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Bigness   Listen
noun
Bigness  n.  The state or quality of being big; largeness; size; bulk.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Bigness" Quotes from Famous Books



... it, she rejoiced that Lise's child would not be born into a world that had seemed—so falsely—fair and sweet, and in reality was black and detestable. Her acceptance of the act—for Lise—was a function of the hatred consuming her, a hatred which, growing in bigness, had made Ditmar merely the personification of that world. From time to time her hands clenched, her brow furrowed, powerful waves of heat ran through her, the craving for action became so intense she could scarcely refrain from rising in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... coasts hunting for Spaniards. The Lord-Deputy Fitzwilliam accompanied one of these parties, and told how in Sligo Bay he saw miles of wreckage, "timber enough to build five of the greatest ships that ever I saw, besides mighty great boats, cables, and other cordage, and some such masts for bigness and length, as I never saw any two could make the like." Fitzwilliam fairly revelled in the destruction of the Spaniards. He wrote to Secretary Walsingham: "Since it hath pleased God by His hand upon the rocks to ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... her seriousness. "When you knew them first," he reminded her, "you had nothing else with which to compare them. It is one who comes from the north who finds a marvel in the bigness and softness of southern stars. Now you have been away—and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... having now my method by the end, Still, as I pulled it came: and so I penned It down; until at last it came to be For length and breadth the bigness that you see.' ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... literary beauty of which he never could divest himself, and which gave an artistic value even to his sermons, so his earlier novels show a profound concern for the welfare of society, a broad, humanitarian spirit, a bigness of soul that included ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... would want to live in Ireland with its penny-farthing politics! London for him! London and a sense of bigness, of wide ideas and the ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... Though so well kept, as age by years is told In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast, Stood new and straight and strong—all battened fast At every opening; and where once the mow Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man, Aslant from left to right, athwart the span, And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed, I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed To this point and to that point, and then burst In the impotent questionings rejected ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... a mean eagerness for gold, a pride in dress, or the building of palaces, which when achieved are not so much as a single grain of dust upon an ant-hill. In a universe, whose arithmetic employs worlds for the ciphers of its reckoning, bigness as associated with man sounds ridiculous; and the biggest fortune or the biggest grief are alike infinitesimal. But when the desire of bigness passes from a man's mind, humility becomes pleasurable, and immensity is soothing. I forgot to think of the vastness ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... was at the Normal School, when I first came across the information in some reader that the Sun was hundreds and thousands of times as big as the Earth, I at once disclosed it to my mother. It served to prove that he who was small to look at might yet have a considerable amount of bigness about him. I used also to recite to her the scraps of poetry used as illustrations in the chapter on prosody or rhetoric of our Bengali grammar. Now I retailed at her evening gatherings the astronomical tit-bits I had ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... patched and tattered, the landward side and all the pleasant hollows between are fairly held against such gales as on Long Island blow the lower dunes hither and yon. The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket of the dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, and on week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop. On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and corners of these sandy hillocks devoted, as the dunes of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... "It isn't the bigness, dear; its the variety," replied the girl. "These are Mr. Wizard's pets, just as you are my pet, and it wouldn't be any more proper for you to eat them than it would be for ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... either of his mates that he would feel entirely at ease—as he could not with them—in trusting the navigation of the brig in my hands. As to the practical part of the work, that was a matter that with my quickness I would pick up in no time; and my bigness and strength, he added, would come in mighty handily when there was trouble among the crew, as sometimes happened, and in keeping the blacks in order, and in the little fights that now and then were necessary with folks on shore. And then he ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier

... pencil to transcribe her thoughts. She thought that it was not exactly fear, but an overpowering realization of her own atomity; a sort of cringing of the soul away from the utter vastness of the world; a growing consciousness of the unlimited bigness of things; an insight of the infinite power of God—the yearning of the soul for understanding of the mysteries of ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer

... across the square, the tramp of the dancers and vacant laughs and discordant music, the door flung wide and the entrance of the cowboy. She did not recall how he had looked or what he had done. And the next instant she saw him cool, smiling, devilish—saw him in violence; the next his bigness, his apparel, his physical being were vague as outlines in a dream. The white face of the padre flashed along in the train of thought, and it brought the same dull, half-blind, indefinable state of mind subsequent to that ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... letter was dispatched to the relatives in that mystic land, America. Soon a reply came back. Madame Bretton had come of fine peasant stock, and her brother had carried with him into the new land of which he had become a citizen his native loyalty and bigness of heart. He now wrote urging his sister and her fatherless children to come to Paterson and share his home until such time as they could find work and settle themselves in ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett

... the deck. He was so still he appeared to be lifeless, a part of the ship; I looked hard before I decided it was a man. It was too dark to make out his features, almost too dark to discern outline, but by the bigness of the blot he made against his background I was sure the man was Newman. What he was doing in such a position I could not guess, but I was so sure of my man, I did not hesitate to move towards him. I even spoke his name, in ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... (for the first time in her life) to the top of Milmannoch Hill. "Eh," said Mysie, looking round her in amaze—"eh, sirs, it's a lairge place the world when you see it all!" Gourlay smiled because he had the same thought, but feebly, because he was cowering at the bigness of the world. Folded nooks in the hills swept past, enclosing their lonely farms; then the open straths, where autumnal waters gave a pale gleam to the sky. Sodden moors stretched away in vast patient loneliness. Then a gray smear of rain blotted the world, penning him ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... covered part of the Chapter House area, as we should, it equalled in area or slightly exceeded alike its successor and Cologne and Florence, and was surpassed only by the new St. Peter's, Milan, and Seville. "See the bigness," said Bishop Corbet of Norwich, "and your eye never yet ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... our selves, they invited us to the Pallace [58]of their Prince or chief Ruler, some two miles distant off from the place where we landed; which we found to be about the bigness of one of our ordinary village houses, it was supported with rough unhewn pieces of Timber, and covered very artificially with boughs, so that it would keep out the greatest showers of Rain, the sides thereof were adorned with several forts of Flowers, which the fragrant ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville

... incessantly. A new light had come over things,—"The light that never was on sea or land," he called it,—and he had worked feverishly. He saw the water and the rugged land as Uncle William saw them. Through his eyes, he painted them. They took on color and bigness—simplicity. "They will call it my third style," said the artist, smiling, as he worked. "They ought to call it the Uncle William style. I didn't do it—I shall never do it again," ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee

... it out at arm's length to get a good squint at its bigness and its redness. Then he turned to look wonderingly after the disappearing automobile with the lady who had tossed him the apple for directing her to the post office. A long trail of dust rose from the unpaved street ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell

... and flowers Fly to and fro, or on the smoothed plank, The suburb of their straw-built citadel, New rubbed with balm, expatiate, and confer Their state-affairs: so thick the airy crowd Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given, Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless—like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount; or faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... to indicate that it recognizes the urgency and bigness and significance of the momentous situation which confronts ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn

... Cove. It was a finger of the sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred yards long, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man could heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a rock about the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel could touch the rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a mud bottom, twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little stream of cold fresh water brawling ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... three instances in which it becomes such, before a noun: viz., to-day, to-night, to-morrow. If it is a "particle," so is any other preposition, as well as every small and invariable word. If it is a "little word," the whole bigness of a preposition is unquestionably found in it; and no "word" is so small but that it must belong to some one of the ten classes called parts of speech. If it is a "sign of the infinitive," because it is used before no other mood; so is it a sign of the objective case, or of what ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... deal of quiet, or even noisy, flirtation. His lodgings were on the Old Steine, close by. But he did not go home immediately. There are times in a man's life when four walls are to small too hold the bigness of his thoughts. Captain Winstanley paced the Marine Parade for half-an-hour or ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon

... Even after the lapse of many years the stone swung round, showing a little opening, through which a man might scarcely creep. As it swung, a mighty bat, white in colour as though with unreckoned age, and such as I had never seen before for bigness, for his measure was the measure of a hawk, flew forth and for a moment hovered over Cleopatra, then sailed slowly up and up in circles, till at last he was lost in the bright light ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... gently, which will make you vomit; then drink a good draught of drink, and so use the Instrument as oft as you please, but never doe this upon an empty stomach. To make the stomach more apt to vomit, and to prepare the humours thereunto before you eat and drink, Take the bigness of a Nutmeg or more of the said Electuary of Cophie, &c., into your mouth; {70} then take drink to drive it down; then eat and drink, and walk, and use the Instrument ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various

... through his mind of the bigness of the sum any one of the several great dailies would give to have the story. And then there followed a sense of shame that he could ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... George asked himself. He could not decide. At any rate the scene impressed him. The bigness of the plain, the summons, the silence, the utter absence of an expression of reproof ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... and were totally ignorant of the way to deal with the savages, or provide food for themselves during long marches over barren plains and wild mountains. In this predicament Captain Sublette found them, and in the bigness of his heart kindly took them in tow. Both parties travelled amicably together, and they arrived without accident on the upper ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... another complaint I bring against John Barleycorn. It is these good fellows that he gets—the fellows with the fire and the go in them, who have bigness, and warmness, and the best of the human weaknesses. And John Barleycorn puts out the fire, and soddens the agility, and, when he does not more immediately kill them or make maniacs of them, he coarsens and grossens them, twists and malforms them out of ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... all, for crawling together on flat tables of rock or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports I beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to suffer our selves to be perswaded but by the evidence of our Reason; I say, (which is observable) Of our Reason, and not of our imagination, or of our senses. As although we see the Sun most clearly, we are not therefore to judge him to be of the bigness we see him of; and we may well distinctly imagine the head of a Lion, set on the body of a Goat, but therefore we ought not to conclude that there is a Chimera in the world. For reason doth not dictate to us, that what we see or imagine so, is true: But it dictates, ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes

... soon as he was old enough to think for himself, or make others listen to him, "amending the great errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;" inventing instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in colonization and extended ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... Bridewell, who was, in fact, his distant cousin, but the likeness consisted solely in a certain evident possession of virile power—a quality which women are accustomed to describe as masculine. He was not tall, and yet he gave an impression of bigness; away from him one invariably thought of him as of unusual proportions, but, standing by his side, he was found to be hardly above the ordinary height. The development of his closely knit figure, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... Trouts, that are good in Winter; but there are not many that are so, for usually they be in their perfection in the month of May, and decline with the Buck: Now you are to take notice, that in several Countries, as in Germany and in other parts compar'd to ours, they differ much in their bigness, shape, and other wayes, and so do Trouts; 'tis wel known that in the Lake Lemon, the Lake of Geneva, there are Trouts taken, of three Cubits long, as is affirmed by Gesner, a Writer of good credit: ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton

... with thick grasses and screened with verdure that the harsh noises of a chattering, working world could not ruffle its peace and serenity. Cynthia's son filled it and the still, lonely old woman was fascinated with his bigness, his merry gladness, but most of all with his understanding friendliness. She told him all her story, her past trials and present griefs. And he told her strange things about people he had seen in other parts of the world, blind people living in foul alleys instead of sunny lanes, ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... Bigness that you wou'd to pickle; pick them fresh, green, and free from Spots; boil them in Water 'till they are tender; then run a Knitting-needle through them the long Way, and scrape off all Roughness; then green them, which ...
— Mrs. Mary Eales's receipts. (1733) • Mary Eales

... simple little incident, but there was something in it somewhere that moved Helen Ward strangely. A spirit that was new to her seemed to fill the room. She felt it as one may feel the bigness of the mountains or sense the vast reaches of the ocean. These two men, employer and employee, were in no way conscious of their relationship as she understood it. Tom did not appear to realize that he was working for John—he seemed rather to feel ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright

... the church and its work. I was so impressed with Mr. Grant's bigness that I volunteered to devote some of my spare time to the work of his parish. A few weeks later I got a letter from him inviting me to become a member of his staff. This was a surprise to me, but I made no immediate decision. I was earning a comfortable living and devoting my ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... but he wasn't good like Mother Duda, and told me one day that he was going to make me his wife, whether I wanted him to or not, and talked about a great secret, and the big man he would be some day. This made me angry, and I said that all the bigness he would ever have would be in his neck. At which he struck me, right across the ear, hard, so hard that I fell on the floor with a scream, and Mother Duda came running. He was sorry then and threw ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... so that a family may live cheaper here than in any town in England of its bigness within such a small distance ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe

... is under the government of a mayor and aldermen, and may pass for a place of wealth, considering the bigness of it. Here, we found, the merchants began to trade in the pilchard-fishing, though not to so considerable a degree as they do farther west—the pilchards seldom coming up so high eastward as Portland, and not very often so ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe

... exclamation from Osborne, who had gone to one of the windows and stood looking out, interrupted the speaker. In spite of his bigness the detective was in excellent training; with a spring he went through the window which opened upon a walk fringed with autumn-brown bushes; and in another moment he was back ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre

... difference of fine things from other. In fine, having dressed her exactly as she herself used to be when she received Octavio's visits in bed, she embraced her, and fancied she was much of her own shape and bigness, and that it was impossible to find the deceit: and now she made Antonet dress her up in her clothes, and mobbing her sarsenet hood about her head, she appeared so like Antonet (all but the face) that ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... exhalations forth Against our members, those same distances Take nothing by those intervals away From bulk of flames; and to the sight the fire Is nothing shrunken. Therefore, since the heat And the outpoured light of skiey sun Arrive our senses and caress our limbs, Form too and bigness of the sun must look Even here from earth just as they really be, So that thou canst scarce nothing take or add. And whether the journeying moon illuminate The regions round with bastard beams, or throw From off her proper body her own light,— Whichever it be, she journeys with ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... courage, the helpless bigness and disinterestedness that always goes with invention, with creative power, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... the Roman people in old time are evidenced by the extensive Provinces from which their food supply was drawn, as well as by the wide circuit of their walls, the massive structure of their amphitheatre, the marvellous bigness of their public baths, and the enormous multitude of mills, which could only have been made for ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... philosophic-now lady and gentleman, of the House of Ptah of Babylonia—'such a silliness—those troubles and frets; it was not the while-worth that we should ever have sorrowed, because the scheme of time and creation is suchly big; had we grasped but its bigness, and the littleness of our span, should we have felt griefs? Nay, nay—nit,' like the street-youths say—would say the lady and gentleman now so passionless as to have philosophers become. And you, it should mean to you much. Humans are funniest when they weep and tremble before, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... stirring from his place within the door-frame: "'Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice I will come in to him and will sup with him,—I come to preach the everlasting gospel to every one that heareth, and all that I want here is my bigness on the floor.'" ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... had come to the threshold of her house of toys and stood looking out, trembling and frightened before the bigness of the real world. He was staggered by that. She had come to the door too late; for if she fared forth, she must go alone and untaught through a country whose loneliness he had known. He must save her from that. He could not give her the one thing ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... of the head-dresses of the Persian women is composed of a light golden chain-work, set with small pearls, with a thin gold plate pendant, about the bigness of a crown-piece, on which is impressed an Arabian prayer, and which hangs upon the cheek below ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... to her; he was as much her own little boy as though no meddlesome hands had even been laid upon him. In size he was quite the same, and, as Mother stood peering in at him, she presently heard a small, far-away voice. In it was the whispered awe of a child who feels the bigness of the night about him and the strangeness of ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott

... Cruz, where he found sixteen Spanish vessels. The bay was defended on the north side by a castle, well mounted with cannon, and in other parts with seven forts, with cannon proportioned to the bigness, all united by a line of communication manned with musketeers. The Spanish admiral drew up his small ships under the cannon of the castle, and stationed six great galleons with their broadsides to the sea: an advantageous and prudent disposition, but of little effect against the English commander; ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... landing on the beach, and never bring home any news of his discovery. The great courtier may do well for himself and keep smooth and politic relations with kings; the great administrator may found a wonderful colony; but it is the man with the wits and the hands, and some bigness of heart to tide him over daunting passages, that wins through the first elementary risks of any great discovery. Properly considered, Columbus's fame should rest simply on the answer to the single question, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... of them were always together, should be the occasion, and Fred Wood was to lead up to the matter by asking Jack some questions as to the relative bigness of the earth and ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty

... "What do you know of what the North will be? You know it only as it has been—as it is, perhaps. But, of its future you know nothing. I tell you the North will change! It is a hard land—cruel—elemental—raw! But it is big! And, when it awakens, its very bigness, the virile force and strength of it, will turn against its savagery, its cruelty, its brutishness; and above all other lands it will stand for the protection of the weak and for the right of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... confessing in his turn, Thus spoke in tones of deep concern: "I happen'd through a mead to pass; The monks, its owners, were at mass; Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass, And add to these the devil too, All tempted me the deed to do. I browsed the bigness of my tongue; Since truth must ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various

... brought to Manchuria in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake, millet, etc., Harbin, Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities might soon build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness. This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those sections of America where the policy of selling everything off the land and ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... difference; bigness is nothing to a good boxer," said Flossie with an air of superior knowledge. "Mr. Butterwick says he doesn't mind taking on the biggest man in England, if he's not a boxer. And he knows that Mr. Vance isn't a boxer, because I asked him about boxing—knowing ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson

... well back, his poise buoyant, and his air of absolute confidence gave a dubious tone to the words of the quidnuncs who were allowing Quigley three minutes to whip him out of all recognition. Done looked slight and small before his big opponent, but Pete's bigness was due largely to surplus material, and Pete had been anything but a temperate man of late. Jim recollected this in calculating his chances and ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... Your kind of man needs something big. And mere concrete bigness isn't enough. You could give your lives to the sciences or to inter-planetary colonization or to social correction, as many people are cheerfully doing—but those aren't for you. Down underneath you miss the ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson

... it was a large island in the Western Ocean, situated before or opposite to the Straits of Gades; and that out of this island there was an easy passage into some others which lay near a large continent, exceeding in bigness all Europe and Asia. So far Plato may have told the truth, and from this passage it is conjectured that the existence of the continent of America was known to the ancients. But he goes on, immediately after, to draw upon his imagination, and to tell us that Neptune settled on this island, ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... starved, and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory, Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, See through the nice veneer the ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger

... that as often as not destroys the tone of the story. One may be aiming at portraying the dignity and simplicity of a wedding or the unmarred happiness of the occasion, but if one attempts to equal the joy of the event with the bigness of his words, one will produce upon the reader an effect of revulsion rather than interest. An ignorant, but well-meaning, reporter on an Eastern weekly concluded a wedding ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... we going to dress?" asked Amy. Nina, instantly diverted, suggested that they go in. Nina's awkward bigness and Amy's mousy neutral tones were as well displayed in one garment as another, but both girls debated over pinks and blues, crepes and mulls, every evening, as if the world was watching them alone. Harriet lingered for ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris

... cannot be too lavish of its gifts or death would always have the victory. This was not what she had looked for, but it was good enough; she was necessary to him and always would be; she was sure of that, yet she constantly repeated it; moreover, she loved his bigness and his physical strength and the way the lines round his eyes wrinkled when he smiled; she knew how to make him smile and now and then they had happy interludes when they talked about crops and horses, profit and loss, the buying ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... every man who has a sole to his foot has a crown to his head. Here's mine;" and so saying, Jack, removing his tarpaulin, exhibited a bald spot, just about the bigness of a crown-piece, on the summit of his ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... aid of the Entente, having had the strength to resist the Bolshevik troops, Poland is now in a state of permanent anarchy; consumes and does not produce; pays debts with a fantastic bigness and does not know how to regulate the incomings. No country in the world has ever more abused paper currency; her paper money is probably the most greatly depreciated of any country on earth. She has not succeeded ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti

... of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present. This region which has so often needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The democracies of the past have been small ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... some moods it seems supremely incredible that we should be of such worth in the scale of Creation as that the Lord of all things should, in a deeper sense than the Psalmist knew, have dwelt with us and be with us still. But bigness is not greatness, and there is nothing incredible in the belief that men, lower than the angels, and needing God more because of their sin, do receive His visitations in an altogether special sense, and that, passing by the lofty and the great that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... walking in the sun when there was any, sleeping with his little boy in a great gulp of softness. And I remember him pulling his fine beard into two darknesses—huge-sleeved, pink-checked chemise—walking kindly like a bear—corduroy bigness of trousers, waistline always amorous of knees—finger-ends just catching tops of enormous pockets. When he feels, as I think, partly happy, he corrects our pronunciation of the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... them by the taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins, shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wings of a lark. I ate them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time, about the bigness of musket bullets. They supplied me as fast as they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment at my bulk and appetite. I then made another sign that I wanted to drink. They found by my eating, that a small quantity would not suffice ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... its bigness that gets hold of one," said Miss Schuyler. "One feels free out here on these wide levels ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... great, consolidated railroad enterprise, skillfully and successfully administered. The great weakness of Commodore Vanderbilt and his associates, and of those who later imitated his work was their fundamental conception of the railroad as a private venture. Success consisted in bigness, great profits, crushing or buying out competitors, and administering the business for the best good of the few owners, regardless of the interests of the region through which the railway passed. Vanderbilt and many of his contemporaries were ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... sternly walled in, a few cows grazing, a lonely donkey, a few long-tailed black sheep, or a couple of goats. Here and there acres of white blossom, looking like a snowfall. This was the bog bean, growing on a stem a foot high, a silvery tuft of silky bloom hanging downward, two inches long and the bigness of a finger. Sometimes we dashed past walled enclosures so full of stone that they looked like abandoned graveyards, and the only use of the fences, so far as I could see, was to keep thoughtless cattle out. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... be taught to speak. Such as are beautiful for Colour. A strange Bird. Water-Fowls resembling Ducks and Swans. Peacocks. The King keeps Fowl. Their Fish, How they catch them in Ponds, And how in Rivers. Fish kept and fed for the King's Pleasure. Serpents. The Pimberah of a prodigious bigness. The Polonga. The Noya. The Fable of the Noya ana Polonga. The Carowala. Gerendo. Hickanella. Democulo, a great Spider. Kobbera-guson, a Creature like an Aligator. Tolla-guion. The people eat Rats. Precoius Stones, Minerals, and other Commodities. ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... my cousin's handkerchief; It sits too narrow there, and shows too much The broadness of her shoulders—Nay, fie, Asteria, Now you put it too much backward, and discover The bigness of her breasts. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott

... the Sherman Act of 1890, and bring suit under it for the dissolution of the Northern Securities Company. For several years after 1897 foreign affairs and big business had been dominant in the American mind, which had admired their bigness and activity, but now the social consequences of big business aroused the fears of the nation. In 1903 Congress passed the Elkins Law, forbidding railroads to give rebates to favored customers, and an Expedition Law, to make the wheels of justice ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... confessed, too, that the Devil had sent her to torment the Minister, and that she was ordered to use a Nail and strike it into his Head, but it would not enter very deep. They confessed also that the Devil gives them a Beast about the bigness and shape of a young Cat, which they call a Carrier, and that he gives them a Bird too as big as a Raven, but white. And these two Creatures they can send anywhere, and wherever they come they take away all sorts of Victuals ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... then pursued the thought further: "But there must be bigness in him, as well as presence of mind and depth of heart—yes, I'm ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... it. Do you know, she has a strange look of you? When I was half off my head I used to mix you up together. She has such a generous and holy bigness—the generosity ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... fisherman ceased not to divert himself with the marvels of the deep, till they came to a high mountain and fared on beside it. Suddenly, he heard a mighty loud cry and turning, saw some black thing, the bigness of a camel or bigger, coming down upon him from the liquid mountain and crying out. So he asked his friend, "What is this, O my brother?"; and the Merman answered, "This is the Dandan. He cometh in search of me, seeking to devour me; so cry out at him, O my brother, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... gratified; 'I never expect to see anything like it for situation, whatever other way it's deficient. Now I'm free to confess it's only a village to your London, for forty thousand wouldn't be missed out of two or three millions; but bigness ain't the only beauty in the world, else I'd be a deal prettier than my girl Bell, who's not much taller than my walking-stick, and the fairest lass ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... have flung himself upon the wretch, to reach for his throat with bare hands; but something in Neptune's face stopped him. Neptune's bigness seemed to fill the whole room. He drew a deep breath, and with one movement ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations with their countless regular avenues of palms. The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our waters in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a great volume of sound, so that once I thought I was passing near a mill, and it was only the voice of the river. I am not specially attracted by the people; but they are ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Pressy testify'd, That being one Evening very unaccountably Bewildred, near a Field of Martins, and several times, as one under an Enchantment, returning to the place he had left, at length he saw a marvellous Light, about the bigness of an Half-bushel, near two Rod, out of the way. He went, and struck at it with a Stick, and laid it on with all his might. He gave it near forty blows; and felt it a palpable substance. But going from it, his Heels ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather

... the case, and drew a long breath of almost horrified astonishment; for there lay before him, in a cradle of green velvet, a diamond of prodigious magnitude and of the finest water. It was of the bigness of a duck's egg; beautifully shaped, and without a flaw; and as the sun shone upon it, it gave forth a lustre like that of electricity, and seemed to burn in his hand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... less ready than you are to do a neighborly kindness. But the mare is by no means capable of performing the journey. About a hand's breadth, did you say? Why, sir, the skin is torn from the poor creature's back the bigness of your broad-brimmed hat! And, besides, I have promised her, so soon as she is able to travel, to Ned Saunders, to carry a load of apples ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... of July. This is the crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield

... her. But I know well how this good head of the dervises may cure her; the thing is very easy, and I will tell it you. He has a black cat in his convent, with a white spot at the end of her tail, about the bigness of a small piece of English money; let him only pull seven hairs out of this white spot, burn them, and smoke the princess's head with the fume, she will not only be presently cured, but be so safely delivered from Maimoun, the son of Dimdim, that he will never ...
— The Story of the White Mouse • Unknown

... tree bearing fruit of one colour and kind of jewel, and these fruits were of all colours, green and white and yellow and red and what not else of colours. Their glitterance outshone the rays of the sun in its forenoon splendour and the bigness of each jewel overpassed description; suffice it that not one of them might be found with the greatest of the kings of the world, [237] no, nor a gem half the bigness of the ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne

... was executed. And when Dakianos was placed there, "Prince," said the genie to him, "there is at the bottom of the sea a fish, the bigness of which is known only to Allah, and which every day comes to land. It remains there till noon to adore the Almighty. No person interrupts its prayers: when they are finished, it plunges again to the bottom ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various

... thousand in requital of that wherewith he hath veiled my face before the poor; for I have plenty." Then said the King, "O merchant, take this and look what is its kind and value." And he gave him a jewel the bigness of a hazel-nut, which he had bought for a thousand sequins and not having its fellow, prized it highly. Ma'aruf took it and pressing it between his thumb and forefinger brake it, for it was brittle and would not brook ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... against the tree-roots; we each sat astride facing each other, the bigness of the tree making it rather an uneasy seat; I slung the wallet round and placed it between us, and had just thrust in my hand, while Pomp wrenched himself round to hang the ammunition pouches close to the gun on a ragged root behind him, ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn

... the flurried meekness of her apologies to Peter senior. "Here you've saved all my dear old things I had in the days before everything was big. I never can get used to it, and I never will now. It's the bigness, I guess, that's seemed—somehow—to take your pa and Ena away from me—long ago. But I've got you. And you let me come here. So I am happy. I'm a real happy woman, Petie. And I want you to be happy the way you used to be—or some better way, not all restless like you are now. I guess ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body our standard—the body whose dimensions are no doubt determined by convenience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but have otherwise no sort of sanctity or superiority, rightness or fitness. It happens to be the object to which ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... form, it deals essentially with elemental moods and ideals. Epical poetry is poetic not because it is metrical and conformative to rhythmical standards,—though it usually is both,—but it is poetry because of the high sweep of its emotional outlook, the bigness of its thought, the untamed passion of its language, and the musical flow of ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... totality, lump, heap, assemblage, collection, accumulation; majority; size, bigness, bulk, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... and speech cheerful, very courteous, and not without some state; his body well shaped, without deformity or blemish: his hands very good and fair; his legs clean, well proportioned, and of sufficient bigness for his stature; his foot as ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... away." The parable is plain enough, but the application of it weakens when we realise that so far as the merely physical development goes, the food of the gods is only bringing about a change of scale. If we grant that this "insurgent bigness" must conquer the world, the final result is only humanity in the same relation to life that it now occupies, and we are left to reflect with Bensington, after the vision had faded, on "sinister shadows, vast declivities ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford

... freezing, and you keep your sluggish mountain of bones covered. A year or two ago I'd have urged you along with a stick. I used to get some work out of you then. But you think you're too big for that, now, don't you? You fancy I'm afraid of your bigness, eh? Well, do you want me to try it ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt

... have devised to amend the errors of usual sea-cards, whose common fault is to make the degrees of longitude in every latitude of one like bigness. ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt

... so; for usually they be in their perfection in the month of May, and decline with the buck. Now you are to take notice, that in several countries, as in Germany, and in other parts, compared to ours, fish do differ much in their bigness, and shape, and other ways; and so do Trouts. It is well known that in the Lake Leman, the Lake of Geneva, there are Trouts taken of three cubits long; as is affirmed by Gesner, a writer of good credit: ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... if for no other," continued O'Malley, "I count my experience with that man as memorable beyond ordinary. 'If for no other,' because from the very beginning there was another. Indeed, it was probably his air of unusual bigness, massiveness rather,—head, face, eyes, shoulders, especially back and shoulders,—that struck me first when I caught sight of him lounging there hugely upon my steamer deck at Marseilles, winning my instant attention before ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... is not because I feel it an ordinary experience, Nona, but because so much has happened I am overpowered by the bigness of it. Really, when we got safely away from the fort, the battle, or at least my share in it, was only about to begin. We had gone a few miles into the country, when General Alexis became desperately ill. Unless he could have immediate attention his physician ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook

... the world and its bigness and splendor: That most of the hearts beating round us are tender; That days are but footsteps and years are but miles That lead us to beauty and singing and smiles: That roses that blossom and toilers that plod Are filled with the glorious spirit ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest

... could hardly be said that this Corsair was a handsome man, still he had fine Corsair's eyes, full of expression and determination, eyes that could look love and bloodshed almost at the same time; and then he had those manly properties,—power, bigness, and apparent boldness,—which belong to a Corsair. To be hurried about the world by such a man, treated sometimes with crushing severity, and at others with the tenderest love, not to be spoken to for one ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... been for you, what you did for me ... others ... new courage, example of bigness—Why! what's the matter ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... of what had happened; and he assured me that the first must certainly be the soul of some person damned, which appeared by the chain about his legs (for his fears had magnified the creature to the bigness of a horse, and the sound of small morice-bells to the clanking of massy chains). As for the old man, he took it to be the spirit of somebody murdered long ago in this place, which had power granted to forment the assassin in the shape of a raven, and that Ralpho was the name of the ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... me through the grille and chuckled. Now, glancing about, I espied a stone hard by about the bigness of a man's head and, laying by my staff, I wrenched the stone from where it lay and, raising it aloft, hove it with all my strength; whereon the gate crashed open so suddenly as to catch the fellow a buffet that laid him sprawling ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... Parish or Town may be chosen three, four or six Peacemakers, according to the bigness of the place: and their work is twofold. First, In general to sit in Council to order the affairs of the Parish, to prevent troubles, and to preserve common peace. Secondly, If there arise any ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... East, where, if any bled at the nose, it was a manifest sign of inevitable death; nay, but in men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of the body; wherefrom, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... something strangely like a World-Soul, and art is beginning to feel she must utter our emotion towards it. Such art is exposed to an inherent and imminent peril. Its very bigness and newness tends to set up fresh and powerful reactions. Unless, in the process of creation, these can be inhibited, the artist will be lost in the reformer, and the play or the novel turn tract. This does not mean that the artist, if he is ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... dear child!" said Boase, "this—this in a way bigness of his view just makes him more of an individualist than anyone. He limits himself nowhere, but simply because it's all gain to his individuality. That it is gain to others too is neither here ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... being cured of the Epilepsy by voiding five Stones, Chirurg. vol. II. p. 20; and of another who died of the Fits from a triangular Stone remaining in the Kidneys, ibid. p. 416. Dr. Short cured a Woman of an Epilepsy of twelve Years standing, by extirpating a cartilagenous Substance, about the Bigness of a large Pea, seated on the gastronemei Muscles, above a Nerve which he cut asunder. Edin. Medic. Essays, ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro

... Barby. "They beat all, for bigness and goodness both. I can't keep 'em together. There's thousands of 'em, and I mean to make Philetus eat 'em for supper—such potatoes and milk is good enough for him, or anybody. The cow has gained on her milk wonderful, Fleda, since she begun to have ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... big, as we count bigness among four-footed wild-folk in Britain to-day. Probably he could stretch the tape to twenty-three inches, of which about sixteen consisted of very long, low body, with sturdy, bear-like, dumpy legs, the rest being rather thick, furry tail; and, though nobody—without steel armor—might have cared ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... palace, with all his treasures: in the sixth, which was next to that, there were several apartments for lodging the officers of his household; and the intermediate spaces, between the other walls, were appointed for the habitation of the people: the first and largest enclosure was about the bigness of Athens. The name of ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... the fullness of the firmament, the myriad of suns and planets, the brilliancy of the constellations, and the overpowering revelation of the infinite above. In less fervent latitudes one can never feel the bigness of the vault on high, nor sense the intimacy one had here with the worlds that spin in ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... eyes, a large forehead, thick eyebrows, a handsome mouth, and a sneering physiognomy. Twenty years before his death, a wen grew between his eye-brows, which in time increased to a considerable bigness. He once designed to have it cut off, but as it was no ways troublesome to him, and he little regarded that kind of deformity, Dr. Le Fevre advised him to let it alone, lest such an operation should be attended with dangerous symptoms in a man of his age. He would often make merry with himself ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... us, parted Europe from Asia, though our map-makers, as I am told, do not agree to it; however, it is certainly the eastern boundary of the ancient Siberia, which now makes a province only of the vast Muscovite empire, but is itself equal in bigness to the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... to the place where they were, even about an hour before day. There altogether we rested, and gave our camels provender, and as soon as the day appeared we rode all into the wood; and I, seeing no wood there but a stick here and a stick there, about the bigness of a man's arm, growing in the sand, it caused me to marvel how so many camels should be loaded in that place. The wood was juniper; we needed no axe nor edged tool to cut it, but plucked it up by strength of hands, roots and ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt

... admissible. It would be quite as just to condemn the paintings on a colossal scale in which Tintoretto and Veronese so nobly manifested their exceptional powers. The size of a work of art per se is an indifferent matter. Mere bigness or mere littleness decides nothing. But a colossal work has its conditions of being: it must conform to certain laws. It must be executed in a large style; it must represent a grand idea; it must possess dignity and strength; it must convey the idea of power and majesty; it must be located ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various

... as he spoke, with its vivid glare showing to Cleggett the enemy magnified to a portentous bigness against a background of chaotic night. Two or three of them stood, leaning keenly forward; several of the others had dropped to one knee; the rifle discharge had checked the rush, and they also were waiting for the lightning. Cleggett and his men threw a second volley ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... Illustrated with Instances (60, 61.) Sixthly, by Motion, which is explain'd (62.) And lastly, and chiefly, by the Union of the Saline Bodies, with the Superficial parts of another Body, whereby both their Bigness and Shape must necessarily be alter'd (63, 64.) Explain'd by Experiments (65, 66.) That the Colour of Bodies may be Chang'd by the concurrence of two or more of these ways (67.) And besides all these, Eight Reflective causes of Colours, there may be in Transparent Bodies several ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle

... sit to write to you now, 7.15, all the world in bed except myself, accounted for, and Belle and Graham, down at Haggard's at dinner. Not a leaf is stirring here; but the moon overhead (now of a good bigness) is obscured and partly revealed in a whirling covey of thin storm-clouds. By Jove, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Papistical. If unto me all tongues were granted, I could not speak the saints here painted. Saint Tit, Saint Nit, Saint Is, Saint Itis, Who 'gainst Mab's state placed here right is. Saint Will o' th' Wisp, of no great bigness, But, alias, call'd here FATUUS IGNIS. Saint Frip, Saint Trip, Saint Fill, Saint Filly;— Neither those other saint-ships will I Here go about for to recite Their number, almost infinite; Which, one by one, here set down are ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick

... nourished, and himself should be in imminent danger; but he believed that God would some way for certain procure the safety of the child, in order to secure the truth of his own predictions. When they had thus determined, they made an ark of bulrushes, after the manner of a cradle, and of a bigness sufficient for an infant to be laid in, without being too straitened: they then daubed it over with slime, which would naturally keep out the water from entering between the bulrushes, and put the infant into it, and setting it afloat upon the river, they left ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp—a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter. And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last. Something in the attitude of the manikins—faces they have none, they are too small for that—something in the way they swing these ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and, as she looked, there seemed to her morbid imagination—diseased and disturbed with long brooding, sick with the monotony of repeated sensation—to be disengaged from all this immensity, a sense of a vast oppression, formless, disquieting. The terror of sheer bigness grew slowly in her mind; loneliness beyond words gradually enveloped her. She was lost in all these limitless reaches of space. Had she been abandoned in mid-ocean, in an open boat, her terror could hardly have been greater. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... luckless "Yamsi"—on the very quay-side so to speak—seems to furnish the Shakespearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these people who to the last moment put their trust in mere bigness, in the reckless affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers booming these ships! Yes, a grim touch of comedy. One asks oneself what these men are after, with this ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... so-called King's Chamber] with an hollow stone [or coffer] in which there was a statue [of stone] like a man, and within it a man upon whom was a breastplate of gold set with jewels; upon this breastplate was a sword of inestimable price, and at his head a carbuncle of the bigness of an egg, shining like the light of the day; and upon him were characters writ with a pen,[251] which no man understood"[252]—a description stating, down to the so-called "statue," mummy-case, or cartonage, and the hieroglyphics upon the cere-cloth, the arrangements ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... measure the height of their humours by the length of their trails, which must be borne up by a page behind. The nobles justle one another to get nearest to the king's elbow, and wear gold chains of that weight and bigness as require no less strength to carry than they ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus

... were shoulders, legs, and loins, shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wings of a lark. I ate them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time about 30 the bigness of musket bullets. They supplied me as fast as they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment at my bulk and appetite. I then made another sign that I wanted drink. They found by my eating that a small quantity ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... and called for a bottle of Long Tom (the best, as I knew, the Anchor and Chain afforded), which must be broached under his eye, and said he would drink with us until we were turned out or dawn came. Lord, how I loved that man, as a child, in those days: his jollity and bigness and courage and sea-clear eyes! 'Twas grand to feel, aside from the comfort of him, that he had put grown folk away to fondle the child on his knee—a mystery, to be sure, but yet a grateful thing. Indeed, 'twas marvellously comfortable to sit close to him. But I never saw ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... Babylon, he changed the Kingdom into a Satrapy or Province: whereby the bounds were long after known: and by this means Herodotus [426] gives us an estimate of the bigness of this Monarchy in proportion to that of the Persians, telling us that whilst every region over which the King of Persia Reigned in his days, was distributed for the nourishment of his army, besides the tributes, the Babylonian region nourished ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton

... their oars he stood up. As they passed by, Barnaby True could see him very plain, the moonlight shining full upon him—a large, stout gentleman with a round red face, and clad in a fine laced coat of red cloth. Amidship of the boat was a box or chest about the bigness of a middle-sized traveling trunk, but covered all over with cakes of sand and dirt. In the act of passing, the gentleman, still standing, pointed at it with an elegant gold-headed cane which he held in his hand. "Are you come after this, Abraham Dawling?" says ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle

... "The Friends of the Ace," once bound by oath to succour one another in peril or poverty, were long ago dispersed; one or two had died; one or two had gone to live elsewhere; the others were disappeared into the smoky bigness of the heavy city. Of the brethren, there remained within his present cognizance only his old enemy, the red-haired Kinney, now married to Janie Sharon, and Charlie Johnson, who, out of deference to his mother's memory, had passed the Amberson Mansion one day, when George stood upon the front ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... best of it was that the danger was all over already. There was no danger any more. The supposed nephew's appearance had a purpose. He had come, full, full to trembling—with the bigness of his news. There must have been rumours already as to the shaky position of the de Barral's concerns; but only amongst those in the very inmost know. No rumour or echo of rumour had reached the profane in the West-End—let ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... timber I saw here was prodigious, as well in quantity as in bigness, and seem'd in some places to be suffered to grow only because it was so far off of any navigation, that it was not worth cutting down and carrying away; in dry summers, indeed a great deal is carried away to Maidstone and other ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various

... Stidger is a college student who played with the foot-ball in America. He is a man with the bigness of the head! He reaches the six feet tall; the four feet around; has an arm like an ox and a head like ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger

... to paper with delight, And quickly had my thoughts in black and white. For, having now my method by the end, Still as I pulled, it came; and so I penned It down: until it came at last to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see. ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan

... the horizon is placed high up in the canvas instead of low down; the consequence is that compositions so treated not only lose in grandeur and truth, but appear to be toppling over, or give the impression of smallness rather than bigness. Indeed, they look like small pictures enlarged, which is a very different thing from a large design. So that, in order to see them properly, we should mount a ladder to get upon a level with their horizon line ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey

... performs all kinds of turned Work, in Silver, such as Tankards, Cans, &c. also in Brass, Iron, Ivory, Turtle-Shell, Bone, Horn, and Wood of any sort or bigness. Repairs Violins; makes Flutes, Fifes, Hoboys, Clarinets, Chaise-Whips, Tea-Boards, Bottle-Stands, Tamboy Frames, Back-Gammon Boxes Men and Dies, Chess men, Billiard-Balls, Maces, Lemon Squeezers, Serenges, Hydrometers, Shaving Boxes and ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks

... distinguish them by the taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins, shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed but smaller than the wings of a lark. I eat them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time, about the bigness of musket-bullets. They supplied me as fast as they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment at my ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester



Words linked to "Bigness" :   immenseness, sizeableness, voluminousness, gigantism, greatness, largeness, voluminosity, roominess, smallness, fullness, vastness, capaciousness, enormousness, size, big, littleness, commodiousness, spaciousness, bulkiness, giantism, grandness, wideness, massiveness, ampleness



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