"Bigness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said 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 ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... 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 to echo ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Room; especially a little Beast call'd an Armadillo, a Thing which I can liken to nothing so well as a Rhinoceros; 'tis all in white Armour, so jointed, that it moves as well in it, as if it had nothing on: This Beast is about the Bigness of a Pig of six Weeks old. But it were endless to give an Account of all the divers wonderful and strange Things that Country affords, and which we took a great Delight to go in Search of; tho' those Adventures are oftentimes ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... rustle of the leaves we, too, hear a "fine, plaintive" sound—no, a shrill and ringing little racket, rather, about the bigness of ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... fine young fellow—slightly bowed already though he had given his age as twenty-five, for the earth begins her work early in a man's frame, and has power over the green tree as well as the dry. But this stoop did not conceal his height and strength and breadth, and somehow his bigness, combined with his simplicity, his slow thought and slow tongue, appealed to Joanna, stirred something within her that was almost tender. She handed ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... instrument is shown in fig. 2, the reproduction of a drawing in the MS. of The Academy of Armoury by Randle Holme,[16] written some time before 1688. At the side of the drawing is the following description: "A double curtaile.[17] This is double the bigness of the single, mentioned ch. xvi. n. 6" (the MS. begins at ch. xvii. of bk. 3) "and is played 8 notes deeper. It is as it were 2 pipes fixed in on(e) thick bass pipe, one much longer than the other, from the top of the lower comes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... a voice. But he seemed never to seek to do so. He was without ambition; and, though curiously careful sometimes about preserving his own dignity, and beyond question sensitive by temperament, he showed marked respect, and even humility, to the worldly-successful. Despite his bigness and simplicity there was something small about him which came out in odd trifling details. Thus it was characteristic of Big James to ask Edwin to be waiting for him at the back gates in Woodisun Bank when he might just as easily have met him at the side door by the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Squitty 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 in at the head. A cliff walled it on the south. A low, grassy ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... scientifically, we find him as 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 ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... their prayer would be wafted up towards Those that sit in the great places in the heavens. But then, above the noise of the ceremonial, there came the rushing sound of wings, and from out of the sky there flew one of those great featherless man-eating birds, of a bigness such as seldom ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... plants as they grew with brackish water and the burnt ashes; then, when they flowered, mated the male and female blossoms, glorious funnels of golden hue big enough for one to live in; and when the young fruit was of the bigness of an ordinary bolster, how they slipped it into a double mould of open reed-work something like the two halves of a walnut-shell; and how, growing day by day in this, it soon took every curve and line they chose to give ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... Spherical Figure; in which Opinion he was confirm'd, by observing the Return of the Sun, Moon and Stars to the East, after their Setting; and also, because they always appear'd to him of the same bigness, both when they rose, and when they were in the midst of Heaven, and at the time of their Setting; whereas, if their Motions had not been Circular, they must have been nearer to sight, at some times than others; and consequently their Dimensions would have appear'd proportionably ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... Marsh over in evident speculation. The man was tall and broad shouldered. His face was clean shaven. The features were strong, with a regularity that many people would consider handsome. He was what one would call a big man, but this appearance of bigness arose more from a heavy frame, and exceptional muscular development, than fleshiness. Murphy took in these details quickly, and the pause was ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... jump. I remember one week, traveling through the Mississippi Valley, stopping every night in some town that had something which was advertised as the biggest in the world. On Friday I reached a sleepy little village which seemed the picture of contented mediocrity. Here, thought I, I shall find no bigness to molest me or make me afraid. But when I sat down to write a letter on the hotel stationery I was confronted with the statement, "This is the biggest little ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... does make her clothes too big! And it doesn't do a bit of good for they hang on her the whole season and by the next they're either worn or faded—and she generally manages to out-grow them, in spite of their bigness." ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... 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 alone in the guileless ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... work of Arthur Davison Ficke runs a note of bigness that compels attention even when one feels that he is still groping both for form and thought. In "Mr. Faust" this note has assumed commanding proportions, while at the same time the uncertainty manifest in some of the earlier work has almost wholly disappeared. Intellectually ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... two acts when he set out for Paris. Once he realized how poor were the prospects of getting his work played there, his ardour for bigness and noise seems to have cooled. There are no more double choruses; everything is planned on a smaller scale. The three remaining acts in their present form (for he afterwards shortened the opera) can be, and often are, compressed into two, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... recent decisions the Supreme Court makes clear that there is nothing in the statute which condemns combinations of capital or mere bigness of plant organized to secure economy in production and a reduction of its cost. It is only when the purpose or necessary effect of the organization and maintenance of the combination or the aggregation ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... in my fear, that he was secured. You would have forgot too, for 'tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh. I could not retreat without infringing on another box, and just behind, a little devil not an inch from my back, had got his nose out, with some difficulty and pain, quite through ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... 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 of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... talking Mike was able to enjoy the girl's beauty and study her individuality. Pretty as she was—and more than pretty—it was her personality which pleased him—the bigness of her nature, the evidence of her wide-mindedness and her quick grasp of fresh subjects, and above all, in her, as in Freddy, there was the ring of unquestionable honour ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... by Frederick G. R. Roth, are interesting artistically, not only for the eager sweep and sense of bigness not usual in the narrow scope of a spandrel, but especially for their warm decorative value to the wall surface and the aspiring way in which they follow the rising line of the archway over which they are placed. The spandrels are made in very vigorous low relief. They express the place ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... discern'd else that I was strangely overjoyed with it, and earnest to have it; for though the poor fellow made what haste he could to untie his bag, I did nothing but chide him for being so slow. Last I had it, and, in earnest, I know not whether an entire diamond of the bigness on't would have pleased me half so well; if it would, it must be only out of this consideration, that such a jewel would make me rich enough to dispute you with Mrs. Chambers, and perhaps make your ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... with her 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
... 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 ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... have been more opposite. One was the product of democracy, buoyant and self-made, while the other represented an intellectual, almost effeminate, aristocracy. Yet nearly from the start Frohman perceived the bigness of vision and the profound understanding that lurked ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... large gallery. This picture has all the qualities of an old Italian master of the best kind. Its composition is big and dignified and in the interest and richness of its color scheme it has here few equals. The chief characteristic of this splendid canvas is bigness of style. In its treatment it is a typical old master, in the best ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... spade. We must assemble for the task great mechanical contrivances. And so with our energies of will; a slight tool means a slight achievement; a huge, aggressive engine, driving on at full blast, means corresponding bigness of results. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... 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 he, and thereat ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... if the atoms possessed no distinction of parts (and hence filled no space), a group of even a thousand atoms would not differ in extension from a single atom, and the different kinds of extension—minuteness, shortness, bigness, length, &c.—would never emerge. If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the atoms also have distinct sides, they have parts and are made up of those parts, and those parts again are made up of their parts, and so on in infinitum.— But, the Vaiseshika may object, the difference ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Mere bigness had never impressed Sanderson; the West had shown him greater vistas than this mammoth basin. And yet his eyes glowed as he looked out and down at the country that lay, slumbering in the pure white ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... 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, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... Suicide is an ugly word—I notice that you avoid it—and love is a big word; I am using them understandingly and soberly. You came to the edge of this thing for the reason that there is not an element of bigness in your life, and there never has been. You lack the balance of large ideas. This man of whom you tell me—of course you do not love him—you have not yet the capacity for understanding the meaning of the word. You like to ride and you like to dance ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... preserved amongst negroes to the present day. Our old author tells us that the people would 'leap from rock to rock, sometimes making ten Fathoms deep at one Leap, in this manner: First they tertiate their Lances, which are about the bigness of a Half-Pike, and aim with the Point at any piece of a Rock upon which they intend to light, sometimes not half a Foot broad; in leaping off they clap their Feet close to the Lance, and so carry their bodies in the Air: the Point of the Lance comes first to the place, which breaks the force of ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... effeminate life made him unfit for business: so, about 1681, he was obliged to resign his offices; after which, by old age and vast bulk of body, his spirits became quite sunk, till his heart was not the bigness of a walnut: and so at last upon the chamber box, (like another Arius) he evacuated soul, vital life, and excrements all at once; and so went to his own place.—Burnet and Wodrow's histories, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... 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. She felt vividly that certain uncongeniality which, when all is said, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... universe's glories. True, we are crushed down by sorrow and by care; and in 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 may inhabit His universe, His chariot wheels ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the right thing—"It's a great business!" It was the greatness of the thing that had absorbed Tarboe. It was the bigness made him feel life could be worth living, if the huge machinery were always in his fingers. Yet he had never expected it, and life was a problem. Who could tell? Perhaps—perhaps, the business would always be his in spite of the second will! Perhaps, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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. The ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... hours I arrived at the famous cold bath called St. Winifred's Well; and the town from thence called Holywell is a pretty large well-built village, in the middle of a grove, in a bottom between, two hills. The well is in the foot of one of the hills, and spouts out about the bigness of a barrel at once, with such force that it turns three or four mills before it falls into the sea. The well where you bathe is floored with stone surrounded with pillars, on which stands a neat little chapel dedicated to St. Winifred, but now turned into ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... corresponding qualities in the quaternary compounds; with the exception, however, of the two qualities of minuteness and shortness. For it is admitted that the forms of extension belonging to quaternary compounds are not minuteness and shortness, but bigness (mahattva) and length. The same happens[355] when many simple atoms or many binary compounds or a simple atom and a binary compound combine to produce ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... without any apparrell sauing her Smocke, the said Deuill did get blood vnder her left arme'.[848] Of the witches who plagued the Fairfax family at Fewstone in 1621, five had domestic familiars: Margaret Waite's was 'a deformed thing with many feet, black of colour, rough with hair, the bigness of a cat'; her daughter, Margaret Waite, had as 'her spirit, a white cat spotted with black, and named Inges'; Jennet Dibble had 'her spirit in the shape of a great black cat called Gibbe, which hath attended her now above 40 years'; Dibble's daughter, Margaret Thorpe, had a ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... 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
... 1st.—I 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... know 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
... within a short time, all his four horses died; after which he sustained many other losses, in the sudden dying of his cattle. He was also taken with a lameness in his limbs, and so far vexed with lice of an extraordinary number and bigness, that no art could hinder the swarming of them, till he burned up two suits of apparel."—"Margaret Arnold testified that Amy Dunny afflicted her children: they (the children), she said, would see mice running round the house, and, when they caught them and threw them into the fire, they would screech ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... distinguish them by the taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wing 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 they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment at my ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... (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 ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... Amon, and so it was natural for old Rameses the third to put the temple to Khonsu under the father's wing like this—but it spoils the effect of the entrance from this pylon. You don't get Karnak's bigness at a burst—but wait till you reach the court ahead. Then you'll ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Mr. Rolles opened 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
... minds of the middle classes, and make such Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are told they have [41] done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to put its trust in achievements of ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... picture by Jordaens and a fable by La Fontaine. The hairy son of Sycorax appeared in the noble world of Shakespeare. Putois, less fortunate, will be always neglected by artists and poets. He lacks bigness and the unusual style and character. He was conceived by minds too reasonable, among people who knew how to read and write, and who had not that delightful imagination in which fables take root. ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... of rooms and closets. Evidently this had been a big, commodious and comfortable house in its day. But that day was long past its sunset. Now the bigness only emphasized the dreariness and desolation. Dampness and spider webs everywhere, cracks in the ceiling, paper peeling from the walls. And around the gables and against the dormer-windows of these ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... go over to the location. Mind, Jim, you must look after the other two and see they don't come back here. I don't want any boys on the place to-night. D'you hear?' Julian proceeded to enlarge on the bigness of reward or punishment in ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... 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 monstrous volumes to their ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 men of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... Fraser River, man is held to have four souls, of which the principal one has the form of a mannikin, while the other three are shadows of it. The Malays conceive the human soul as a little man, mostly invisible and of the bigness of a thumb, who corresponds exactly in shape, proportion, and even in complexion to the man in whose body he resides. This mannikin is of a thin, unsubstantial nature, though not so impalpable but that it may cause displacement on entering a physical object, and it can ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 jerked the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... whole picture. Suddenly she darted out her hand like a flash, making me start at the unexpected motion, and quickly withdrawing it, held up a finger before me. From its tip a minute gossamer spider, about twice the bigness of a pin's head, appeared suspended from a fine, scarcely visible line three ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... been put to bed early, with every one a crown of gold upon her head. There was in the same chamber a bed of the like bigness, and it was into this bed the Ogre's wife put the seven little boys, after which she went to bed to ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... is not at all primitive in 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 ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... encouraged in this belief by the pen-portrait which he himself appends to it. "He was," he says, "a tall, powerful fellow of a good shape, if we except that his arms were too long and that his feet and hands were of an uncomely bigness. In face he was swarthy, with black hair and a black forked beard; his nose was big and very high in the bridge, and his eyes sunk deep under beetling eyebrows were very pale-coloured and very cruel and sinister. He had—and this I have ever remarked to be the sign ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... the benefit of others as for yourself. You are encouraging the right principle amongst your yeomen and your farmers. You are setting your heel upon feudalism—you, the daughter of a race who have always demanded it. You live amongst these wonderful surroundings, you grow into the bigness of them, nature becomes almost your friend. It is one of the most dignified and beautiful lives I ever knew for a woman, and ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... without classic austerity or coldness. It is at once beautiful in form, rich in decorative detail, and satisfyingly warm in color. Moreover, it has the finest setting of all the Exposition buildings. The bigness of conception, the boldness with which the largest architectural elements have been handled, the perfect arrangement of architecture, planting, and reflecting waters-all these combine to create the most compelling picture ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... all allowance for the feeling of insignificance and forlornness which is apt to overwhelm us when we begin to realise the immensity of the material universe, a little closer thought should make it obvious that nothing in the nature of mere bulk or bigness furnishes even a reasonable presumption, let alone a convincing argument, against the survival of the soul; it is indeed difficult to perceive what legitimate bearing these physical phenomena are supposed to have upon a purely spiritual question. If we ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... fitted to serve the Necessities of a vile Body, than to minister to his Understanding; and from the little Spot to which he is chained, he can frame but wandering Guesses concerning the innumerable Worlds of Light that encompass him, which, tho' in themselves of a prodigious Bigness, do but just glimmer in the remote Spaces of the Heavens; and, when with a great deal of Time and Pains he hath laboured a little way up the steep Ascent of Truth, and beholds with Pity the groveling Multitude beneath, in a Moment, his Foot slides, and he tumbles ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... be too true; as next day, the 11th of June, the admiral was forced to have the ships towed over a flat where there was not a foot of water, and its whole breadth did not exceed two ships length[14]. Bearing up closer to Cuba, they saw turtles of vast bigness, and in such numbers that they covered the sea. At break of day, they saw such an enormous flock of sea crows as even darkened the sun, these were going from sea towards to the island, where they all alighted; besides ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... this Goethe story with the prayer of little Larry H., son of an eminent Harvard biologist. Larry, at the age of six, was taken by his mother to the top of a Vermont hill-pasture, where, for the first time in his life, he saw a herd of cows and was thrilled by their glorious bigness and nearness and novelty. When he said his prayers that night, he was enough of a poet to change his usual formula ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... scared rats, glancing at him in timid hate. He came striding along the weather side of the deck from the remote, august poop; he was like a dreadful god making a dreadful visitation upon his faithful. Short-legged, tending to bigness in the belly, bearded, vibrant with animal force and personal power, his mere presence cowed them. His gross face, the happy face of an egoist with a sound digestion, sent its lofty and sure regard over them; it had a kind of unconsciousness ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the bigness and colour of our bulls, but their bones are not so great. They have a great bunch upon their fore-shoulder, and more hair on their fore part than on their hinder part, and it is like wool. They have as it were an horse-mane upon their backbone, and ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... melody, often lovely, generally characteristic, though sometimes common, in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the miraculous facility he possessed of extemporising frequent passages of extraordinary power and bigness. At least half of his songs are poor—for a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of the remainder at least half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for sweetness, strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... both of a bigness, and a' plays at quoits well, and eats conger and fennel, and drinks off candles' ends for flap-dragons, and rides the wild-mare with the boys, and jumps upon joined-stools, and swears with a good grace, and wears his boots very smooth, like unto the sign of the leg, and breeds no bate with telling ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... He was confused, painfully conscious of his inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inadequate. He could not express what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. Well, he decided, it was up to him to get ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... from China, and groweth there upon little shrubs and bushes, the branches whereof are well garnished with white flowers, that are yellow within, of the bigness and fashion of sweet-brier, but in smell unlike, bearing thin green leaves, about the brightness of Scordium, Myrtle or Sumack. This plant has been reported to grow wild only, but doth not: for they plant it in their gardens about four foot distance and it groweth about four ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... 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 ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... justified. There was a knock at the study door, discreet, insistent, menacing, and it was Mr. Cowl's knock. He entered, smiling gravely and yet, as it were, teasingly. His easy bigness, florid and sinister, made a disturbing contrast with the artless and pure simplicity of Audrey in her new black robe, and even with Miss Ingate's pallid maturity, which, after all, was passably innocent and ingenuous. Mr. Cowl resembled a great beast good-humouredly lolloping ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... abyss, draw nearer and nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... option signed and the task squarely confronting him, he realized with fresh force its bigness and the weight of responsibility that rested upon his shoulders. He began the most dramatic struggle of his career, a fight against untried conditions, a desperate race against the seasons, with ruin as the penalty ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... very great wisdom and understanding. I have made for thee a great match. Heed my words and walk in the way of my words, go when I say go, come when I bid thee come, and we shall grow fat with the wealth of this big white man who is a fool according to his bigness." ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... answered gently. "Before the war is just a different age." For a while she was silent; then she drew a deep breath. "Don't you feel it as I feel it?" she whispered. "The bigness of it, the wonder of it. Underneath all the horror, underlying all the vileness—the splendour of it all. The glory of human endurance. . . . People wondered that I could stand it—I with my idealism. But it seems to me that out of the sordid ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... contriving to improve the time by a good 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 so before ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... through a study of some legend of ancient Britain or some epic of an extinct race. As Mr. Percy Boynton has said, "To foster in a whole generation some clear recognition of other qualities in America than its bigness, and of other distinctions between the past and the present than that they are far apart is to contribute towards the consciousness of a national individuality which is the first essential of national life.... We must put ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... most of them. "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 ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... 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 drown the greater and better sort of them, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... 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," and ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want of philosophy!" So in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," he, half in jest and half in earnest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... 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
... matter of her lord Al-Rashid and that which had betided him after her loss and wept with sore weeping. Presently, she heard a blowing behind her;[FN200] so she turned and behold, a Head without a body and with eyes slit endlong: it was of the bigness of an elephant's skull and bigger and ha] a mouth as it were an oven and projecting canines as they were grapnels, and hair which trailed upon the ground. So Tohfah cried, "I take refuge with Allah from Satan the Stoned!" and recited the Two Preventives;[FN201] ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... 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
... cocos palm?" said I, rejoicing; and forthwith doffing my sword belt, I clambered up this tree hand over fist and had soon plucked and tossed down a sufficiency of great, green nuts about the bigness of my two fists. Now sitting beside him, Sir Richard showed me how I must cut two holes in the green rind and we drank blissfully of this kindly juice that to our parched tongues was very nectar, for verily never in all my days have I tasted drink so delectable ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... no 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 ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... little above the average height ... with the deep chest and deep voice that always go with the born leader of men; the bigness and strength of the hands ... the clear eye and broad, firm, and expressive mouth, and the massive head that suggests irresistibly a combination of ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... her heart—with her rubbishing longing after novelty and intellect, and fine scorn of homespun truth and loyalty. Were I a woman, I should esteem the size of my husband's heart, and the sweetness of his temper, matter of more importance than the bigness of his brain, or the freshness of ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... leaned up 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, when, all at once, the boy's left leg flew over and kicked ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... indicate that it recognizes the urgency and bigness and significance of the momentous ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn
... (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).—Of this whale little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... possess the sight of the soul, so much as that other doth. For as, in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant, or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shape, colour, bigness, and particular marks? or of a gorgeous palace, an architect, who, declaring the full beauties, might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were, by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceit, with being witness to itself ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... the dish, which they call the game of the little bones, is only played by two persons. Each has six or eight little bones, which at first sight may be taken for apricot stones; they are of that shape and bigness. They make them jump up by striking the ground or the table with a round and hollow dish, which contains them, and which they twirl round first. When they have no dish, they throw the bones up in the air with their hands. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, some vast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this whole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in silence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in my berth and laugh at the bigness ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Christ and his holy religion, but had also taught the idolaters both how to make and use them. While I remained in Calicut, I saw them give a mould to the idolaters, by which they might cast brass cannon of sufficient bigness to receive a charge of 105 cantaros or measures of powder. At this time also there was a Jew in Calicut who had built a handsome brigantine, in which were four large iron cannons; but Providence soon after gave him his due reward, as he was drowned while bathing in the river. To return to the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... whatever Ground Satan lost, he seems to have recovered it again; and all Asia and Africa is at present overrun with Paganism or Mahometanism, which I think of the two is rather the worst; Besides all America, a Part of the World, as some say, equal in Bigness to all the other, in which the Devil's Kingdom was never interrupted from its first being inhabited, whenever it was, to the first Discovery of it by the European ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... a fierce rebel, the lord of Caesarea; and the cause of this war is as follows. One of the kings of the Arabs, awhile since, chanced, in one of his conquests, upon a treasure of the time of Alexander, from which he carried away countless riches and amongst other things, three round jewels, of the bigness of an ostrich's egg, from a mine of pure white jewels, never was seen the like. Upon each of these jewels were graven talismans in the Greek character, and they had many properties and virtues, amongst the rest that if one of them were hung round the neck of a new-born child, no ailment ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... body were lost in sheer immensity above them. They knew they were riding in a car; but they couldn't see the car. All they could see was the black cliff that was the seat-cushion behind them. The world had disappeared—hidden in its bigness; the world, indeed, was just at present ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... yet, there was somethin' about him, somethin' that made me think of Jim Last himself—somethin' in his quiet eyes—as if they had both come from somewhere outside Lost Valley where they grow different men. It was a—bigness, a ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... still he read on; and in the midst of the storm the door flew open, and a black hen and chickens came into the room. They were of the ordinary size when they first appeared, but gradually became larger and larger, until the hen was of the bigness of a good sized ox. At this point the vicar suddenly closed his discourse, and dismissed his congregation, saying he was wanted at home, and hoped he might arrive there in time. When he entered the chamber the hen was already touching the ceiling. But he threw down a bag of ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... beyond her control. They passed once more between the broken waves and entered the still bay with its border of flowering earth. There, when the yacht had been anchored, Millie sat gazing silently at the open sea whose bigness had so unexpectedly distressed her. Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight, hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk the enigmatic governess; it was in ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... from the scene of his life and work the more firmly are we, his countrymen, convinced of his sincerity, strength, wisdom, and bigness of heart. The two men who stand out preeminently in history among great Americans are Washington and Lincoln, the former as the founder of the Union and the latter as the man who gave it unbreakable continuity and preserved ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... elsewhere. It was provided that the whole quantity coined should not exceed 360 tons of copper, whereof 100 tons only were to be coined in the first year, and 20 tons in each of the last thirteen, said farthings and halfpence to be of good, pure, and merchantable copper, and of such size and bigness, that one avoirdupois pound weight of copper should not be converted into more farthings and halfpence than would make thirty pence by tale; all the said farthings and halfpence to be of equal weight in themselves, or as near thereunto as might ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift |
