markland told me himself. You know that I've scraped an acquaintance with him? Oh! I suppose I haven't seen you since then. He's a dwarfish fellow with only one eye. Mrs Boston Wright cries him up ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the rebuff and stole a timid glance at the thinker. Espalin was a lean little, dried-up manikin, with legs, arms, and mustaches disproportionately long for his dwarfish body. His black, wiry hair hung in ragged witchlocks; his black pin-point eyes were glittering, cold, and venomous. He looked, thought Pringle, ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Plant dwarfish or bushy in habit, generally about two feet and a half in height or length; fruit largest at the blossom-end, and tapering gradually to a neck, which is solid, and more or less curved; size medium,—average specimens, when suitable for use, measuring about eight inches in ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... how this Horde of dwarfish, blue, warty, misformed little horrors woke to the presence ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... The dwarfish peaks, that had surrounded Joyce's outlook all her life, made one understand the girl's love for this picture. As this was great, compared to the small things she knew, so life held possibilities that her life hinted—she might struggle with that ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... plain to the Jhilun. Fine cultivation observed on all sides, and of various sorts, chiefly Bajra and Kureel. Dhah abundant, but not arborescent, Euonymus, Peganum, Bheir, and Phulahi, the latter very dwarfish. Mimosa albispina and Adhatoda very common. The commonest tree in these countries is Bheir, and a very handsome ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... was a sudden commotion from the opposite side of the room. A quaint dwarfish figure, crippled but full of vigour, stumped ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... end of the inlet, its low, cliffy lining sinks, at both sides, into a beach. A copra warehouse stands in the shadow of the shoreside trees, flitted about for ever by a clan of dwarfish swallows; and a line of rails on a high wooden staging bends back into the mouth of the valley. Walking on this, the new-landed traveller becomes aware of a broad fresh-water lagoon (one arm of which he crosses), and beyond, of a grove ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... oak is left behind, and the pine grows stunted and dwarfish. The wind blows colder and colder. A ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... harm neither to you nor to her," a voice replied. And the foremost of the troop, a thick dwarfish man with a huge two-handed sword, stood aside. "Messer Baudichon," he said to one behind him, "this ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... vastly, and he said it was the finest street in the city, and should be called the Kurfuerstendamm. His master and all the Germans who came to live in it agreed with him. They gave large rents for a flat in one of the houses, and when they went to London and saw the smoky dwarfish houses there they came away as quickly as possible and rubbed their hands and were happy, and said to each other, "How beautiful is our Kurfuerstendamm. We have as many turrets as we have chimneys, and we have garlands on our balconies of green or gilded iron, and some of us have angelic ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... a little wistful as he blinks at all the lights, And maybe he is thinking of his claim And the dark and dwarfish cabin where he lay and dreamed at nights, (Thank God, he'll never see the place again!) Where he lived on tinned tomatoes, beef embalmed and sourdough bread, On rusty beans and bacon furred with mould; His stomach's out of ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... couple of native families living on the shore in rude huts, composed of the branches of trees, and with mud and stones heaped over them. The people were the ugliest I had ever seen, being more like baboons than men and women. They were dwarfish in stature, the tallest of the party not exceeding five feet in height, and the majority of the others quite a foot shorter. I noticed also, as the skipper had told me, that their apparel was of the very scantiest possible, consisting only of a piece of sealskin, which was movable, ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... "in partibus;" that his figure, at a distance, removed from the field of action, seemed to gain in size in the measure that the level of the revolution sank and the official prominences of official France became more and more dwarfish; that he could figure as republican Pretender for 1852, and periodically issued to the Wallachians and other peoples circulars in which "despot of the continent" is threatened with the feats that he and his allies had in contemplation. Was Proudhon wholly wrong when he cried out ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... left Isenland he rode on and on until he came to a great mountain. Here near a cave he found two little dwarfish Nibelungs, surrounded by twelve foolish giants. The two little Nibelungs were princes, the ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... was dark as a raincloud, he had one large round eye, white tusks protruded from his lips, and he carried a gaily painted urn. His unspeakable attendants leaped like frogs. The jolliest looking of all the warriors came thereafter, with a dwarfish body and very short legs; he had a huge black-bearded head, a flat nose, and his tongue hung from his mouth and waggled as he moved. He wore a belt and a necklace, and nothing else whatever except the plumes of the hawk arranged ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... Might lug it twice its length; But then to reach yon mountain top, And that without a breathing stop, Were surely past a mortal's strength— Unless, indeed, it be no bigger Than some wee, pigmy, dwarfish figure, Which one would head a cane withal;— And if to this the case should fall, The adventurer's honour would be small! This posting seems to me a trap, Or riddle for some greenish chap; I therefore leave the whole to you.' The doubtful reasoner onward hies. With heart ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... a half year before the final incarceration of Berthold Bryller for life, in an insane asylum subsidized by the state, a yelling arose in the schoolyard of the Horror High School. A crowd of mostly smaller pupils surged behind a dwarfish, care-worn, lop-sided boy whose back showed the slight beginnings of a hump. They teased him cheerfully and spitefully—the words were unintelligible because of the noise but surely malicious. He was pushed so that he stumbled. Many older high school pupils looked on, amused ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... a careless observer the words were not inappropriate to his dwarfish proportions. His head, which, between his excessively wide shoulders, was perched upon the top of a very long neck, was too large, much too large for his body. His face was narrow, his complexion swarthy, his sallow cheeks high and sunken. A nose slightly ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most solicitous ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... countenance. "Whether you mean to accept the proposal, or not," she consequently said, "you can anyhow speak nicely. It isn't worth the while dragging this one in and involving that one! The proverb adequately says: 'In the presence of a dwarf one mustn't speak of dwarfish things!' Here you've been heaping insult upon me, but I didn't presume to retaliate. These two young ladies have however given you no provocation whatever; and yet by referring, as you've done, in this way and that way to secondary ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,—compared not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too, with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes and toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution; he was one whose hand ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... assassinated not far off, outside the Sakaruda gate of the castle. Besides these, barracks, parade-grounds, policemen, kurumas, carts pulled and pushed by coolies, pack-horses in straw sandals, and dwarfish, slatternly-looking soldiers in European dress, made up the Tokiyo that I saw between Shinbashi ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... The proclamation was on the twelfth of December. On the twenty-first, a noted sorcerer came to Ossossan. He was of a dwarfish, hump-backed figure,—most rare among this symmetrical people,—with a vicious face, and a dress consisting of a torn and shabby robe of beaver-skin. Scarcely had he arrived, when, with ten or twelve other savages, he ensconced himself in ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... plunged over the broken stones of its bed in a series of cascades. A few trees, or rather a few burnt stumps, fringed the banks, but the trees which here and there remained unburned were so crooked and dwarfish as merely to heighten ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... affects every phase and aspect of child as well as adult, by doing something to the speed of activities in their cells, is told straightway by the effects of it when eaten or introduced into the skin or blood of various people. A cretin, idiotic, dwarfish, deformed, hopeless, an incessantly prodding burden of sorrow to the mother, who looks upon the masterpiece she had labored to bring forth, and beholds a terrible gargoyle, becomes transformed ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... "O thou refuse of brokers, meseemeth thou art mad, in that thou showest me this hour past, first to a pair of greybeards, in each of whom are two faults, and then thou proferrest me to my lord Shihab al-Din wherein be three defects; and thirdly, he is dwarfish, secondly, he hath a nose which is big, and thirdly, he hath a beard which is long. Of him quoth one ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... their triangular shields and fetching sweeping blows with two-handled swords; or that of Lucca—its fantastic columns clasped by writhing snakes and winged dragons, their marble scales spotted with inlaid serpentine, every available space alive with troops of dwarfish riders, with spur on heel and hawk in hood, sounding huge trumpets of chase, like those of the Swiss Urus-horn, and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and hares, boars and wolves, every stone ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... quickly and unitedly in anything, partly because Chinese pride and prejudice will not easily yield to the leadership of the haughty little island whose people as well as whose territory have long been contemptuously regarded as dwarfish and inferior. ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... geographical writings of Jews are social histories of their brethren in faith. Somewhat later, David Reubeni published some strange stories as to the Jews. He went to Rome, where he made a considerable sensation, and was received by Pope Clement VII (1523-1534). Dwarfish in stature and dark in complexion, David Reubeni was wasted by continual fasting, but his manner, though harsh and forbidding, was intrepid and awe-inspiring. His outrageous falsehoods for a time ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... and had no profession but literature. And fourth, by the sheer force of his ambition he won his place, and held it, in spite of religious prejudice, and in the face of physical and temperamental obstacles that would have discouraged a stronger man. For Pope was deformed and sickly, dwarfish in soul and body. He knew little of the world of nature or of the world of the human heart. He was lacking, apparently, in noble feeling, and instinctively chose a lie when the truth had manifestly more advantages. Yet this jealous, peevish, waspish little man became ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... rooting; preparatory to planting them out, the stems of the shrub and tree-suckers should likewise be trimmed occasionally, by cutting off all lower laterals; and any having long, slender, and weak tops, or such as are intended to assume a more dwarfish or bushy growth, may be shortened at top in proportion, to form about half a foot to one or two feet in length, according to their nature or strength; and others that are more strong, or that are designed to run up with taller ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... difficulty, after a short experience, in judging of the rock that formed the basis of the country over which I was travelling, from the kind of tree or herbage that flourished in the soil above it. The eucalyptus pulv., a species of eucalyptus having a glaucus-coloured leaf, of dwarfish habits and growing mostly in scrub, betrayed the sandstone formation, wherever it existed, This was the case in many parts of the County of Cumberland, in some parts of Wombat Brush, at the two passes on the great south road, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... The dwarfish little Malay whose task it seemed to be to drive the great beasts to their morning bath, from which they returned muddied and dripping, had twice over, to the recovering lad's knowledge, shouted at and tried to drive Peter's friend from the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... mountains of the western Highlands often sent forth wilder tribes to frequent the marts of St. Mungo's favourite city. Hordes of wild shaggy, dwarfish cattle and ponies, conducted by Highlanders, as wild, as shaggy, and sometimes as dwarfish, as the animals they had in charge, often traversed the streets of Glasgow. Strangers gazed with surprise on the antique and fantastic dress, and listened to the unknown ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... this, the door was opened, and Charcam entered, accompanied by a dwarfish, shabby-looking man, in a brown serge frock, with coarse Jewish features, and a long red beard. Between the Jew and the attendant came Jack Sheppard; while a crowd of servants, attracted by the news, that the investigation of a robbery was going ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... from that very place to the land of None's Desire. Yet it was otherwise that Fate would have it. For the dwarf parried with his little arms the grip of those monstrous hands, and gradually working along the enormous limbs came at length to the giant's body where by dwarfish cunning he obtained a grip; and turning Plash-Goo about, as a spider does some great fly, till his little grip was suitable to his purpose, he suddenly lifted the giant over his head. Slowly at first, by the edge of that precipice whose base sheer distance ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... Alcibiades, in Plato, had rather die young, beautiful, rich, noble, and learned, and all this in full excellence, than to stop short of such condition; this disease is, peradventure, excusable in so strong and so full a soul. When wretched and dwarfish little souls cajole and deceive themselves, and think to spread their fame for having given right judgment in an affair, or maintained the discipline of the guard of a gate of their city, the more they think ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Dwarfish, compared with this gigantic figure, appeared the proportions of the other Indian, who, within twelve inches of my face, was stooping over the thing he was dragging in a position that lent to his person the additional horror of deformity. And the burden, lying upon a sweeping cedar ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... we saw suddenly spread out below us the vale of Monteith, with "far Loch Ard and Aberfoil" in the center and the huge front of Ben Venue filling up the picture. Taking courage from this, we hurried on. The heather had become stunted and dwarfish, and the ground was covered with short brown grass. The mountain-sheep which we saw looking at us from the rock above had worn so many paths along the side that we could not tell which to take, but pushed on in the direction ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish schoolmaster. But he had been seen landing. The inhabitants had identified him for a Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the dark and dwarfish aboriginal people of the land. Immediately the obscure ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door with fearful whisperings. For some time the schoolmaster held them at bay, and at last ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... business and professional struggles of the more resolute and enterprising members of the race on every hand. While these endeavors are in many instances healthy and promising in character, the greater multitude are skeleton-like in shape and dwarfish in proportion, indicating to a pitiful degree the lack of blood to supply and brain to conduct the enterprise, it matters little whether it be of the professional or business type. The medical practitioner and undertaker are striking exceptions to the non-prosperous and unsuccessful class, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... one Cutwolfe, a wearish dwarfish writhen fac'd cobler, brother to Bartoll the Italian, that was confederate with Esdras of Granado, and at that time stole away my ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... higher apes.' It can be shown," he continues, "that these statements are derived from the writings of a learned scholar of Bonn on the condition of savage nations, the facts of which are based either on the depositions of an African slave of the Doko tribe, a dwarfish people in the south of Shoa, or on the assertions of Bengalese planters, or perhaps on the observations of a sporting adventurer, that a mother and daughter, and at another time a man and woman, were found in India in a semi-animal condition. On the other hand, not only have neither nations, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the god: for the image of Hephaistos very nearly resembles the Phenician Pataicoi, which the Phenicians carry about on the prows of their triremes; and for him who has not seen these, I will indicate its nature,—it is the likeness of a dwarfish man. He entered also into the temple of the Cabeiroi, into which it is not lawful for any one to enter except the priest only, and the images there he even set on fire, after much mockery of them. Now these also are like the images of ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... Mimer's coming. As he sat there, he looked, to the people below, like some great castle tower; for he was a giant in size, and his coat of mail was so huge that twenty men of common mould might have found shelter, or hidden themselves, within it. As the smith Mimer, so dwarfish in stature, tolled up the steep hillside, Amilias smiled to see him; for he felt no fear of the slender, gleaming blade that was to try the metal of his war coat. And already a shout or expectant triumph went up ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... fiery energy in his look, a ring of half-desperate hope in his deep voice, which moved her to strange thoughts. His face, too, was changed and ennobled, his gestures larger, even his small stature ceased, for once, to seem dwarfish and gnome-like. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... subsequently turned over to Giacomo Casanova, as is duly recorded in the latter's Memoires, under the year 1753.] just as he had been. Truly, it was diverting, after a candid appraisal of his own merits, to reflect that a dwarfish Louis de Soyecourt had succeeded where quite impeccable people like Bayard and du Guesclin had failed; by four years of scandalous living in Noumaria he had confirmed the duchy to the French interest, had thereby secured the wavering friendship of Austria, and had, in effect, set France ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... was becoming dazed with happiness. Curious thoughts about his fairy-godmother crept into his head; strange thrills of pleasure and of pain shot through his dwarfish frame, and turned him well-nigh sick with emotion. It seemed to Caspar that he had grown older and younger in that one summer day. He felt giddy, and suddenly longed for his ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... scuffling rush of feet just then, and the object of his thoughts, wild and weird-looking from his dwarfish aspect, glistening head, and ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... replied, Sume tibi meos oculos et deam existimabis, take mine eyes, and thou wilt think she is a goddess, dote on her forthwith, count all her vices virtues; her imperfections infirmities, absolute and perfect: if she be flat-nosed, she is lovely; if hook-nosed, kingly; if dwarfish and little, pretty; if tall, proper and man-like, our brave British Boadicea; if crooked, wise; if monstrous, comely; her defects are no defects at all, she hath no deformities. Immo nec ipsum amicae stercus foetet, though she be nasty, fulsome, as Sostratus' ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... alternately kept eating goora and chewing tobacco snuff, the custom with all ranks, male and female, who can procure them; on her right side lay a whip. At a little distance, squatted on the ground, sat a dwarfish, humpbacked female slave, with a wide mouth, but good eyes. She had no clothing on, with the exception of a profusion of strings of beads and coral round her neck and waist. This dwarfish personage served the purpose of a bell in our country, and what, it may be supposed, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... dry Goddesses, as some who when They stuffe their page with Godds, write worse then Men. Thou was't thine owne Muse, and hadst such vast odds Thou out-writ'st him whose verse made all those Godds: Surpassing those our Dwarfish Age up reares, As much as Greeks or Latines thee in yeares: Thy Ocean Fancy knew nor Bankes nor Damms, We ebbe downe dry to pebble-Anagrams; Dead and insipid, all despairing sit Lost to behold this ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... youngest son of Lord-Treasurer Burghley, then twenty-five years of age.—He had no official capacity, but was sent by his father, that he might improve his diplomatic talents, and obtain some information as to the condition of the Netherlands. A slight, crooked, hump-backed young gentleman, dwarfish in stature, but with a face not irregular in feature, and thoughtful and subtle in expression, with reddish hair, a thin tawny beard, and large, pathetic, greenish-coloured eyes, with a mind and manners already trained to courts and cabinets, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with which she had herself made her escape from Miss Horn's house. At a few yards' distance from her it stood, and gazed up at her countenance as intently as she seemed to be gazing on the sea. It was a man of dwarfish height and uncertain age, with a huge hump upon his back, features of great refinement, a long thin beard, and a forehead unnaturally large, over eyes which, although of a pale blue, mingled with ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... has already guessed the name of the gentleman who caused this distinct and sudden interest and flung consternation and activity into two separate groups. As James Darlington followed the glance of the young girl, he had recognized the dwarfish figure of the Mexican who had robbed him of his treasure and who had previously led him and his party into dire trouble—hence his excitement, but why the interest of the Senorita da Cordova?—Ah! that is another tale, but now to tell the story of the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... a slothful servant in thy family, an idle laborer in thy vineyard, 'an unfruitful branch,' a poor dwarfish member in thy body. Grant, O grant a little fruit on the topmost bough. O, at the 'eleventh hour' may I begin to work, to bear some fruit, to the glory of that grace by which my soul is saved from the wages of sin, death, and hell, and made heir, by free gift, of the wages of righteousness, ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... fear, would so far destroy the independence of the individual, as to interfere with the great object of all social reform, namely, the development of humanity, the substitution of a race of free, noble, holy men and women, instead of the dwarfish and mutilated specimens which ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... round the tepees, and then a group of children, poorly clad in ragged pieces of blankets and skins, gaped at Jones. He saw their pinched, brown faces, staring, hungry eyes, naked legs and throats, and noted particularly their dwarfish size. When he spoke they fled precipitously a little way, then turned. He called again, and all ran except one small lad. Jones went into the cabin and came out with a handful ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... moment awe-struck as I gazed at the shrivelled and dwarfish bodies, the long, ape-like arms, and huge disproportioned heads, from which fell their hair in snaky tangles, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... pictured as a man of dwarfish stature clothed in bearskin, or merely in leaves or with an apron of leaves. He has two horns on his head. In his right hand he holds a hammer and in his left a chisel (sometimes these are reversed), the only implements ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... a mile. It is separated from the mainland by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie[4] stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... objects of divine solicitude. Hopeless looks and dwarfish lives are fearful protests against the pitiless avarice of the faithless rich. This or that conception of the redemptive economy, or concerning the personnel of its central figure, may be tolerated, but there can be no hopeful sign for him who ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... a merry company. And they were just afloat, When lo! a man of dwarfish span Came ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... for it does not often fall to the lot of mortal man to find in one little, insignificant figure, dwarfish alike in soul and body, such a compound of selfishness, duplicity, meanness, and vulgarity, as was centered in the ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well- managed nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature had overshadowed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at the age of twenty-one alone in the world, and master of a considerable fortune, including the estate and mansion of Crome. The beauty and intelligence of his childhood had survived into his manly age, and, but for his dwarfish stature, he would have taken his place among the handsomest and most accomplished young men of his time. He was well read in the Greek and Latin authors, as well as in all the moderns of any merit who had ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... that Capt. Stephen Spike, of the brigantine Molly Swash?" called out the little, dumpling-looking person, in a cracked, dwarfish sort of a voice, that was admirably adapted to his appearance. Our captain fairly started; turned full toward the speaker; regarded him intently for a moment; and gulped the words he was about to utter, like one confounded. As he gazed, however, at little dumpy, examining his bow-legs, red ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... was Zibe Turner, a creature who would pass for a Calaban. A monster he was except his legs, which were short and slim, giving him a dwarfish appearance. So he was a monster dwarf, if such a term is allowable. His head was immense in size, covered with long unkempt hair. His shoulders, arms and trunk would become a giant. A look at his face showed ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... performed senseless antics, the city fool, on Lord Mayor's day, was to jump clothes and all into a large bowl of custard. To a certain extent he generally corresponded with his name in having some mental weakness or eccentricity, and it was a recommendation if he were dwarfish or deformed. He wore a "motley" suit of discordant colours to make him ridiculous, and correspond with the incongruity of his mind and actions—a dress similar to the hundred patched paniculus centunculus of the Roman mimes. Sometimes he wore a petticoat or calf-skin ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... grey roofs. It had something the air of a rambling infinitesimal cathedral, the body of it rising in the midst two storeys high, with a steep-pitched roof, and sending out upon all hands (as it were chapter-houses, chapels, and transepts) one-storeyed and dwarfish projections. To add to this appearance, it was grotesquely decorated with crockets and gargoyles, ravished from some medieval church. The place seemed hidden away, being not only concealed in the trees of the garden, but, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... violently: "In this way the whole world, and above all my glorious mountains, with their glittering subterraneous chambers, will be hocus-pocust into mere store-houses, wretcheder ones than if they were made of wood, into miserable wareshops and stalls. What then would the dwarfish sprites, and the mighty mountain-spirit, and all the goblins and elvish imps, and the swarm of gnomes there below have to do? and yet they are always, some of them cleverly, some of them clumsily, putting ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the peerage, was staying at one of our country houses. His daughter, my uncle, and an Italian Abbe were the only guests besides. The merchant was a portly, purple-faced man, who bore his new honours with a curious mixture of assumed pomposity and natural good-humour. The Abbe was dwarfish and deformed, lean, sallow, sharp-featured, with bright bird-like eyes, and a low, liquid voice. He was a political refugee, dependent for the bread he ate, on the money he received for teaching languages. He might have been a beggar from the streets; and still my father would have ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... mallet, they broke up the rocks containing copper and tin. Then they built great roaring fires, to smelt the ore into ingots. They would show the teachers that the Dutch kabouters could make bells, as well as the men in the lands of the South. These dwarfish people are jealous of men and very proud of ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... genius which springs from a want of intellectual harmony, without the moral and physical strength necessary to perfect development, but with this erratic mischief we have nothing to do. Mary, the reader well knows was plain in person, and as a child almost dwarfish, but wholesome food, fresh mountain air and household kindness, had modified ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... heavy: Besenval hears, but can send no help. One poor troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoitring, cautiously along the Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf. "We are come to join you," said the Captain; for the crowd seems shoreless. A large-headed dwarfish individual, of smoke-bleared aspect, shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in him; and croaks: "Alight then, and give up your arms!" the Hussar-Captain is too happy to be escorted to the Barriers, and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... beautiful town and Mantua, presents one continued grove of dwarfish mulberries, among which start up innumerable barren hills. Now and then a knot of poplars diversify their craggy summits, and sometimes a miserable shed. Mantua itself rises out of a morass formed by the Mincio, whose course, in most places, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... country manners showing a determination to persevere, until fairly delivered of his errand. A door at the extremity of the gallery stood ajar, and through this he made bold to enter. A Numidian slave, dwarfish and deformed, was sweeping his master's chamber. He stopped short as the barbarian, with a stupid and wondering look, entered the apartment. After surveying the new comer with an air of deliberate scrutiny, the dwarf burst forth into a violent ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... himself that his size has marred his fortune. He is cockney born, about fifty; quality and splendor act forcibly on his imagination, and he is much condemned in the houses where I visit on account of his dwarfish stature"; and we are told that the English favor pretty faces for their maids and fine figures ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... seemed to be against her will. Her voice was less hoarse and gruff since the pond had been no more, and she had acquired an expression, so suffering, so concentrated, so thoughtful, that, together with her heavy black eyebrows, large face, profuse black hair, and unlustrous eyes, it gave her almost a dwarfish air, increased by her awkward deportment, which concealed that she was in reality tall, and on a large scale. She looked to so little advantage in bright delicate colours, that Albinia was often incurring her displeasure, and risking ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Of the dwarfish race, And Durin too Were then created. And like to men Dwarfs in the earth Were formed in ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... to Nancy's dwarfish plainness was what peculiarly provoked James Cheshire. He might have laughed at the criticisms on his wife, though the envious neighbors' wives did say that it was the old servant and not Mrs. Cheshire who produced such fine butter and cheese; ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... that is eked out by what the women collect of roots and beans, and fruits of the Desert. Those who inhabit the hot sandy plains of the Desert possess generally thin, wiry forms, capable of great exertion and of severe privations. Many are of low stature, though not dwarfish; the specimens brought to Europe have been selected, like costermongers' dogs, on account of their extreme ugliness; consequently, English ideas of the whole tribe are formed in the same way as if the ugliest specimens of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Colne's5 clear flood, Or where Cassivelan's grey turrets stood! There thou shalt cull me simples, and shalt teach Thy friend the name and healing pow'rs of each, 210 From the tall blue-bell to the dwarfish weed, What the dry land and what the marshes breed, For all their kinds alike to thee are known, And the whole art of Galen6 is thy own. Ah, perish Galen's art, and wither'd be The useless herbs that gave not health to ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... your contributors that they cannot be too short; and that if not dwarfish, they must be wild—or ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... fish are sometimes met with in free waters than in preserves, solely because they have had abundance, and variety of food. In all moor becks, plenty of small Trout are found; such waters are excellent for breeding, but as very little nutriment comes from peat or waste lands, they are generally dwarfish in size, and moderate in flavour. On the contrary, in small streams running through a fertile soil, fish are frequently killed of a most satisfactory size and weight. In rapid rivers the beds of which are formed of limestone rock, Trout are upon ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... however that he was suffered thus to enjoy himself; for hearing a slight noise near the fire-place, he turned his head, and saw a deformed, dwarfish body emerge from the shadowy part of the room, proceed stealthily toward the fire, over which he rubbed his thin, attenuated hands, and then placing them under their opposite arms, he hugged himself in evident comfort. The fire had by this time so far dwindled away as to be only ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... hideous, squat, dwarfish shadow. Two long gorilla-like arms were upraised in an abandonment of fury. Then came that awful, blood-curdling scream again, and the shadow's owner seemed ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... come to a stone fountain, constructed perhaps centuries ago, which still furnishes a delightful beverage for himself and beast. Oftentimes the road leads through a country entirely waste, and covered with tall bunches of grass or the dwarfish palmetto; sometimes in the cultivated districts the road is bounded by the formidable prickly-pear, which grows to the height of twenty feet, or by rows of the stately aloe, and not unfrequently by wild hedges of myrtle, intertwined with innumerable ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... and steep, The hill sinks down upon the deep. Here Vennachar in silver flows, There, ridge on ridge, Benledi rose; Ever the hollow path twined on, 40 Beneath steep bank and threatening stone; An hundred men might hold the post With hardihood against a host. The rugged mountain's scanty cloak Was dwarfish shrubs of birch and oak, 45 With shingles bare, and cliffs between, And patches bright of bracken green, And heather black, that waved so high, It held the copse in rivalry. But where the lake slept ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... penetrating quiver of the wind, the low tombs, laden with garlands and crowns of beads, assumed soft tints of charming delicacy. There were some quite white, and others all black, according to the colour of the beads. But the contrast lost much of its force amid the pale green foliage of the dwarfish trees. Poor families exhausted their affection for the dear departed in decking those five-year grants; there were piles of crowns and blooming flowers—freshly brought there on the recent Day of the Dead. Only the cut flowers ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... We tried to talk, but could think of nothing to say. Then the servant returned, ushering in a dwarfish Arab in a dirty white turban, and the shabby black galabeah worn only by the poor who cannot afford good materials and the bright ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... legitimately command a splendid enthusiasm of indignation.... It was all a dream, the dream of a prosperous comfortable man who had never come to the cutting edge of life. Everywhere cunning, everywhere small feuds and hatreds, distrusts, dishonesties, timidities, feebleness of purpose, dwarfish imaginations, swarm over the great and simple issues.... It is a war now like any other of the mobbing, many-aimed cataclysms that have shattered empires and devastated the world; it is a war without point, a war that has lost ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... downwards from a lewd and abominable Court, had made legislation a mere scramble for place and emolument. English history presents no period so disgraceful as the Restoration. To use the words of Macaulay, it was "a day of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sister or brother, without a home, he found himself alone—all alone in the world, where he never asked to come, and whence he could have gone, without anybody caring at all about it. He was not called Gringalet in mere sport; he was dwarfish and puny, and reedy; no one would have given him over seven or eight years, yet he was thirteen; but if he did not look more than half his age, it was not his fault, for he had not on the average eaten more than every other day, and then so little, and ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... business houses were installed in tents. That huge canvas erection was a mining exchange; that great log barn a dance-hall. Dwarfish log cabins impudently nestled up to pretentious three-story hotels. The effect was oddly staccato. All was grotesque, makeshift, haphazard. Back of the main street lay the red-light quarter, and behind it again a swamp of niggerheads, the breeding-place ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... prestige of Philadelphia begins to fade and her ancient influences to hang about her "like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief." In this year (Port Folio, page 463) is heard the first note of alarm. New England is gaining; "with such rivalry Philadelphia must yield the proud title which she has borne, or rouse from the withering ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... perhaps a pleasant contrast to an ear saturated with the Gallicised neatness of Addison and Pope. Unluckily, the secret of the old majestic cadence was hopelessly lost. Johnson, though spiritually akin to the giants, was the firmest ally and subject of the dwarfish dynasty which supplanted them. The very faculty of hearing seems to change in obedience to some mysterious law at different stages of intellectual development; and that which to one generation is delicious music is to another a mere droning ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... forests. Our people pretend, however, that the tholukh does not occur in Soudan, its place being filled up by various thorny trees, much resembling the mimosa. We have around us some other stunted shrubs. All trees are dwarfish ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... gum-leaves, which fluttered high over-head in the gentle morning breeze, and still bathed, as it were, in tears for the late elemental strife, made them sparkle like glittering gems in the roof of their arboreous edifice. The aromatic exudation from the dwarfish wattle, with its May-like blossom, which seemed to flourish under the protection of its gigantic compeers; and the bright acacia, decking, with its brilliant hue, the sloping sward, both lent their aid in the general pageant. The shrill cry of the parrots, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... associations, to whom all that is great and noble in life does not, at times at least, if not always, seem secondary to obscure rivalries and considerations, to the petty hates that are like germs in the blood, to the lust for self-assertion, to dwarfish pride, to affections they gave in pledge even before they ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... makes Addison speak of Steele as "Little Dicky" whereas the person so called by Addison was not Richard Steele, but a dwarfish actor who played ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the floor, at which Lieutenant Splinter, in his shirt and trowsers, drenched, unshorn, and deathlike, was roasting a joint of meat, whilst a dwarfish Indian, stark naked, sat opposite to him, squatting on his hams, more like a large bull—frog than a man, and fanning the flame with a palm leaf. In the dark corner of the hut half a dozen miserable sheep shrunk huddled together. Through the open door I saw the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Arabs, beggars, clowns turning somersaults, and costermongers hawking their wares. They were jostling, pelting, and applauding a figure which at first Gemma could not see for the pushing and swaying of the crowd. The next moment, however, she saw plainly what it was—a hunchback, dwarfish and ugly, grotesquely attired in a fool's dress, with paper cap and bells. He evidently belonged to the strolling company, and was amusing the crowd with ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... incapacitate the negro, who can never invent an alphabet or an arithmetic, and whose theology never passes beyond the stage of sorcery. They cause the Tartars to delight in a diet of milk, and the American Indian to abominate it. They make the dwarfish races of Europe instinctive miners and metallurgists. An artificial control over temperature by dwellings, warm for the winter and cool for the summer; variations of clothing to suit the season of the year, and especially the management ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... mouldering and crumbling doorway, shown by a square of lighter darkness, and exchanged the damp, chill atmosphere of the vaults for the stagnant, sultry open air. Sir Norman, with a notion in his head that his dwarfish highness might have placed sentinels around his royal residence, endeavored to pierce the gloom in search of them. Though he could discover none, he still thought discretion the better part of valor, and stepped out ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... the eighteenth dynasty to Roman times, yet retained a foreign character. He is a dwarfish, clumsy figure, wearing a feline skin on his back, with the tail hanging down to his heels. A female figure wearing the feline skin similarly is known from the twelfth dynasty. Rarely female forms of B[e]s {63} occur in late times. The source of this ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... cannot hate him. Another likeness I have seen, too, that touched me sorrowfully. You remember my speaking of a Miss Kavanagh, a young authoress, who supported her mother by her writings. Hearing from Mr. Williams that she had a longing to see me, I called on her yesterday. I found a little, almost dwarfish figure, to which even I had to look down; not deformed—that is, not hunch-backed, but long-armed and with a large head, and (at first sight) a strange face. She met me half-frankly, half-tremblingly; we ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... went in without any hesitation, and entered the first room into which the passage led him. It was a small parlor; and, at the back window, which looked out on a garden, sat Joanna Grice, a thin, dwarfish old woman, poring over a big book which looked like a Bible. She started from her chair, as she heard the sound of footsteps, and tottered up fiercely, with wild wandering grey eyes and horny threatening hands, to meet the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... articles from the other islands, especially from the eastern, nearer the African continent. In 1834 Fuerteventura yielded, from a depth of six feet, a dwarfish image of a woman with prominent bosom and dressed in the native way: it appeared almost Chinese. A pot of black clay from Palmas showed superior construction. Here, too, in 1762 a cavern produced a basalt plate, upon which are circular ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... THEKLA. A dwarfish old man with a friendly face And snow-white hairs, whose gracious services Were mine at first sight, opened ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 24th, at the dawn of day, we inspanned, and trekked about five hours in a northeasterly course, through a boundless open country, sparingly adorned with dwarfish old tree. In the distance the long- sought mountains of Bamangwato at length loomed blue before me. We halted beside a glorious fountain, which at once made me forget all the cares and difficulties I ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... civil and ecclesiastical, and whatever records the industry of antiquarians has brought to light in their provincial, municipal, and monastic histories:—tall tomes and huge! undegenerate sons of Anak, which look down from a dizzy height on the dwarfish progeny of contemporary wit, and can find no associates in size at a less distance than two centuries; and in arranging which the puzzled librarian must commit an anachronism in ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... dwarfish nonhuman gabbled something then doubled behind me. I saw him dodge, feint in the direction of the gates, then, as the crowd surged that way, run for the street-shrine across the square, slipping from recess to recess of the wall. A hail of stones went flying in that direction. ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Cruz island of Nitendi going and returning, and could therefore drop me and take me up again after about six weeks. While waiting for her arrival, I investigated some caves on Leleppa, near Port Havannah, which the natives reported to be inhabited by dwarfish men; but the ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... soon to become a civilized people. Heathenism was already half abandoned, and their nomad habits half laid aside. But when the Huns came up suddenly from the steppes of Asia, the stately Gothic warriors fled almost without a blow from the hordes of wild dwarfish horsemen. The Ostrogoths became the servants of their conquerors, and the heathens of Athanaric found a refuge in the recesses of the Transylvanian forests. But Fritigern was a Christian. Rome had helped him once before, and Rome might help him now. A whole ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... of another people many thousand years ago overrunning and dominating the Firbolgs; a race of taller stature, of handsome features, though also dark, but with softer black hair, not crisp and tufted like the hair of the dwarfish earlier race. Of this second conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered from many lands where they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in caverns or sepulchres of stone; ornaments, ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... our course, travelling over sandy ridges covered with Eugenia, Exocarpus, and a very pretty Eucalyptus, with rose-coloured flowers and obcordate leaves, and yellow soft bark, also a dwarfish tree with dark green leaves, and axillary racemes of round monospermons, fruit of a purple colour, with a thin rind of a bitter flavour; also a great many trees of moderate size, from fifteen to twenty feet ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... that I don't know when. If I did but know when, I should be so wonderfully clear about it all! At present I can't see even so much as the Simplon in consequence of certain farewell readings and a certain new book (just begun) interposing their dwarfish shadow. But whenever (if ever) I change 'going' into 'coming,' I shall come to ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... curve over the dilated, densely black pupils, full but steady. The eyes of the dark woman in the dream were not so enchanting. Then Surja Mukhi's features were not similar. The dream figure was dwarfish; Surja Mukhi rather tall, her figure swaying with the beauty of the honeysuckle creeper. The dream figure was beautiful, but Surja Mukhi was a hundredfold more so. The dream figure was not more than twenty years of age; Surja Mukhi was nearly twenty-six. Kunda saw ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... fragments of rock which had evidently been detached from the principal mass and shivered to pieces in the fall. A few trees, among which were the black walnut, the slippery elm, and here and there an oak, grew among the rocks, and attested by their dwarfish stature the ungrateful soil in which they had taken root. It was not an exhilarating scene, but it was one that had a peculiar fascination for Miss St. Denis—a fascination she could not explain, and which she now began to regret. The darkness had come on very rapidly, and was especially ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... I produced, I think, 22 seedling trees from the Lancaster Persian walnut. About five per cent are hybrids. There was one strong-growing black x Persian hybrid that I am sure of. There are three or four very dwarfish trees that undoubtedly were crossed with the heartnut. They were all dwarf. I haven't been able to get one to bear. I have had one grafted five or six years on a black walnut, but that was the heartnut ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... house, we saw the whole garrison assembled before the door. It consisted of a dozen dwarfish, spindle-shanked Mexican soldiers, none of them so big or half so strong as American boys of fifteen, and whom I would have backed a single Kentucky woodsman, armed with a riding-whip, to have driven to the four winds of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the light of the lamp in the archway, with some faint glimmers from the stairways surrounding the court, reached the dirty paving. Bristol directed the light of a pocket-lamp upon the hunched-up figure which lay in the dust, and I saw it to be that of a dwarfish creature, yellow skinned and wearing only a dark loin cloth. He had a malformed and disproportionate head, a head that had been too large even for a big man. I knew after first glance that this was one of the horrible dwarfs employed by the Hashishin in their murderous business. ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... strongly contrasted by large Venetian windows newly inserted in frames of the most ostentatious white. A smart, green veranda, scarcely finished, ran along the low portico, and formed the termination to two thin rows of meagre and dwarfish sycamores, which did duty for an avenue, and were bounded, on the roadside, by a spruce white gate, and a sprucer lodge, so moderate in its dimensions, that it would scarcely have boiled a turnip: if ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Paris pulpits, and day by day had fanned the bigotry—already at a white heat—of the Parisian populace. Tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. But for his life he dared not. And presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and offered him ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... at dawn of day, we inspanned, and trekked about five hours in a northeasterly course, through a boundless open country sparingly adorned with dwarfish old trees. In the distance the long-sought mountains of Bamangwato at length loomed blue before me. We halted beside a glorious fountain, which at once made me forget all the cares and difficulties I had encountered ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... running down among the black-boled trees, a strange, squat, gnomelike man whose gait was as uncouth as his dwarfish figure. He held something in his two hands as he ran, and when he came near he threw this thing with a swift movement up before him, but he did not pause in his odd, ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... apes in three white beds, And nightcaps, one and nine, On moonlit pillows lay three heads Bemused with dwarfish wine. ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... with expanded nostrils, which seemed to admit the sight to their very brain; faces which extended rather in breadth than length, with strange unintellectual eyes placed in the extremity; figures short and dwarfish, yet garnished with legs and arms of astonishing sinewy strength, disproportioned to their bodies. As the travellers passed, the savages held a species of tournament, as the Count termed it. In this they exercised themselves by darting at each other ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... had long, clear earrings, blazing with a lustre which could not be borrowed or false; she had rings on her skeleton hands, with thick gold hoops, and stones—purple, green, and blood-red. Hunchbacked, dwarfish, and doting, she was adorned like ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... buck and of wild game they brought us abundance; but though months passed we were no nearer that which we sought the mine of bright stones such as the Spanisher had shown us and the whereabouts of which these strange black, dwarfish people alone knew. Never could we master their strange tongue like to the creaking and rustling of dry bones upon a gibbet more than the speech of humans and time and patience alone showed us a way. Their man of magic held great power over them. He was of another race, of our own ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... of stick 100 feet aloft for hours at a time, swiftly sailing over the sea, is very much like crossing the Channel in a balloon. Manfred-like, you talk to the clouds: you have a fellow feeling for the sun. And when Jarl and I got conversing up there, smoking our dwarfish "dudeens," any sea-gull passing by might have taken us for Messrs. Blanchard and Jeffries, socially puffing their after-dinner Bagdads, bound to Calais, via Heaven, from Dover. Honest Jarl, I acquainted with all: ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... contemplated the progress of his rival with uneasiness and aversion. He often commented upon it to his particular confidents as a thing altogether inconceivable. Mr. Falkland he described as an animal that was beneath contempt. Diminutive and dwarfish in his form, he wanted to set up a new standard of human nature, adapted to his miserable condition. He wished to persuade people that the human species were made to be nailed to a chair, and to pore over books. He would have them exchange those robust exercises ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the Braddock household was not included in the general staff, being a mere appendage of the Professor himself. This was a dwarfish, misshapen Kanaka, a pigmy in height, but a giant in breadth, with short, thick legs, and long, powerful arms. He had a large head, and a somewhat handsome face, with melancholy black eyes and a fine set of white teeth. Like most Polynesians, his skin was of a pale bronze and elaborately ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... Tokay on our table, Like a pigmy castle-warder, Dwarfish to see, but stout and able, Arms and accoutrements all in order; And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth, Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather, Twisted his thumb in his red moustache, Jingled his huge ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... their illusions were short-lived. At one of their first meetings with the delegates of the Great Powers a storm burst which scattered their expectations to the winds. When the sky cleared it was discovered that from indispensable fellow-workers they had shrunk to dwarfish protegees, mere units of an inferior category, who were to be told what to do and would be constrained to do it ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Wilno I have seen those vaunted trees that grow in the east and the south, in that fair Italian land—which of them can be compared to our trees? The aloe with its long stalk like a lightning rod? Or the dwarfish lemon tree with its golden balls and lacquered leaves, short and dumpy, like a woman who is small and ugly, but rich? Or the much-praised cypress, long, thin, and lean, which seems the tree, not of grief, but of boredom? They say that it looks very sad upon ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... is unique among capitals,—it has no suburbs. It lies in a desolate table-land in the windy waste of New Castile; on the north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other side the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes into one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon. There are no villages sprinkled in the environs to lure the Madrilenos out ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains to be, and magnificent the edifices with which the region is adorned, it appears, at any time after midsummer, a huge valley of dust, planted with low rows of the pallid and thin-leaved olive, or the more dwarfish maple on which the vines are trained. The simplicity of nature, so far as can be done, is destroyed; there is no fine sweep of forest, no broad expanse of meadow or pasture ground, no ancient and towering trees clustered about the villas, no rows of natural shrubbery following the course ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... scarcely larger than swallow's nests? these green canopies, overgrown with moss? He pinched himself, and gazed again. Countless flowers nodded to him, and seemed, like himself, on tip-toe with curiosity, he thought. He beckoned one of the busy, dwarfish ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... flock from every side The suit of none is e'er denied. Whate'er, where'er howe'er the call, He hears the suit and gives to all. Now with thine own illusive art Perform, O Lord, the helper's part: Assume a dwarfish form, and thus From fear ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Middle Ages were passed,—or else took to the wilds under any vigorous mind, and became bandits. The open country was all trodden down by wave after wave of marauding, murdering, beer-swilling, turbulent giants from the north,—or by the still more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece; they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy; host after host of them;—civilization was a pathetic sand-castle washed ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... from his own immortal works, for which he was near being thrashed and even stabbed. He still has a craze for singing arias, and accompanies his hideous squalling on a wretched jarring, jangling guitar, all out of tune. His faithful Pylades is an ill-bred dwarfish eunuch, whom the Romans call Pitichinaccio. There is a third member of the company—guess who it is?—Why, none other than the Pyramid Doctor, who kicks up a noise like a melancholy ass and yet fancies ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann |
