"Pigmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opine—let Fame say what it can— Of ancient vigour, (Fame is, oft, a Liar) That Milo was a pigmy to this Man, And his fat Ox quite skinny to ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud, mockingly and defiantly, at the advancing storm. I see him yet standing there like a pigmy out of the Arabian Nights before the huge front of some malignant genie. He was daring ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... a bachelor, he would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears everything to pieces, as if his pen ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... asteroidal pairs travelling in approximately coincident tracks, must date from a remote antiquity. They result, Professor Kirkwood[1029] believed, from the divellent action of Jupiter upon embryo pigmy planets, just as comets moving in pursuit of one another are a consequence of the sundering ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to myself for several hours in the morning; but I found ample and pleasant employment in surveying the comforts and beauties of my habitation. For I was not forced to perform the part of an insignificant pigmy in the vast abodes of the colossal race of man: I possessed a beautiful little house proportioned to my size, pleasantly situated on a table in the furthest corner of the schoolroom, and commanding an extensive ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... Yap! yap! yap! You defy me?—you pigmy, you insolent scrap! What!—this to my teeth, that have worried a score Of the biggest rats bred in the granary floor! Come on, and be swallowed! I ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... noticed three dwarfs in bulky, helmeted moon-suits, shuffling clumsily across the copper plates. Hazily he knew he was with the others in an airlock; the hiss and the throbbing of pumps told him that. Under the great dome there was the latticework of a huge reflecting telescope; strange pigmy figures scuttled here and there, working at curious machines. There was the constant purr of many motors, the gentle pulsation of ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... sense of proportion and relation. Before the ant a man looms as large as a mountain before us. An insect does not see things as they are but as they seem to it. Growth in intelligence necessitates a truer appreciation of proportions and relations. The pigmy also sees little but himself, but years and experience leave behind them wisdom. The civilized races have all risen from barbarism and savagery—that is, from a state of imperfect thinking as well as of imperfect loving and choosing. Experience and culture bring larger knowledge and a more ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... the child{14} among his new-born blisses, A six years' darling of a pigmy size! See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, With light upon him from his father's eyes! See at his feet some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... resumed their way up the wolf-haunted bottom, over rocks, through puddles, into pigmy forests of cherry and plum. But now, careless of lost time, Dallas ran with backward looks and frequent haltings, giving strict heed to the whereabouts ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... crying, "Corn and wood! Corn and wood!" Those who could fled to the Republican camp. The Austrians practically mutinied. Starving and dying thousands clamored for surrender. Yet the ugly, revolting pigmy who was lieutenant of the Empire held them back in the terror of his ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... types has shown that each group considered is made up of heterogeneous elements. Pigmy blood is everywhere evident, but aside from this there is a well-marked brachycephalic and a dolichocephalic element. With the latter is a greater tendency than with the first for the face to be angular; the cheek ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... feathery things, and loneliest, whirring among birds, insect-like, and among insects, bird-like, his path untraceable, his home unseen? An image of airy motion, yet it sometimes seems as if there were nothing joyous in him. He seems like some exiled pigmy prince, banished, but still regal, and doomed to wings. Did gems turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in that long-past dynasty of the Humming-Birds? It is strange to come upon his tiny nest, in some gray and tangled swamp, with this brilliant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... A pigmy scraper, wi' his fiddle, Wha us'd at trysts and fairs to driddle, Her strappan limb and gausy middle He reach'd na higher, Had hol'd his heartie like a riddle, An' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... comes to hand. A handful of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low. Will that become an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men of destiny, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... your monumental oak from your pigmy acorn, there grew up a great feud between the families of the two girls, and like a poison the plague of the quarrel spread to Florence, and in a twinkling men were divided against each other in a deathly hatred that ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... raging, to the pigmy dwarf who bore The news, exclaimed the king, "Now hence away!" Nor horse he waits, nor carriage, nor, before Departing, deigns to his a word to say. He hurries with such speed, that not with more The lizard darts at ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the gang were busied here and there, bulking grotesquely as they moved about the fire, seeming disheveled demons of the pit. Like some master imp torturing a pigmy over the flames, old Ben York was kneeling close beside the blaze, holding to the coals a hickory stick, which served as spit for the roasting of a squirrel. The brilliance shone full on the frowsy gray whiskers, and, above them, the blinking, rheumy eyes, so intent on the proper ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... friends among the guards at the Palace gates have said this all the evening. For the Chinese Colossus, lumbering and lazy, sluggish and ill-equipped, has raised himself on his elbow, and with sheep-like and calculating eyes is looking down on us—a pigmy-like collection of foreigners and their guards—and soon will risk a kick—perhaps even will trample us quickly to pieces. How bitterly everyone is regretting our false confidence, and how our chiefs are ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... the Sittinae subfamily in America is the pigmy nuthatch, known scientifically as Sitta pygmaea, a genuine westerner, not known east of the plains. However, in the Rocky Mountain district he is an abundant species, his range east and west being from the plains ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... door, of course, were the two creatures with the enormous mandibles that had escorted the pigmy men to the larder. But these others were as different as though they ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... poured down a libation too liberal. To those curious in philology I convey the information, that in the word dinghy, the g was pronounced hard. This explanation is also necessary to do justice to the pigmy floater, as it was always painted in the gayest colours possible. It was quite a pet of the first-lieutenant's. Indeed, he loved it so much, that he took care never to oppress it ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... her earlier authors equal Juvenal and Tacitus; none certainly exceed them. But they are the last barriers that stem the tide. After them the flood has already rushed in, and before long comes the collapse. In Suetonius and Florus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race; in Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarfishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold enough to respond ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... order the Milbrook to Lisbon with the letters from hence by the next Levant wind, and from thence to Spithead. The Pigmy will return to you with the first English mail ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... For the first time in his life he felt humble. He perceived how misguided he had been ever to suppose that he could pit his pigmy wits against this smooth-faced worker ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... That every pigmy kicked it as it lay; And much I grieved to think how power and will In opposition rule our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... remarked Barry. "The arteries of the Empire. Hang it all! The blockade reminds me of a pigmy treacherously stealing up behind a giant and trying to cut his jugular vein. Instead, he merely scratched a comparatively unimportant capillary, and feels mighty sorry for himself when the giant turns and scruffs ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... wont is once a-year To lounge in watering-places, disagreeable and dear; Who on pigmy Cambrian mountains, and in Scotch or Irish bogs Imbibe incessant whisky, and inhale incessant fogs: Ye know not with what transports the mad Alpine Clubman gushes, When with rope and axe and knapsack to the realms of snow he rushes. O can I e'er the hour forget—a voice within cries "Never!"— ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... are not our Streets filled with sagacious Draymen, and Politicians in Liveries? We have several Taylors of six Foot high, and meet with many a broad pair of Shoulders that are thrown away upon a Barber, when perhaps at the same time we see a pigmy Porter reeling under a Burthen, who might have managed a Needle with much Dexterity, or have snapped his Fingers with great Ease to himself, and Advantage to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... black, an hour before the dawn, when his eyes opened wide, and he sat up, listening. He heard it again, faint and far away, a feeble "pop-pop!" Then there were more, a sudden pigmy chorus of battle. He got to his feet, and ran ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... taken hold of this matter, I may look for that invitation to his house at, any moment. I am perishing to go! I do long to know whether I am only simply a large-sized pigmy among these pigmies here, who tumble over so easily when one strikes them, or whether I am really—." Her thoughts drifted into other channels, for a season. Then she continued:—"He said I could be useful in the great cause of philanthropy, and help in the blessed ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... should: This apish and unmannerly approach, This harness'd masque and unadvised revel This unhair'd sauciness and boyish troops, The king doth smile at; and is well prepar'd To whip this dwarfish war, these pigmy arms, From out the circle of his territories. That hand which had the strength, even at your door, To cudgel you, and make you take the hatch; To dive, like buckets, in concealed wells; To crouch in litter of your stable planks; To lie, like pawns, lock'd up in chests and trunks; ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Agesilaus despicabili forma; Boccharis a most deformed prince as ever Egypt had, yet as [3613]Diodorus Siculus records of him, in wisdom and knowledge far beyond his predecessors. A. Dom. 1306. [3614] Uladeslaus Cubitalis that pigmy king of Poland reigned and fought more victorious battles than any of his long-shanked predecessors. Nullam virtus respuit staturam, virtue refuseth no stature, and commonly your great vast bodies, and fine features, are sottish, dull, and leaden spirits. What's in them? [3615]Quid nisi ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... (Circaetos gallicus and Aquila naevioides), the osprey, the vulture, the falcon, the kite, the honey-buzzard, the marsh-harrier, the sparrow-hawk, owls of two kinds (Ketupa ceylonensis and Athene meridionalis), the grey shrike (Lanius excubitor), the common cormorant, the pigmy cormorant (Graeculus pygmaeus), numerous seagulls, as the Adriatic gull (Larus melanocephalus), Andonieri's gull, the herring-gull, the Red-Sea-gull (Larus ichthyo-aetos), and others; the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... agreed to by ministers; but when Fox made a call for papers, Lord North opposed it, as liable to make discoveries prejudicial to the interests of the country. This drew down upon him a series of odious comparisons. Burke compared him to the "pigmy physician," who watched over the health of Sancho Panza, in the government of Barataria, and who snatched away every dish from his patient's well-supplied table, on various pretences, before he could get one mouthful. The house was convulsed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... The UNIVERSAL DEGENERACY OF MANKIND to the level of the "man of the future"—as idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates—this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly POSSIBLE! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows ANOTHER loathing unknown to the rest of mankind—and perhaps ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... weight and volume, and the reaction of differentiation which is the finer process. The picture is a frog, but a frog the size of a tadpole, a frog which has missed its childhood, adolescence and youth, skipping over these transition stages into the adult age, as a pigmy. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... which she scorns to visit, so sure is her memory. I do the same thing a couple of times more; and the insect always returns to the last perch, without worrying about the others. I stand amazed at the memory of that pigmy. She need but catch a single hurried glimpse of a spot that differs in no wise from a host of others in order to remember it quite well, notwithstanding the fact that, as a miner relentlessly pursuing her underground labours, she has other matters to occupy her mind. Could our own memory ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... field of grain the fiery crescent spread around the southerly end of the west addition up to Oak and Fell streets, along Octavia. There one puny engine puffed a single stream of water upon the burning mass, but its efforts were like the stabbing of a pigmy at ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the prototype of the famous Palace of Glass, which, in this Annus Mirabilis, received under its roof six millions of the people of all nations, tongues, and creeds. In extent, the conservatory at Chatsworth is but a pigmy compared with that which glorifies Hyde Park: but it is filled with the rarest Exotics from all parts of the globe—from 'farthest Ind,' from China, from the Himalayas, from Mexico; here you see the rich banana, Eschol's grape hanging in ripe profusion beneath the shadow of immense ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... wrote the Spanish Count d'Aranda to his royal master in 1782, "is born a pigmy. A day will come when it will be a giant, even a colossus. Liberty of conscience, the facility for establishing a new population on immense lands, as well as the advantages of the new government, will draw thither farmers and ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... and the prolocutor for the Grecians, gave me leave, that am a pigmy, to do an embassage to you from the cranes. Gentlemen (for kings are no better), certain humble animals, called our actors, commend them unto you; who, what offence they have committed I know not (except it be in purloining some hours out of Time's treasury, that might have been ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings with those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recorded their dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold. The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient artist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the lords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... all. Then, in addition to these, were deep gullies across the roads, worn away by small rills, proceeding from rivulets in the adjoining uplands, which were; principally dry, or at least mere threads of | water in summer, but in winter became pigmy torrents that tore up the roads across which they passed, leaving them in the dangerous ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... absolutely fatal to animal life; an atmosphere which, while it stimulated vegetable growth, no living thing could breathe and continue to live. Hence it was, that vegetation, gigantic almost beyond conception, covered its surface. Fern, which is now a pigmy plant, nowhere higher than a few feet, grew tall and overshadowing like great oaks, while oaks, it is fair to presume, towered thousands of feet towards the sky. These stupendous forests stood alone upon the surface of the earth; ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... season to this incessant panorama of childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... I went down to the front line and had leisure to examine the commandant's headquarters, which had been held by our gallant French Allies since November, 1914. It was a dugout in the rear of a ruined windmill, and contained several pigmy rooms. There was a room for the signallers, another for the adjutant and one for the commandant. The French officers had left behind them excellent maps of the German position showing their trenches, also panoramic sketches showing the roads, ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... A pigmy scraper wi' his fiddle, Wha used to trysts an' fairs to driddle, [markets, toddle] Her strappin' limb an' gawsie middle [buxom] (He reach'd nae higher) Had holed his heartie like a riddle, And blawn't ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... beetle's hum The Elfin army's goblin drum To pigmy battle sound; And now, where dripping dew-drops plash On waving grass, their bucklers clash, And now their quivering lances ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... fortune in life. Born in Chopi, he was sent for by Kamrasi, who first gave him two women, who died; then another, who ran away; and, finally, a distorted dwarf like himself, whom he rejected, because he thought the propagation of his pigmy breed would not be advantageous to society. Bombay then marched him back to the palace, with 500 simbi strung in necklaces round his neck. When these two had gone, the Kamraviona arrived with two spears, one load of flour, and a pot of pombe, which he requested me to accept, adding that the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... at Portsmouth Gates, A pigmy at Goree. An orange-tawny up the Straits, A black at St. Lucie. Thus whatsomedever course I bend ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... encinal that day with which to build new corrals at one of the outlying tanks. As he would not return before dark, and I knew the padre was due at Santa Maria that evening, my description of him made Don Blas a mere pigmy in comparison. But we finally reached the house, and on our reentering the sitting-room, young Travino very courteously arose and stood until Father Norquin should be seated. But the ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... short-tailed hawk, white-tailed hawk, Swainson hawk, short-winged hawk, broad-winged hawk, Mexican black hawk, Mexican goshawk, sparrow-hawk, barn-owl, long-eared owl, short-eared owl, great gray owl, barred owl, western owl, Richardson owl, screech-owl, snowy owl, hawk-owl, burrowing owl, pigmy owl and elf owl—live mostly on destructive mammals, insects, frogs and snakes, but they eat some birds and some of them occasionally catch poultry. Young ones do much more harm than the full-grown ones, probably because they find poultry and birds easier to obtain than other food. These species ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... were stirred by something bright. His broad chest heaves with pleasure. His strong loose hands clench themselves, in his earnestness; and he emphasizes what he says with a right arm that shows, in my pigmy view, like ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... She could not rest her soul upon this pigmy. She felt revengeful rather toward him—revengeful, because he could sit there opposite her so capable and faithful, so truthful and decent, so utterly unlike the companion whom ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... very vivid indeed along the line from Dover to London at that time. For a space they traversed just such a country-side as he had known since his childhood, the small oblongs of field, hedge-lined, of a size for pigmy horses to plough, the little roads three cart-widths wide, the elms and oaks and poplars dotting these fields about, little thickets of willow beside the streams; ricks of hay no higher than a giant's knees, dolls' ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... mood to climb there this afternoon. Lazily smoking a cigar I drank in the pastoral panorama spread out before me. The old Sumner road wound as a dusty-gray ribbon amid fields of grain and corn. Below were the pigmy figures of golfers, grotesque in their insignificance, striding ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... A man made up of a thousand members and each member a man is a grand creature,—particularly when you consider that he is self-made. And the object of this self-made giant, men-man, is to destroy another like himself, or the separate pigmy members of another such giant. We have failed to put ourselves—heads, arms, legs, and wills—together as a unit for any purpose so thoroughly as to snuff out a similar unit. Up to 1861, it seems that the business ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... hasty-pudding is thy chiefest dish, With bullock's liver, or some stinking fish: Garbage, ox-cheeks, and tripes, do feast thy brain, Which nobly pays this tribute back again. With daisy-roots thy dwarfish Muse is fed, A giant's body with a pigmy's head. Canst thou not find, among thy numerous race Of kindred, one to tell thee that thy plays Are laught at by the pit, box, galleries, nay, stage? Think on't a while, and thou wilt quickly find Thy body made for labour, not thy mind. No other use of paper thou shouldst make Than carrying ...
— English Satires • Various
... quickly all things vanish away—their bodily structure into the general substance; the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past thoughts. Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping through life—a pigmy soul carrying a dead body ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... generally supposed that the masters are the strong people of the world, but they are not. Labor is really the giant, the Samson, and it would be impossible for the pigmy, capital, to rob him, but for his lack of knowledge. The Holy Ghost sees to it that the slave class ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... other parts of the State the isolated hills generally present a rounded outline, and with a few exceptions do not inspire those strong emotions which one must necessarily experience while standing like a pigmy among the piled-up, craggy hills of northern Berkshire. Here is found the most lofty elevation in the State—Saddle Mountain—whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above tide water. Its name originated from the alleged resemblance of its top ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... world since his time far more than men equally famous in their day. It was this "invisible power" behind his ideal which triumphed over all opposition at last, and which continues to triumph in spite of the pigmy-souled crowd of party politicians who still wrangle in the political arena. Nothing lasting is ever accomplished without "vision," and the spiritual, though long in coming, will yet triumph over ignorance and prejudice and selfishness, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... The pigmy antelope inhabits some parts of Africa, and, in size, corresponds with the small deer of Ceylon. I never saw so beautiful a little creature, appearing more like a fable than a reality. Their tiny black horns are but slightly curved inwards, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... unseen. Some of us at once started for a large lagoon that we had passed in the morning, and creeping up through the long grass, found its surface quite covered with water-fowl of every description, from the black swan to the beautiful pigmy goose. A volley, fired at a concerted signal, strewed the surface of the lake with the dead and wounded, and we were compelled to stand idly on the bank until the wind wafted the game ashore, for at the report of the guns two ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... unfrequently amazed at this inequality of nature in her favorite pupil. On one side he seemed a full-grown man of grand proportions; on the other, a pigmy-child. She had heard him pour forth torrents of eloquence on the Sabbath, and felt the force of a nature exceptionally rich and strong in its conception of religious truths and human needs, only to find him on the morrow floundering hopelessly in the mire of rudimentary ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that Nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according to where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers; all bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ultimate horizon ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... paddock on the left-hand side of the entrance, a small but most interesting collection of white animals attracts the attention of the visitor. It consists of four superb Angora sheep and a pigmy bull. ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... was the simplicity and condescension of his manners. From the gigantic stature of his understanding, he was prepared to trample down his pigmy competitors, and qualified at all times to enforce his unquestioned pre-eminence; but his mind was conciliating, his behaviour unassuming, and his bosom the receptacle of ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... imperial throne, So distant, O ye gods! from every one, The royal virtues are like many a star, From this our pigmy system rather far: Whose light, though flying ever since creation, Has not yet pitched upon our nation. [Footnote: Such was the sublime opinion ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... army were particularly remarked a multitude of men of all nations, without uniform and without arms, and servants swearing in every language, and urging by dint of shouts and blows the progress of elegant carriages, drawn by pigmy horses harnessed with ropes. These were filled with provisions, or with booty saved from the flames. They carried, also, many French women with their children. Formerly these females had been happy inhabitants of Moscow; but they now fled from the hatred of the Muscovites, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... unabated between Puylaurens and Chanteloupe; and the life of the former having been on one occasion attempted, the faction of Monsieur did not hesitate to attribute the contemplated assassination to the adherents of the Queen-mother; whence arose continual conflicts between the two pigmy Courts, which rendered unavailing all the efforts of the Marquis d'Ayetona to reconcile the royal relatives. Moreover, Marie was indignant that the Marquis constantly evinced towards her son a consideration in which he sometimes failed ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... reflected as a debate between right and wrong, as to whether I should or should not be justified in taking Nancy if I could get her: it seemed as though some new and small yet dogged intruder had forced an entrance into me, an insignificant pigmy who did not hesitate to bar the pathway of the reviving giant of my desires. These contests sapped my strength. It seemed as though in my isolation I loved Nancy, I missed her more than ever, and the flavour she gave ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... remained true to a few points. One of them is antagonism to orthodoxy. It was an old cry of the German skeptics, "Away with orthodoxy. It fetters us to forms and creeds, makes us blind devotees to system, converts us into bigots, and dwarfs reason into an invisible pigmy." Yet we frequently meet with language of similar import in the present day. If we did not know its authorship we could easily tell the ecclesiastical fountain whence it flows. "The implications of false and shallow reasoning," says an American Unitarian divine, "partial observation, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... better to take the train, even though the railway went round, because the mountains were lofty, and the roads were indifferent in the region traversed. To this the lady answered with some truth that the highest peak in Britain was a pigmy to the lowest of the Selkirks, and that she had spent two summers camping among the fastnesses ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... seemed to engulf them. Every evening the squads returned, desert-stained and weary, to their rest under the lonesome stars. Every morning the sun broke fiercely up from the long level of the eastward plain to pour its hot strength down upon these pigmy creatures, who dared to invade the territory over which he had, for so many ages, held undisputed dominion. Every evening the sun plunged fiercely down behind the purple wall of mountains that shut in the Basin on the west, as if to gather strength in some nether world ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... for me to talk to a person your age about smoking," continued his mother. "When you've got your full growth and can earn money enough to pay for such foolishness you've a right to indulge in it if you see fit; but until then don't start a habit that will do you no good and may make a pigmy of you for life." ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his wants and his desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims,—with immortal longings,—with thoughts which sweep the heavens, and wander through eternity. A pigmy standing on the outward crest of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... phantom ship, whose proportions became all the more magnified the nearer she approached, rose upon them steadily out of the mist, growing into a gruesome reality each second, her hull towering over the little cutter as she bore down upon her, like a giant above a pigmy! ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... can do no wrong. But banish'd thence on Wednesday night, By Jove you can do nothing right. I hear (perhaps the story false is,) From Almacks, that he never waltzes With Lady Anne or Lady Biddy, Twirling till he's in Love, or giddy. The girl a pigmy, he a giant, His cravat stiff, her corset pliant. There, while some jaded couple stops, The rest go round like humming tops. Each in the circle with its neighbour Sharing alternate rest and labour; While ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... lofty temperamental Upper Fall, the Lower Fall appears a smug and steady pigmy. In such company, for both are always seen together, it is hard to realize that the Lower Fall is twice the height of Niagara. Comparing Yosemite's three most conspicuous features, these gigantic falls seem to appeal even more to the imagination than to the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... the deeds done by the heroes of the sixteenth century with the pigmy means at their command, they were but the merest child's play to the awful storm of devastation which, in a few hours, was to burst over southern England. Then it was England against Spain; now it was Anglo-Saxondom against the world; and the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... of the gale, too, and the angry hiss of the storm-lashed waters, contributed their quota to the feeling of awe with which we looked abroad from our pigmy ark. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... in thought has occasionally been broken in upon by pigmy rulers, who, for the moment, had a giant's power, so it seems hardly possible that a government which encouraged Goethe should have banished Wagner. The greatness of Kant was largely owing to the fact ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... brass blocks), set food before me, and by signs manifested the utmost good will. A long time afterward, when I had learned the language of the country, he explained that he had recognized me as an American pigmy, a race of which he had some little knowledge through a letter from a brother, who had been in my country. He showed me the letter, of which the chief part is here ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... advanced, to meet each other in deadly conflict, the Trojans marched with noisy shouts, like the clamor of the cranes, when they fly to the streams of Oceanus, in the early morning, screaming, and bringing death and destruction to the Pigmy men; but the Achaieans came on in ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... above honesty,' said Mrs Hurtle, 'as a great general rises above humanity when he sacrifices an army to conquer a nation. Such greatness is incompatible with small scruples. A pigmy man is stopped by a little ditch, but a giant ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... awake each slumb'ring string, And (mighty subject!) of a Mushroom sing, Fair to the eye, and pleasant to the taste; Charm'd by the note, a pigmy group, in haste, Lay down their grainy loads, as slow they move Thro' lanes of reed and grass, to them a grove! As if an Orpheus thou, they gather round, Erect their tiny ears, and drink the sound. Gray was the sky, save where the eastern ray O'er ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... set all the malice of all the pigmy writers at defiance, and thought the friendship of Mr. Pope cheaply purchased by being exposed to their censure and their hatred; nor had he any reason to repent of the preference, for he found Mr. Pope a steady ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... a wholly unsuccessful attempt to look unconcerned—at a quaint old painting of Sergeant Broughton who first taught Englishmen to box scientifically. When the great are really wrathful it ill becomes pigmy people to jabber or argue. So I waited with bent head and respectful silence to which the passing moods of such ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... full sorely nettled. With foaming mouth, and flashing eye, He roars. All creatures hide or fly,— Such mortal terror at The work of one poor gnat! With constant change of his attack, The snout now stinging, now the back, And now the chambers of the nose; The pigmy fly no mercy shows. The lion's rage was at its height; His viewless foe now laugh'd outright, When on his battle-ground he saw, That every savage tooth and claw Had got its proper beauty By doing bloody duty; Himself, the hapless lion, tore his hide, And lash'd with sounding ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... time when the animals reigned on the earth they had killed all but a girl and her little brother, and these two were living in fear and seclusion. The boy was a perfect pigmy, never growing beyond the stature of a small infant, but the girl increased with her years, so that the labour of providing food and lodging devolved wholly on her. She went out daily to get wood for their lodge fire, and took her brother ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... music the peace of the words stole over the dwarf's troubled spirit, soothing and fortifying him so that he felt himself no longer a weakling, a pigmy, but a veritable giant to fight and to endure. And with a smile upon his lips and a light not of earth in his sunken eyes, Bambo and his charges slipped noiselessly away from the bear, the monkey, and the ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... evidence of the existence of that heroic valor which has so often led our arms on to glory and immortality? Re-open negotiation, sir, with France? Do it, and soon you will find your flag insulted, dishonored, and trodden in the dust by the pigmy States of Asia and Africa—by the very banditti of the earth. Sir, the only negotiations, says the President of the United States, that he would encounter, should be at the ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's Bureau reports only incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible parenthood that is ignored ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... his friends could drive this belief out of his head. Not only when he was engaged in writing, but even in the midst of an ordinary conversation, at supper, or whilst drinking a social glass of wine or rum, he would suddenly exclaim, "See there—there—that ugly little pigmy—see what capers he cuts. Pray don't incommode yourself, my little man. You are at liberty to listen to us as much as you please. Will you not approach nearer? You are welcome." (Here, and occasionally, he would accompany his words with violent muscular ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... of North America, whose instinctive care to defend itself from danger causes it to feign the appearance of death. As the great continent of Australia became known, it was found that the great mass of its mammalia, from the gigantic kangaroo to the pigmy, mouse-like potoroo, belonged to this singular order. The order contains a most anomalous set of animals, some being exclusively carnivorous, some chiefly subsisting on insects, while others browse ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... tangent organ wander o'er The rock-built mountain, and the winding shore; No apt ideas could the pigmy mite, Or embryon emmet to the touch excite; But as each mass the solar ray reflects, The eye's clear glass the transient beams collects; Bends to their focal point the rays that swerve, And paints the living image on the nerve. So in some village-barn, or festive hall The spheric lens ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... as you may think fit to cast into it as preparatory to the introduction into the union of the miserable residue. No man can contradict me when I say, that if you have this power, you may squeeze down a new-born sovereign State to the size of a pigmy, and then taking it between finger and thumb, stick it into some niche of the Union, and still continue by way of mockery to call it a State in the sense of the Constitution. You may waste it to a shadow, and then introduce it into ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... Pigmy seraphs gone astray, Velvet people from Vevay, Belles from some lost summer day, Bees' exclusive coterie. Paris could not lay the fold Belted down with emerald; Venice could not show a cheek Of a tint so lustrous ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... muddy stream, and with its low banks, scattered flat sand-bars, and pigmy islands, a melancholy river, straggling through the centre of vast prairies, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel trees standing at long distances from each other, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... once what he thought, for without the least hesitation he took the one step which placed him in front of me, where he stood waiting with his two little fists hanging straight at his sides but manfully clenched in full readiness for attack. That this display of pigmy chivalry was not quite without its warrant is evident to me now, for Father did not look like himself or act like himself any more than he had the ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... idleness is personified by another pigmy, the Geancanach (love-talker). He does not appear, like the Leprechaun, with a purse in one of his pockets, but with his hands in both of them, and a dudeen (short pipe) in his mouth, as he lazily strolls through lonely valleys making love to the foolish country lasses and "gostering" with the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... thought somebody was shooting out cartloads of stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big stones into pieces. Then I realised that under this sound there was also a strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it every now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols. Then I knew what it was. I went to the window; and a great firelight flung across two meadows smote me where I stood. "Oh, my holy aunt," I thought, "they've mistaken ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... foundation of fifteen generations of Kami, whose birth seems to have been essential to the "making of the land," though their names afford no clue to the functions discharged by them. From over sea, seated in a gourd and wearing a robe of wren's feathers, there comes a pigmy, Sukuna Hikona, who proves to be one of fifteen hundred children begotten by the Kami of the original trinity. Skilled in the arts of healing sickness and averting calamities from men or animals, this pigmy renders invaluable aid to the Great-Name Possessor. But the useful ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... protectorship will be pleased to confer upon me?' To which his mighty ugliness replied, 'Friend Naylor, I know thou hast been very industrious to make many people fools in the upper world, which has highly conduced to my interest.' Then turning to a pigmy aerial, who attended his commands as a running footman, 'Haste, Numps,' says he, 'and fetch me the painted coat,' which was no sooner brought, but by Lucifer's command I was shoved into it, neck and shoulders, by half a dozen ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... and almost as impatient for the start for the Dark Continent. Ben slept at the Chester's home that night and if his dreams were not as populated with visions of elephants, leopards, deer, huge snakes and pigmy savages as theirs it was not any lack of interest in the coming expedition that ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... he gazed at the cars that they ran pigmy freight trains in the land he came from, and he was conscious of something that had a curious stirring effect on him in the clang and clatter of that giant rolling stock, as the engineer hurled his great train furiously down-grade. It was man's defiance of the wilderness, ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... made a point of visiting the celebrated and immense nitre caverns or catacombs of the limestone region. Here I found the mummies of the pigmy race that once inhabited the gigantic valley of the Mississippi, adorned with strings of shell-wampum and turkeys' feathers—seated in death like the ancient Naso-menes, grinning at me with their long inhuman fore-teeth—and came out as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths from his own pulpit every Sunday. Contemplate this freak of nature, and think what a Cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pigmy skin. If we probe, and dissect; and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Apeman, standing six feet two inches in height and weighing over two hundred pounds avoirdupois, heretofore regarded as a marvel in physical development, now, in the presence of these eight-foot giants, felt like a shrunken pigmy. Formerly it was generally conceded that I was a rather handsome fellow. This woman thought I was hideous. Previously, I had felt proud of my nicely curled heavy black mustache, now I thought it ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... Mustapha advanced into Austria, looking neither to the right nor the left, marching onward, onward to Vienna. Such obstacles as he encountered on his way he removed by the might and strength of his forces, as an elephant lifts his ponderous foot to crush a pigmy lying in his path. His march was through burning villages and devastated fields; the glare of his torch illumined the sky, the blood of his victims reddened the earth. Austria's desponding hopes were concentrated upon the Duke of Lorraine; for the King of Poland had not arrived, and ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... declares, through the mouth of his modern science,—he is not of real importance withal. The little planet on which he dwells would, to all seeming, move on in its orbit in the same way as it does now, without him. In itself it is a pigmy world compared with the rest of the solar system of which it is a part. Nevertheless, the fact cannot be denied that his material surroundings are of a quality tending to either impress or to deceive Man with a sense of his own value. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... of the toilet of the Egyptians. He was represented as a deformed pigmy. He led the women to conquest in love, and the men in war. He was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... there are thirty varieties of antelopes known and described; eighteen of them are found in this country, and there are the largest and smallest of the species; for we have the eland, and we have the pigmy antelope, which is not above six inches high. We see here also the intermediate links of many genera, such as the eland and the gnoo; and as we find the elephant, the rhinoceros, and Wilmot's friend, the ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... the worst of my trying to give a consecutive narrative of my first years at the Lyceum. Henry Irving looms across them, reducing all events, all feelings, all that happened, and all that was suggested, to pigmy size. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... man accustomed to camels for exploration, the beautiful horse sinks into the insignificance of a pigmy when compared to his majestic rival, the mighty ship of the desert, and assuredly had it not been for these creatures and their marvellous powers, I never could have performed the three last journeys which complete ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... he exclaimed; "not a step further! See, see!" There, at the foot of a large tree, with its tail coiled round an upper branch, its body circling the trunk, was a huge python. Our uncle's pet, compared to it, was a mere pigmy. It was pressing with its enormous body a large pig, which, with its huge mouth wide open, it was preparing to swallow. So eager was it that it did not observe us. We stood transfixed with a feeling akin to horror, lest any movement might disturb it. We knew that ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... territory, from out another vent, springs the Flora River, whose waters ripple over limestone bars in miniature cascades, from pool to pool, like pigmy reproductions of the lost terraces of New Zealand. Follow the edge of the great tableland around, and amongst the deep seams and fissures of its abrupt descent coastward, we suddenly come, midst rugged barreness and gloomy grandeur, upon these messengers ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... had such a developer. He never was a born railwayman, any more than he was a pure financier. He was a colossal exploiter of national resources by means of borrowed money. In the era before Mackenzie we had Clergue at the Soo. Clergue was a pigmy forerunner of Mackenzie. What Clergue did in Algoma the other man aimed to do for the whole country, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... lassie, with a monster oil-glazed sarcophagus-looking milliner's basket, carrying home a couple of bonnets to a customer. See! there is lame Jack, who sweeps the crossing in the borough, followed by a lady with her 'six years' darling of a pigmy size,' whom she calls 'Little Popps,' both hurrying home to dinner after a morning's shopping. All these, and a hundred others of equally varied description, go off on the landing-stage, whence they will have to pay their obolus to the Charon of the Thames ere they are swallowed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... able to understand: Before the song was well finished, Mr Cumming came up with the tobacco, and I could not but smile at the astonishment which I saw expressed in his countenance, upon perceiving himself, though six feet two inches high, become at once a pigmy among giants; for these people may indeed more properly be called giants than tall men. Of the few among us who are full six feet high, scarcely any are broad and muscular in proportion to their stature, but look rather like men of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... mutters, "What an awful sight! how madly grand with briny light!" How sublimely terrific are the elements here combined to wage war against the craft he thought safe from their thunders! She is but a pigmy in their devouring sweep, a feeble prey at their mercy. The starboard wheel rumbles as it turns far out of water; the larboard is buried in a deep sea the ship careens into. Through the fierce drear ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... as sloes? See here a shocking awkward creature, That speaks a fool in every feature.' 'The woman's blind,' the mother cries; 'I see wit sparkle in his eyes.' 20 'Lord! madam, what a squinting leer; No doubt the fairy hath been here.' Just as she spoke, a pigmy sprite Pops through the key-hole, swift as light; Perched on the cradle's top he stands, And thus her folly reprimands: 'Whence sprung the vain conceited lie, That we the world with fools supply? What! give our sprightly race away, For the dull helpless ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... he gazed at it, he half thought himself an actor in a fairy portal [tale?]; and would not have been surprised—at least, he would have taken it with the composure of a dream—if the mimic portal had unclosed, and a form of pigmy majesty had appeared within, beckoning him to enter and find the revelation of what had so long perplexed him. The key of the cabinet was in the lock, and knowing that it was not now the receptacle of anything in the shape of family papers, he threw it open; and there appeared the mosaic ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for new service further Pacificward. Of Frijoles there remained barely enough to shudder at, with the collector's nasal bawl of "Free Holys!" and everywhere the irrepressible tropical greenery was already rushing back to engulf the pigmy works of man. It seemed criminally wasteful to have built these entire towns with all the detail and machinery of a well governed and fully furnished city from police station to salt cellars only to tear them down again and utterly wipe ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... her bow appears A champion no danger fears; A pigmy craft, that seems to be, To this new lord that rules the sea, Like David of old To Goliath bold— Youth and giant, by ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... below to feel giddy as they gazed. It was, indeed, a strange and somewhat fearful spectacle— that slight human form, sixty or seventy feet above their heads, at such a vast elevation so diminished in size as to appear like a child or a pigmy, and the more fearful to them who could not convince themselves of the security of the slender stair upon which he was standing. They were half expecting that, at any moment, one of the pegs would give way, and precipitate the poor fellow to the earth, a crushed ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... motions, and provoke the war So when inclement winters vex the plain With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain, To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly,(108) With noise, and order, through the midway sky; To pigmy nations wounds and death they bring, And all the war descends upon the wing, But silent, breathing rage, resolved and skill'd(109) By mutual aids to fix a doubtful field, Swift march the Greeks: the rapid dust around Darkening arises from the labour'd ground. Thus from ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the rapids of the St. Louis has been well described: "Like specks on the broad bosom of the waters, two pigmy vessels held their course up the lonely St. Lawrence. They passed abandoned Tadoussac, the channel of Orleans, the tenantless rock of Quebec, the wide Lake of St. Peter with its crowded archipelago, and the forest ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... organized the Termans," suggested another Council Member, "despite their pigmy size, they will become a menace that cannot ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... the beginning of the seventeenth century, crossed the Atlantic in two pigmy barks—one of twelve, the other of fifteen tons—and ascended the St. Lawrence on an exploring tour. At Hochelaga all was changed. The Indian town had vanished, and not a trace remained of the savage population which Cartier saw there ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... ruthless hand had been so pitilessly stretched forth over the suffering land—it was the all-powerful minister, the curse of Spain, the butcher of the noble Torrijos and his unhappy companions, whom he, the insignificant student, had cast down from his high state! The giant had succumbed before the pigmy; the virtual ruler of the kingdom had fallen by the agency of one whom, a day previously, he might with impunity have annihilated. Events so extraordinary and of such rapid occurrence, were hard to comprehend; and Federico ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... I grew to realise facts, to see men and women as they are, not as they appear! Sometimes the bare word 'reality' fills me with such loathing for this paltry world, with its pigmy minds and soulless bodies, that I can hardly control my contempt. I pull myself together, and pray for a new set of nerves, a stronger heart, and a better flow of healthy blood ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... farmer, of Manchester, New Hampshire. I was not long in dispatching an efficient agent to Manchester, and in overcoming the competition with other showmen who were equally eager to secure this extraordinary pigmy. The terms upon which I engaged him for three years were so large that he was christened the $30,000 Nutt; I, in the meantime, conferring upon him the title of Commodore. As soon as I engaged him, placards, posters and the columns of the newspapers proclaimed ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... for Lord Saltire let me have the run of his library. Gibbon gave me a couple of enchanting weeks. You know the effect that he produces. You seem to be serenely floating upon a cloud, and looking down on all these pigmy armies and navies, with a wise Mentor ever at your side to whisper to you the inner meaning of all ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... relinquished their prize, though defended only by the courage and address of a single man. On his proper element Yawkins was equally successful. On one occasion he was landing his cargo at the Manxman's Lake near Kirkcudbright, when two revenue cutters (the 'Pigmy' and the 'Dwarf') hove in sight at once on different tacks, the one coming round by the Isles of Fleet, the other between the point of Rueberry and the Muckle Ron. The dauntless freetrader instantly weighed anchor and bore ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... below at the house—a doll's house; at the toy corrals and tiny sheds and stables. Slim, walking down the hill, was a mere pigmy—a short, waddling insect. At least, to a girl unused to gazing from a height, each object seemed absurdly small. Flying U coulee stretched away to the west, with a silver ribbon drawn carelessly through it with many a twist and loop, ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... disengaged. With a fine saw I form them into little boards and then smooth them with a sharp case knife, but the London veneering-mills would turn them out fit for immediate use, without any necessity for more than a touch of fine glass-paper. Some of my pigmy boards are two feet long by three and a half inches wide, which is more than sufficient for our purpose, and to me they have proved a vast acquisition. The natives call them 'Kirilimow,' the latter syllable signifying root"—TEMPLETON, Trans. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some contention as to who should have the ears; but in spite of his obstinacy (deaf as these little creatures are to advice), I contrived to get ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... among the shelves of your imperial library. The greatest historian of the century is nothing but the custodian of a library, and is subordinate to a chief whom he must obey, although the latter is mentally a pigmy compared with him. Such a position is unworthy of your eminent abilities, or tell me, do you ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... thy range; with varied style Thy Muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle To that hoar pile which still its ruin shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy-folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground! Or thither, where, beneath the showery West, The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid: Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest; No slaves revere them, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"—all save one, and he the nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... the fighting when he rose again, Deadly the blows their sturdy gauntlets dealt. But while Bebrycia's chieftain sparred round chest And utmost shoulder, the resistless foe Made his whole face one mass of hideous wounds. While the one sweated all his bulk away, And, late a giant, seemed a pigmy now, The other's limbs waxed ever as he fought In semblance and in size. But in what wise The child of Zeus brought low that man of greed, Tell, Muse, for thine is knowledge: I unfold A secret not mine own; at thy behest ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... everywhere about the lagoons—ducks, shags, great geese, and pigmy geese, hovering and settling about them in screaming clouds; and after dinner, deciding we might as well have a bit of game for supper, we walked across the open salt-bush plain to the Big Red Lily. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... then! Read the old French writers! None was a pigmy. When they stood under the waterfall the water ran off their skins as off a marble table. Not a drop stayed on. They were as smooth ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... which these quarrels gave rise, but various and severe wars were carried on between the Attalids and the Galatians, between the Attalids and the kings of Bithynia, and even between Rhodes and Crete. In Hellas proper, in like manner, the pigmy feuds which were customary there continued to smoulder; and even Macedonia, formerly so tranquil, consumed its strength in the intestine strife that arose out of its new democratic constitutions. It was the fault of the rulers as well as ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... farm-house, across the river?" says a brave pigmy of a chap in navy uniform. "That is head-quarters for Secession. They were going to take the School from us, Sir, and the frigate; but we've got ahead of 'em, now you and the Massachusetts boys have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... however, yet improved in proportion to our nearness to Soudan; for this dwarf forest of tholukh and various other trees cannot be compared to the splendid desert vegetation in the Aheer valleys; these are pigmy mimosas in comparison with those of Aheer. The surface of the ground is now undulating sand and red earth, and every trace of stone has almost disappeared; the soil is also covered with karengia and other herbs, all dry and sapless. We seem to be traversing ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... great golden disc up over the ridge. It was at the full and made glorious patterns of light through the forest. Little voices of the night which he had not heard until now began to thrill and quiver under the soft light. It was as though the North Woods were filled with a secret, pigmy people who were moon worshippers; as though now they greeted their goddess with an elfin chant ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... hills seem Alps, when veil'd in misty shroud, Some men seem kings, through mists of ignorance; Must we have darkness, then, and cloud on cloud, To give our hills and pigmy kings a chance? Must we conspire to curse the humbling light, Lest some one, at whose feet our fathers bow'd, Should suddenly appear, full length, in sight, Scaring to laughter the adoring crowd? Oh, no! God send us light!—Who loses then? The king of slaves and not the king of men. True kings are ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... responsibility, owing allegiance to God and my own conscience alone. I may have been born with less capacity than the least among you, with small chance of growing to your mental stature, or reaching your standard of moral elevation; but I have a perfect right to sit in your midst, pigmy that I may be, since I am one of "the people" who did ordain this glorious old Constitution, and one of "the governed," whose consent is made the basis of a government ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... more than a literary colossus. Pigmies can only claim pigmy honors. Size, after all, rules in this universe, because size and power go together. The large bodies rule the small. There is no impression of greatness in art without something that is analogous to size,—breadth, depth, height. The sense of vastness is never ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... beneath the common size, was one day accosted in a public coffee-room by an Irish baronet of colossal stature, with, "May I pass to my seat, O Giant?" When the doctor, politely making way, replied, "Pass, O Pigmy!"—"O, sir," said the baronet, "my expression alluded to the size of your intellect."—"And my expression, sir," said the doctor, "to the size ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... lower. Thus, far from being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the precipice the Cliff ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... was no longer to figure in lithography as the fantastic Prince Rosolin; no longer were multitudes (in chalk) to shelter under the enormous shadow of M. d'Argout's nose: Marshal Loban's squirt was hung up in peace, and M. Thiers's pigmy figure and round spectacled face were no more to appear in print.* Robert Macaire was driven out of the Chambers and the Palace—his remarks were a great deal too appropriate and too severe for the ears of the great men who congregated ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but one pony for the two, and they were to ride "turn about"; but Chuar'ruumpeak, the chief, rides, and Shuts, the one-eyed, barelegged, merry-faced pigmy, walks, and points the way with a slender cane; then leaps and bounds by the shortest way, and sits down on a rock and waits demurely until we come, always meeting us with a jest, his face a ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... survived to our day; and a similar fact is to be observed in many of the earlier geological epochs, a group progressing and reaching a maximum of size or complexity and then dying out, or leaving at most but few and pigmy representatives. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Fahrenheit, on which we could measure the height of a man's mind. How delightful it would be to drag up some pompous pretender who passes off at once upon himself and others as a profound and able man, and make him measure his height upon that pillar, and understand beyond all cavil what a pigmy he is! And how pleasant, too, it would be to bring up some man of unacknowledged genius, and make the world see the reach of his intellectual stature! The mass of educated people, even, are so incapable of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... black-faced pond, suggests to him the image of a "gay French lady," dropped, with straightened limbs, into the silent ocean of death; while the Hungarian Tokay (Tokayer Ausbruch), in its concentrated strength, seems to jump on to the table as a stout pigmy castle-warder, strutting and swaggering in his historic costume, and ready to defy twenty men at ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... quadrupeds brings the whole question of the succession of species vividly before one's mind; and I found in South America great pieces of tesselated armour exactly like, but on a magnificent scale, that covering the pigmy armadillo; I had found great teeth like those of the living sloth, and bones like those of the cavy. An analogous succession of allied forms had been previously observed in Australia. Here then we see the prevalence, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... In vain I looked around for a stone, and sought in every pocket for my knife, with which either to strike the copper-cap and bring about ignition, or hamstring the colossal but harmless animal, by whose towering side I appeared the veriest pigmy in the creation. Alas! I had lent it to the Hottentots to cut off the head of the hartebeeste, and, after a hopeless search in the remotest comers, each hand was withdrawn empty. Vainly did I then wait for the tardy and rebellious villains to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... once Pueriles I had read, And newly had my Cato construed, 20 In my small selfe I greatly marueil'd then, Amonst all other, what strange kinde of men These Poets were; And pleased with the name, To my milde Tutor merrily I came, (For I was then a proper goodly page, Much like a Pigmy, scarse ten yeares of age) Clasping my slender armes about his thigh. O my deare master! cannot you (quoth I) Make me a Poet, doe it if you can, And you shall see, Ile quickly bee a man, 30 Who me ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... suffered in the person of Flimnap the Lilliputian Premier, Tories and Whigs in the High-Heels and Low-Heels, Catholics and Protestants in the Big-endians and Small-endians. In the "Voyage to Brobdingnag," where Gulliver finds himself a pigmy among giants, the general object of the satire is the same, but its application becomes more bitter and universal. Characteristics of the human race hardly perceptible in their ordinary proportions, attain a disgusting and monstrous prominence when ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman |
