"Dwarfish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time-honoured bricks which composed the fabric, were strongly contrasted by large Venetian windows newly inserted in frames of the most ostentatious white. A smart, green veranda, scarcely finished, ran along the low portico, and formed the termination to two thin rows of meagre and dwarfish sycamores, which did duty for an avenue, and were bounded, on the roadside, by a spruce white gate, and a sprucer lodge, so moderate in its dimensions, that it would scarcely have boiled a turnip: ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we shall find out. I daresay the astute reader has already guessed the name of the gentleman who caused this distinct and sudden interest and flung consternation and activity into two separate groups. As James Darlington followed the glance of the young girl, he had recognized the dwarfish figure of the Mexican who had robbed him of his treasure and who had previously led him and his party into dire trouble—hence his excitement, but why the interest of the Senorita da Cordova?—Ah! that is another tale, but now to tell the story of the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... inches and taller by half a head, dwindled, seen in juxtaposition with this man of the iron will and the leader's temperament, to a flabby, dwarfish, and petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in, and read him, and dropped him, and fastened on the little Englishwoman, as the great boots tramped heavily across the floor, and the great voice ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Without father or mother, without sister or brother, without a home, he found himself alone—all alone in the world, where he never asked to come, and whence he could have gone, without anybody caring at all about it. He was not called Gringalet in mere sport; he was dwarfish and puny, and reedy; no one would have given him over seven or eight years, yet he was thirteen; but if he did not look more than half his age, it was not his fault, for he had not on the average eaten more than every other day, and then so little, and so bad, that he really ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... and coat, but who says himself that his size has marred his fortune. He is cockney born, about fifty; quality and splendor act forcibly on his imagination, and he is much condemned in the houses where I visit on account of his dwarfish stature"; and we are told that the English favor pretty faces for their maids and fine figures for ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... it with tribes of memories, lower and dwarfish, but myriads strong. The bells from some convent rang, the December stars blazed beyond his window, he put out his arms ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... the hall a man of dwarfish stature came towards them. Under the dome of his tiny hat his unshaven face began to smile with pleasure and he was heard to murmur. The eyes were melancholy ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... below, like some great castle tower; for he was a giant in size, and his coat of mail was so huge that twenty men of common mould might have found shelter, or hidden themselves, within it. As the smith Mimer, so dwarfish in stature, tolled up the steep hillside, Amilias smiled to see him; for he felt no fear of the slender, gleaming blade that was to try the metal of his war coat. And already a shout or expectant triumph went up from the throats ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... stern and steep, The hill sinks down upon the deep. Here Vennachar in silver flows, There, ridge on ridge, Benledi rose; Ever the hollow path twined on, Beneath steep hank and threatening stone; A hundred men might hold the post With hardihood against a host. The rugged mountain's scanty cloak Was dwarfish shrubs of birch and oak With shingles bare, and cliffs between And patches bright of bracken green, And heather black, that waved so high, It held the copse in rivalry. But where the lake slept deep and still Dank osiers fringed the swamp and hill; And oft both path and hill were torn Where ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... "Nebran—" The dwarfish nonhuman gabbled something then doubled behind me. I saw him dodge, feint in the direction of the gates, then, as the crowd surged that way, run for the street-shrine across the square, slipping from recess to recess of the wall. A hail of stones went flying in that direction. The little ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... and had no profession but literature. And fourth, by the sheer force of his ambition he won his place, and held it, in spite of religious prejudice, and in the face of physical and temperamental obstacles that would have discouraged a stronger man. For Pope was deformed and sickly, dwarfish in soul and body. He knew little of the world of nature or of the world of the human heart. He was lacking, apparently, in noble feeling, and instinctively chose a lie when the truth had manifestly more advantages. Yet this jealous, peevish, waspish little man ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the dwarfish demon styled That foiled the knights in Marialva's dome: Of brains (if brains they had) he them beguiled, And turned a nation's shallow joy to gloom. Here Folly dashed to earth the victor's plume, And Policy regained what Arms ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well managed nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... dawn of day, we inspanned, and trekked about five hours in a northeasterly course, through a boundless open country sparingly adorned with dwarfish old trees. In the distance the long-sought mountains of Bamangwato at length loomed blue before me. We halted beside a glorious fountain, which at once made me forget all the cares and difficulties I had encountered in reaching ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of his rival with uneasiness and aversion. He often commented upon it to his particular confidents as a thing altogether inconceivable. Mr. Falkland he described as an animal that was beneath contempt. Diminutive and dwarfish in his form, he wanted to set up a new standard of human nature, adapted to his miserable condition. He wished to persuade people that the human species were made to be nailed to a chair, and to pore over books. He would have them ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... found a couple of native families living on the shore in rude huts, composed of the branches of trees, and with mud and stones heaped over them. The people were the ugliest I had ever seen, being more like baboons than men and women. They were dwarfish in stature, the tallest of the party not exceeding five feet in height, and the majority of the others quite a foot shorter. I noticed also, as the skipper had told me, that their apparel was of the very scantiest ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... quantities of miasm. Some of the lakes are clear and of a sandy bottom, but the most are of a different character. The French settled near a lake or a river, apparently in the most unhealthy places, and yet their constitutions are little affected, and they usually enjoy good health, though dwarfish and shrivelled in ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... revelry which the fancy of the painter has poured around this spell-bound pair, baffles all description. All is mirthful, tricksy, and fantastic. Sprites of all looks and all hues—of all "dimensions, shapes, and mettles,"—the dwarfish elf and the elegant fay—Cobweb commissioned to kill a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle, that Bottom might have the honey-bag—Pease-Blossom, who had the less agreeable employment of scratching ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... parade of any of its great and famous rivals, the street parade of this circus was a meager and disappointing thing. Why, there was only one elephant, a dwarfish and debilitated-looking creature, worn mangy and slick on its various angles, like the cover of an old-fashioned haircloth trunk; and obviously most of the closed cages were weather-beaten stake wagons in disguise. Nevertheless, there was a sizable turnout of people for the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the top landing of a French restaurant we had gained access, by means of a trap, to the roof of the building. Now, the busy streets of Soho were below me, and I clung dizzily to telephone standards and smoke stacks, rarely venturing to glance downward upon the cosmopolitan throng, surging, dwarfish, in ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... We tried to talk, but could think of nothing to say. Then the servant returned, ushering in a dwarfish Arab in a dirty white turban, and the shabby black galabeah worn only by the poor who cannot afford good materials and the ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... in mountainous situations, where they are constantly exposed to strong-blowing winds, are always dwarfish; in such situations, the present plant has no stalk, whence its name acaulis, but cultivated in ...
— The Botanical Magazine v 2 - or Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... a dwarfish birch are two mountain plants of no small ornamental value for the plains. They may not endure the moister air near the Mississippi, but there we have already many useful natives, like the black haw and thorn apple, that are as ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... unjust, and were, in the relation in which the Achaeans stood to the Romans, more than unseemly; and yet in his very impolitic complaisance towards the Hellenes he had substantially done what the Achaeans willed. But the matter did not end there. The Achaeans, tormented by their dwarfish thirst for aggrandizement, would not relax their hold on the town of Pleuron in Aetolia which they had occupied during the war, but on the contrary made it an involuntary member of their confederacy; they bought Zacynthus from Amynander the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... an air of decent comfort. Through the window appeared a very little vegetable garden with a border of the hardiest flowers. "The large beans there," explained the host, "are for soup and coffee. My corn," he said, pointing out some rows of dwarfish maize, "has escaped the early August frosts, and so I expect to have some roasting-ears ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... Corner was becoming dazed with happiness. Curious thoughts about his fairy-godmother crept into his head; strange thrills of pleasure and of pain shot through his dwarfish frame, and turned him well-nigh sick with emotion. It seemed to Caspar that he had grown older and younger in that one summer day. He felt giddy, and suddenly longed for his quiet ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... a slothful servant in thy family, an idle laborer in thy vineyard, 'an unfruitful branch,' a poor dwarfish member in thy body. Grant, O grant a little fruit on the topmost bough. O, at the 'eleventh hour' may I begin to work, to bear some fruit, to the glory of that grace by which my soul is saved from the wages of sin, death, and hell, and made heir, by free gift, of the ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... full of food, and rang continuously to the voice of the caller of gifts; I had to blush a little later when my own present came, and I heard my one pig and eight miserable pine-apples being counted out like guineas. In the four corners of the yard and along one wall, there are make-shift, dwarfish, Samoan houses or huts, which have been run up since Captain Wurmbrand came to accommodate the chiefs. Before that they were all crammed into the six cells, and locked in for the night, some of them with dysentery. They are wretched constructions enough, but sanctified by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mental and physical stuffiness until the Middle Ages were passed,—or else took to the wilds under any vigorous mind, and became bandits. The open country was all trodden down by wave after wave of marauding, murdering, beer-swilling, turbulent giants from the north,—or by the still more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece; they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy; host after host of them;—civilization ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the calm delight, and thus proceed Through the green lane,—then linger in the mead, - Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom, - And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum; Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass, And press the sandy sheep-walk's slender grass, Where dwarfish flowers among the gorse are spread, And the lamb browses by the linnet's bed; Then 'cross the bounding brook they make their way O'er its rough bridge—and there behold the bay! - The ocean smiling to ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... fiction, seemed to think; for, though every bandbox had a carefully closed lid, not one among them had a bottom; owing to which cause the property within was merely, as it were, extinguished. The chest of drawers having been originally made to stand upon the top of another chest, had a dwarfish, elfin look, alone; but in regard of its security it had a great advantage over the bandboxes, for as all the handles had been long ago pulled off, it was very difficult to get at its contents. This indeed was only to be done ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... introduced them into a small bare room with a single table, a sofa, and a dwarfish fire; and Michael called promptly for more coals and a couple of ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... affects every phase and aspect of child as well as adult, by doing something to the speed of activities in their cells, is told straightway by the effects of it when eaten or introduced into the skin or blood of various people. A cretin, idiotic, dwarfish, deformed, hopeless, an incessantly prodding burden of sorrow to the mother, who looks upon the masterpiece she had labored to bring forth, and beholds a terrible gargoyle, becomes transformed when ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... rocks containing copper and tin. Then they built great roaring fires, to smelt the ore into ingots. They would show the teachers that the Dutch kabouters could make bells, as well as the men in the lands of the South. These dwarfish people are jealous of men and very proud of what they ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... fortune perhaps upon the whole appearing to favour the Cymry, who not only slew a vast number of their adversaries, but partially succeeded in recovering their lost dominions. {7c} At this critical juncture a dwarfish herald arrived at the fence, proposing on the part of the Saxons a truce or compact, which, however, was indignantly rejected by the natives, and the action renewed. {7d} The scales now rapidly turned. In one part of the field such a terrible carnage ensued, that there was but one man left ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... those glaring colours which amazed me in "Bussy D'Amboys" upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly[2]; nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought, dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles; the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all, uncorrect English, and a hideous ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... derided the image of the god: for the image of Hephaistos very nearly resembles the Phenician Pataicoi, which the Phenicians carry about on the prows of their triremes; and for him who has not seen these, I will indicate its nature,—it is the likeness of a dwarfish man. He entered also into the temple of the Cabeiroi, into which it is not lawful for any one to enter except the priest only, and the images there he even set on fire, after much mockery of them. Now these also are ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... approach larger rocky islands, and the huge, grey, broken rocks of the main land, where dwarfish pine woods grow in a continual combat with the blast; the Skjaergaards sometimes become only a narrow canal, sometimes an extensive lake strewed with small islets, all of stone, and often only a mere block of stone, to which a single little fir-tree clings ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... trees, and the loneliness of the vast, empty earth comes back to us,—what is forgotten in the rush of the sunshine,—the constant loom of the mystery. One understands then why the early men feared the plains when it was dark, and huddled themselves together in the hills. Who could say what ugly, dwarfish things, what evil fairies, what dangerous dead men might climb up over the rim of the world? A man was not afraid of the grey wolf, or even the huge beast that trumpeted in the morass by the great water when the light was at his back, but when the world was darkened old men ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... vastly, and he said it was the finest street in the city, and should be called the Kurfuerstendamm. His master and all the Germans who came to live in it agreed with him. They gave large rents for a flat in one of the houses, and when they went to London and saw the smoky dwarfish houses there they came away as quickly as possible and rubbed their hands and were happy, and said to each other, "How beautiful is our Kurfuerstendamm. We have as many turrets as we have chimneys, and we have garlands on our balconies of green or gilded iron, and some of us ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... carpenter, a journeyman carpenter of small dimensions, decidedly below the middle size—bordering, perhaps, upon the dwarfish. His face was round and shining, and his hair carefully twisted into the outer corner of each eye, till it formed a variety of that description of semi-curls, usually known as 'aggerawators.' His earnings were all-sufficient for his wants, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... for a moment awe-struck as I gazed at the shrivelled and dwarfish bodies, the long, ape-like arms, and huge disproportioned heads, from which fell their hair in snaky tangles, black ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... great deal of the best intellectual work is done by men who are physically screws; by men who are nearly blind, broken-winded, lame, and weakly. We all know what the Apostle Paul was physically; we know too what the world owes to that dwarfish, bald, stammering man. I never in my life read anything more touching than the story of that poor weakly creature, Dr. George Wilson, the Professor of Technology in the University of Edinburgh. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... open, and pacing slowly up and down in front of it was a tall slave in white tunic and turban, who, turning his gleaming eyeballs on Sah-luma, nodded by way of salutation, and then uttered a sharp, peculiar whistle. This summons brought out two curious, dwarfish figures of men, whose awkward misshapen limbs resembled the contorted branches of wind-blown trees, and whose coarse and repulsive countenances betokened that malignant delight in evil-doing which only demons are supposed to know. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... dwarfish race, And Durin too Were then created. And like to men Dwarfs in the earth Were formed in numbers As ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... wistful as he blinks at all the lights, And maybe he is thinking of his claim And the dark and dwarfish cabin where he lay and dreamed at nights, (Thank God, he'll never see the place again!) Where he lived on tinned tomatoes, beef embalmed and sourdough bread, On rusty beans and bacon furred with mould; His stomach's out of kilter and his system full of lead, But it's over, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... where the first children of a family, who were born when their parents were temperate, have been healthy, intelligent, and active; while the last children, who were born after the parents had become intemperate, were dwarfish and idiotic. A medical gentleman writes, "I have no doubt that a disposition to nervous diseases of a peculiar character is transmitted by drunken parents." Another gentleman states that, in two families within his knowledge, the different stages of intemperance ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... and an Italian Abbe were the only guests besides. The merchant was a portly, purple-faced man, who bore his new honours with a curious mixture of assumed pomposity and natural good-humour. The Abbe was dwarfish and deformed, lean, sallow, sharp-featured, with bright bird-like eyes, and a low, liquid voice. He was a political refugee, dependent for the bread he ate, on the money he received for teaching languages. He might have been a beggar from the streets; ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... her with step almost as noiseless as that with which she had herself made her escape from Miss Horn's house. At a few yards' distance from her it stood, and gazed up at her countenance as intently as she seemed to be gazing on the sea. It was a man of dwarfish height and uncertain age, with a huge hump upon his back, features of great refinement, a long thin beard, and a forehead unnaturally large, over eyes which, although of a pale blue, mingled with a certain mottled milky gleam, had ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... the young, and to mar its grace and freedom. We have been told that it was not well that our sons and daughters should commit to memory texts and catechisms, lest the free play of the fancy should be checked and they be rendered mechanical and constrained in their demeanor, and dwarfish in their intellectual stature. We see nothing of this exemplified in this memoir. One may look long to find an instance of more lady-like and graceful accomplishments, of more true refinement, of more liberal and varied cultivation, of more thorough mental discipline, of more pliable ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... I like to elongate the truth; What else but flattery pleases youth? A boy who in my face should scan Will grow as tall as any man!" Says convex; "That is not the case With me; for those who in my face Should chance to look, themselves will find Turned into things of dwarfish kind. To praise mankind is what I hate: What says our neighbour, Master Plate?" The plate-glass then essayed to speak; Said he: "My friends, I never seek So to distort the things I see That none can tell what things they ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... some one between eight o'clock and a quarter past. The quarter had already struck, and no one had appeared. He turned and gazed at the bronze portal. Only one wing of it was open, and he could see lights beyond. From time to time small groups of dwarfish figures passed into it, as tiny, heedless moths might fly into the yawning jaws of a lion. At last a priest approached the portal from within and beckoned. Benedetto drew near. The ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... commands, move only in command Nothing in love: now does he feel the —— Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe Upon a dwarfish thief. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... fold of the hill; but the more part of the time, the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of habitation. Hermiston parish is one of the least populous in Scotland; and, by the time you came that length, you would scarce be surprised at the inimitable smallness of the kirk, a dwarfish, ancient place seated for fifty, and standing in a green by the burn-side among two-score gravestones. The manse close by, although no more than a cottage, is surrounded by the brightness of a flower-garden and the straw roofs of bees; and the whole colony, kirk and manse, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was wide, covered on the bottom with stones among which grew dwarfish, thorny shrubs. A high rock full of crevices and fissures formed its southern wall. The Arabs discerned all this by the light of quiet but more and more frequent lightning flashes. Soon they also discovered in the rocky wall a kind of shallow cave or, rather, a broad niche, in which people ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... nothing from a government like that, where every thing seems to be working in an opposite direction from what everybody knows is right and proper. A king anxious to deserve the good opinion of his subjects! What nonsense! It ought to be just the other way. The ideas of this people are as dwarfish ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... presence. There lie the qualities of beauty either dead or unoperative; or at most exerted to mollify the rigor and sternness of the terror, which is the natural concomitant of greatness. Besides the extraordinary great in every species, the opposite to this, the dwarfish and diminutive, ought to be considered. Littleness, merely as such, has nothing contrary to the idea of beauty. The humming-bird, both in shape and coloring, yields to none of the winged species, of which it is the least; and perhaps his beauty is enhanced by ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Plant dwarfish or bushy in habit, generally about two feet and a half in height or length; fruit largest at the blossom-end, and tapering gradually to a neck, which is solid, and more or less curved; size medium,—average specimens, when suitable for use, measuring about eight inches in length, and three inches ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... of the Icelandic coast, she says, were very different from the descriptions she had read in books. She had conceived of a barren desolate waste, shrubless and treeless; and she saw grassy hillocks, leafy copses, and even, as she thought, patches of dwarfish woods. But as she drew nearer, and could distinguish the different objects more plainly, the hillocks were transformed into human habitations, with small doors and windows; and the groups of trees proved to be huge lava masses, from ten to fifteen ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... bards of yore," startling us at a Sunday-school festival of tea and cake in an English village; we have a crazy gypsy, in a scarlet cloak, singing snatches of romantic song, and revealing a secret on her death-bed which, with the testimony of a dwarfish miserly merchant, who salutes strangers with a curse and a devilish laugh, goes to prove that Ernest, the model young clergyman, is Kate's brother; and we have an ultra-virtuous Irish Barney, discovering that a document is forged, by comparing the date of the paper with the date of the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... appeared a creature, So small, he almost might a twin have been With Miss Crachami—dwarfish quite in stature, Yet well proportioned—neither fat nor lean, His face of marvellously pleasant feature, So short and sweet a man was never seen— All thought him charming at the first beginning— Alas, ere long they found ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... all a dream, the dream of a prosperous comfortable man who had never come to the cutting edge of life. Everywhere cunning, everywhere small feuds and hatreds, distrusts, dishonesties, timidities, feebleness of purpose, dwarfish imaginations, swarm over the great and simple issues.... It is a war now like any other of the mobbing, many-aimed cataclysms that have shattered empires and devastated the world; it is a war without point, a war that has lost its soul, it ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Chrysopsis villosa, Amorpha canescens, Tephrosia Virginiana, Lithospermum canescens; between which the immigrated Mullein (Verbuscum thapsus) may be found. The pebbly fragments of the entire slope, which during spring-time were sparingly covered with dwarfish herbs, such as the Androsace occidentalis, Draba Caroliniana, Plantago Virginica, Scutellaria parvula, are now crowded with plants of taller growth and variegated blossoms. Rudbeckia hirta, with its numerous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... very good reason for leaving a few inches (never more than six), and I turned my back on him and walked away as I said these cruel words. It seemed a shame to cut these bushy, long-legged, handsome fellows back to dwarfish insignificance and brutish ugliness, but it had to be done. I wanted stocky, thrifty, low-headed business trees, and there was no other way to get them. The trees in the lower, or ten-acre, orchard, were not treated so severely. Their long legs were left, and their bushy tops ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... violently: "In this way the whole world, and above all my glorious mountains, with their glittering subterraneous chambers, will be hocus-pocust into mere store-houses, wretcheder ones than if they were made of wood, into miserable wareshops and stalls. What then would the dwarfish sprites, and the mighty mountain-spirit, and all the goblins and elvish imps, and the swarm of gnomes there below have to do? and yet they are always, some of them cleverly, some of them clumsily, putting their hands to the wheel. And ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... scattered forests. Our people pretend, however, that the tholukh does not occur in Soudan, its place being filled up by various thorny trees, much resembling the mimosa. We have around us some other stunted shrubs. All trees are dwarfish ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... water spouted upwards with indescribable force and bulk; one pillar rose higher than the other; each seemed to emulate the other. When I had in some measure recovered from the surprise, and regained composure, I looked at the tent. How little, how dwarfish it seemed as compared to the height of these pillars of water! And yet it was about twenty feet high. It did, indeed, lie ten feet lower than the basin of the Geyser; but if tent had been raised above tent, these ten feet could only be deducted once, and I calculated, ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... is bandaged in the region of the biceps. The figure beyond him smells a flower, perhaps as a preservative against infection. Behind the physician stands a man leaning on a staff; he is wounded in the left leg, which is bandaged. By his side stands a dwarfish figure with disproportionately large head, whose body exhibits deformities typical of the developmental disease now known as Achondroplasia; in addition to these deformities we note that his body is hairy and the bridge of his nose sunken; on his back he carries a hare which is almost as tall ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the centinel, speaking to a little dwarfish bandy-legg'd drummer, that so courteous a soul should have lost his scabbard—he cannot travel without one to his scymetar, and will not be able to get a scabbard to fit it in all Strasburg.—I never had one, replied the stranger, looking back to the ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... man for man, a hundred times, but we are disarmed; our very greatness makes us debtors; they claim the land we stand upon; they tax our ampler need of food and shelter, and for all these things we must toil with the tools these dwarfs can make us—and to satisfy their dwarfish fancies ... ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... blunt broad stone, whereas the stone of the imperial gage is "oval and pointed at both ends." These trees also differ in their manner of growth: "the greengage is a very short- jointed, slow-growing tree, of spreading and rather dwarfish habit;" whilst its offspring, the imperial gage, "grows freely and rises rapidly, and has long dark shoots." The famous Washington plum bears a globular fruit, but its offspring, the emerald drop, is nearly as much elongated as the most elongated ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... Now I am launch'd into a Discourse of the Pulse, I must acquaint you, that the European Bean planted here, will, in time, degenerate into a dwarfish sort, if not prevented by a yearly Supply of foreign Seed, and an extravagant rich Soil; yet these Pigmy-Beans are the sweetest of that kind ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... honor, that I have strayed far frae hame, and to little purpose,—better fortune has not lit on me this wearisome day, than meeting wi' your honor, for God bless you many a time has the poor dwarfish body ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his face was dark as a raincloud, he had one large round eye, white tusks protruded from his lips, and he carried a gaily painted urn. His unspeakable attendants leaped like frogs. The jolliest looking of all the warriors came thereafter, with a dwarfish body and very short legs; he had a huge black-bearded head, a flat nose, and his tongue hung from his mouth and waggled as he moved. He wore a belt and a necklace, and nothing else whatever except the plumes ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... quarter of a mile. It is separated from the main land by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wild hopes, keen attention, and good money—this is the sport of kings which gluts the pockets of greedy knaves! A vast city—nay, a vast empire—is partially disorganized for a day in order that some dwarfish boys may be seen flogging immature horses during a certain number of seconds, and we learn that there is something "English," and even chivalrous, in ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked was one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish. He gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dwarfish, bow-legged little man, with a short neck, on which rested a big head with a very prominent forehead, that shaded his small piercing eyes like ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... They were jostling, pelting, and applauding a figure which at first Gemma could not see for the pushing and swaying of the crowd. The next moment, however, she saw plainly what it was—a hunchback, dwarfish and ugly, grotesquely attired in a fool's dress, with paper cap and bells. He evidently belonged to the strolling company, and was amusing the crowd with hideous ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... 1820 the prestige of Philadelphia begins to fade and her ancient influences to hang about her "like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief." In this year (Port Folio, page 463) is heard the first note of alarm. New England is gaining; "with such rivalry Philadelphia must yield the proud title which she has borne, or rouse from the withering lethargy ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... her Grace for awhile; but she had too many gewgaws and playthings, and I found, after not many days, that my popularity was on the wane, and that I could not hope to maintain it against the attractions of a French waiting-maid, a monkey, a parrot, a poodle, and a little Dwarfish boy-attendant that was half fiddler and half buffoon. So my consequence faded and faded, and I was sneered at and flouted as a young Savage and a young Irish by the English lacqueys about the House, and I sank ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... at the rebuff and stole a timid glance at the thinker. Espalin was a lean little, dried-up manikin, with legs, arms, and mustaches disproportionately long for his dwarfish body. His black, wiry hair hung in ragged witchlocks; his black pin-point eyes were glittering, cold, and venomous. He looked, thought Pringle, very ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... chain-clad paladins, stooping behind their triangular shields and fetching sweeping blows with two-handled swords; or that of Lucca—its fantastic columns clasped by writhing snakes and winged dragons, their marble scales spotted with inlaid serpentine, every available space alive with troops of dwarfish riders, with spur on heel and hawk in hood, sounding huge trumpets of chase, like those of the Swiss Urus-horn, and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and hares, boars and wolves, every stone signed with its grisly beast—be one whit more ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... jewels: she had long, clear earrings, blazing with a lustre which could not be borrowed or false; she had rings on her skeleton hands, with thick gold hoops, and stones—purple, green, and blood-red. Hunchbacked, dwarfish, and doting, she was adorned like a ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... began to open on the east, and we saw suddenly spread out below us the vale of Monteith, with "far Loch Ard and Aberfoil" in the center and the huge front of Ben Venue filling up the picture. Taking courage from this, we hurried on. The heather had become stunted and dwarfish, and the ground was covered with short brown grass. The mountain-sheep which we saw looking at us from the rock above had worn so many paths along the side that we could not tell which to take, but pushed on in the direction of the summit, till, thinking it must be near ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... a raw, grey, blustering morning, with no smell of frost in the air, but rather every sign of thaw, and the old man, after watching the two tall mail-clad figures stride off with their dwarfish guide hastening in front, closed the door, and turned with a grave and weary ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... departure from Point Lake we had boiled the Indian tea plant, ledum palustre, which produced a beverage in smell much resembling rhubarb; notwithstanding which we found it refreshing, and were gratified to see this plant flourishing abundantly on the sea-shore, though of dwarfish growth. ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... pulpits, and day by day had fanned the bigotry—already at a white heat—of the Parisian populace. Tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. But for his life he dared not. And presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and offered him ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... produced, I think, 22 seedling trees from the Lancaster Persian walnut. About five per cent are hybrids. There was one strong-growing black x Persian hybrid that I am sure of. There are three or four very dwarfish trees that undoubtedly were crossed with the heartnut. They were all dwarf. I haven't been able to get one to bear. I have had one grafted five or six years on a black walnut, but that was the heartnut and not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... Though suppliants flock from every side The suit of none is e'er denied. Whate'er, where'er howe'er the call, He hears the suit and gives to all. Now with thine own illusive art Perform, O Lord, the helper's part: Assume a dwarfish form, and thus From ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... meet with approbation, And some one find an inclination To ask, by natural transition Respecting me and my condition; That I am one, the enquirer teach, Nor very poor, nor very rich; Of passions strong, of hasty nature, Of graceless form and dwarfish stature; By few approved, and few approving; Extreme in ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... my other vices (and they are, of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on my heart and say that it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it is irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-coloured procession of life, which includes the char-a-banc among its many chariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... no official capacity, but was sent by his father, that he might improve his diplomatic talents, and obtain some information as to the condition of the Netherlands. A slight, crooked, hump-backed young gentleman, dwarfish in stature, but with a face not irregular in feature, and thoughtful and subtle in expression, with reddish hair, a thin tawny beard, and large, pathetic, greenish-coloured eyes, with a mind and manners already trained to courts and cabinets, and with a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... stone? Perhaps the artist may have done His work in such a way, that one Might lug it twice its length; But then to reach yon mountain top, And that without a breathing stop, Were surely past a mortal's strength— Unless, indeed, it be no bigger Than some wee, pigmy, dwarfish figure, Which one would head a cane withal;— And if to this the case should fall, The adventurer's honour would be small! This posting seems to me a trap, Or riddle for some greenish chap; I therefore leave the whole to you.' The doubtful reasoner onward hies. With heart resolved, in spite of ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... They were long deer-eyes, extending to the side hair; the eye-brows joined in a beautiful curve over the dilated, densely black pupils, full but steady. The eyes of the dark woman in the dream were not so enchanting. Then Surja Mukhi's features were not similar. The dream figure was dwarfish; Surja Mukhi rather tall, her figure swaying with the beauty of the honeysuckle creeper. The dream figure was beautiful, but Surja Mukhi was a hundredfold more so. The dream figure was not more than twenty years of age; Surja Mukhi was nearly twenty-six. Kunda ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... the stronghold of Carlism, and that the inhabitants were fanatically attached to their religion, which they apprehended was in danger. The truth is, that the Basques cared nothing for Carlos or Rome, and merely took up arms to defend certain rights and privileges of their own. For the dwarfish brother of Ferdinand they always exhibited supreme contempt, which his character, a compound of imbecility, cowardice, and cruelty, well merited. If they made use of his name, it was merely as a cri de guerre. Much the same may be said ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... dwarfish shadow. Two long gorilla-like arms were upraised in an abandonment of fury. Then came that awful, blood-curdling scream again, and the shadow's owner seemed to plunge ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... worship—flat noses with expanded nostrils, which seemed to admit the sight to their very brain; faces which extended rather in breadth than length, with strange unintellectual eyes placed in the extremity; figures short and dwarfish, yet garnished with legs and arms of astonishing sinewy strength, disproportioned to their bodies. As the travellers passed, the savages held a species of tournament, as the Count termed it. In this they exercised themselves by darting at each ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... elapsed, and he returned not. Mistress Nutter became fearfully impatient. Three-quarters, and even the old hag was uneasy. An hour, and he stood before them—dwarfish, fiendish, monstrous. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Jews are social histories of their brethren in faith. Somewhat later, David Reubeni published some strange stories as to the Jews. He went to Rome, where he made a considerable sensation, and was received by Pope Clement VII (1523-1534). Dwarfish in stature and dark in complexion, David Reubeni was wasted by continual fasting, but his manner, though harsh and forbidding, was intrepid and awe-inspiring. His outrageous falsehoods for a time found ready acceptance with Jews and Christians alike, and his fervid Messianism won over to his cause ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... are common to the Mediterranean and the Indian oceans. But while those in the fossil slate and the recent specimens from the tropics correspond in size, individuals of the same species from the Mediterranean are dwarfish and degenerate. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the Braddock household was not included in the general staff, being a mere appendage of the Professor himself. This was a dwarfish, misshapen Kanaka, a pigmy in height, but a giant in breadth, with short, thick legs, and long, powerful arms. He had a large head, and a somewhat handsome face, with melancholy black eyes and a fine set of white teeth. Like most Polynesians, his skin was of a pale bronze ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... called Tuaricks of Fezzan. They are a dwarfish, slim race; and the Fezzanees call them their Arabs. They cover up their faces like their kindred of Ghat, but have for the most part white thelems instead of black. A few sport a red fotah, or turban. They speak Arabic commonly, but some know also the language of Ghat; which fact ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... donkeys neigh; for the bray of a donkey is only a harsher neigh, pitched on a different key, it is true, but a sound of the same character—as the donkey himself is but a clumsy and dwarfish horse. All the cows low, from the buffalo roaming the prairie, the musk-ox of the Arctic ice-fields, or the yak of Asia, to the cattle ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... English fleets and dockyards; and he was to make some overtures to the Huguenot refugees, who, it was supposed, had been so effectually tamed by penury and exile, that they would thankfully accept almost any terms of reconciliation. The new Envoy's origin was plebeian, his stature was dwarfish, his countenance was ludicrously ugly, and his accent was that of his native Gascony: but his strong sense, his keen penetration, and his lively wit eminently qualified him for his post. In spite of every disadvantage of birth and figure he was soon known as ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... feet in length, and one hundred and seventy-two in breadth across the transept; while that of Philadelphia was soon completed, and all might gaze on the massive and majestic edifice, by the side of which every other public building in a city containing eight hundred thousand souls appeared dwarfish and unsubstantial. Boston was soon to behold within its walls a Catholic cathedral, three hundred and sixty-four feet long, and one hundred and forty broad in the transept, though the same diocese was already filled with large stone churches, built solely ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... The dwarfish peaks, that had surrounded Joyce's outlook all her life, made one understand the girl's love for this picture. As this was great, compared to the small things she knew, so life held possibilities ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... what instruments I must use! what disguises I must assume! to tricks and artifice I must bow my pride! base are my enemies—uncertain my friends! and verily, in this struggle with blinded and mean men, the soul itself becomes warped and dwarfish. Patient and darkling, the Means creep through caves and the soiling mire, to gain at last the light which is ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Aurelian's time, and bade fair soon to become a civilized people. Heathenism was already half abandoned, and their nomad habits half laid aside. But when the Huns came up suddenly from the steppes of Asia, the stately Gothic warriors fled almost without a blow from the hordes of wild dwarfish horsemen. The Ostrogoths became the servants of their conquerors, and the heathens of Athanaric found a refuge in the recesses of the Transylvanian forests. But Fritigern was a Christian. Rome had helped him ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... it," replied the mate, with a sigh or relief; "great thick dense forest with dwarfish trees growing out of the mud, and if you could see now, you'd find all the leaves sparkling with fireflies up the creeks ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... vice in themselves; and the abolition of private property, I fear, would so far destroy the independence of the individual, as to interfere with the great object of all social reform, namely, the development of humanity, the substitution of a race of free, noble, holy men and women, instead of the dwarfish and mutilated specimens which now cover ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... storm rages and coldness freezes and the hand of cruelty oppresses, we can have no beautiful and vigorous development of physical or moral powers. There will be a stinted and one-sided growth. At best it will be dwarfish, and tend to counteract the spontaneous outflow of mental and moral life. The tender plant, when, cramped and clogged by existing impediments, cannot spring up into beauteous maturity. Neither can your child, when crammed with ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... unsymmetrically developed in consequence of the confined space; its segments are more or less amalgamated with each other; the feet are stunted, and the appendages of the abdomen transformed from natatory feet with long setae into foliaceous or tongue-shaped and sometimes ramified branchiae. In the dwarfish males the eyes, antennae, and feet, are usually better preserved than in the females; but on the other hand all the appendages of the abdomen have not unfrequently disappeared, and sometimes every trace of segmentation. In the females of Entoniscus, which are found in the body-cavity ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... that Capt. Stephen Spike, of the brigantine Molly Swash?" called out the little, dumpling-looking person, in a cracked, dwarfish sort of a voice, that was admirably adapted to his appearance. Our captain fairly started; turned full toward the speaker; regarded him intently for a moment; and gulped the words he was about to utter, like one confounded. As he gazed, however, at little dumpy, examining his bow-legs, red broad ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... snow. Not till late in the day did any life manifest itself round the tepees, and then a group of children, poorly clad in ragged pieces of blankets and skins, gaped at Jones. He saw their pinched, brown faces, staring, hungry eyes, naked legs and throats, and noted particularly their dwarfish size. When he spoke they fled precipitously a little way, then turned. He called again, and all ran except one small lad. Jones went into the cabin and came out with a handful ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... I perceiue that she hath made compare Betweene our statures, she hath vrg'd her height, And with her personage, her tall personage, Her height (forsooth) she hath preuail'd with him. And are you growne so high in his esteeme, Because I am so dwarfish, and so low? How low am I, thou painted May-pole? Speake, How low am I? I am not yet so low, But that my nailes ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... in our course, travelling over sandy ridges covered with Eugenia, Exocarpus, and a very pretty Eucalyptus, with rose-coloured flowers and obcordate leaves, and yellow soft bark, also a dwarfish tree with dark green leaves, and axillary racemes of round monospermons, fruit of a purple colour, with a thin rind of a bitter flavour; also a great many trees of moderate size, from fifteen to twenty ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... a fiery energy in his look, a ring of half-desperate hope in his deep voice, which moved her to strange thoughts. His face, too, was changed and ennobled, his gestures larger, even his small stature ceased, for once, to seem dwarfish and gnome-like. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... The oak is left behind, and the pine grows stunted and dwarfish. The wind blows colder and colder. A wintry ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... touched me sorrowfully. You remember my speaking of a Miss Kavanagh, a young authoress, who supported her mother by her writings. Hearing from Mr. Williams that she had a longing to see me, I called on her yesterday. I found a little, almost dwarfish figure, to which even I had to look down; not deformed—that is, not hunch-backed, but long-armed and with a large head, and (at first sight) a strange face. She met me half-frankly, half-tremblingly; we sat down together, and when I had talked with her five minutes, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... side, and a calabash of water to wash her mouth out, as she alternately kept eating goora and chewing tobacco snuff, the custom with all ranks, male and female, who can procure them; on her right side lay a whip. At a little distance, squatted on the ground, sat a dwarfish, humpbacked female slave, with a wide mouth, but good eyes. She had no clothing on, with the exception of a profusion of strings of beads and coral round her neck and waist. This dwarfish personage served the purpose of a bell in ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... for it does not often fall to the lot of mortal man to find in one little, insignificant figure, dwarfish alike in soul and body, such a compound of selfishness, duplicity, meanness, and vulgarity, as was centered in the object of that ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... Stanley resembles that Darkest England of which I have to speak, alike in its vast extent—both stretch, in Stanley's phrase, "as far as from Plymouth to Peterhead;" its monotonous darkness, its malaria and its gloom, its dwarfish de-humanized inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privations and their misery. That which sickens the stoutest heart, and causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in despair, is the apparent impossibility of doing more than merely to peck at the outside of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... illustrious husband of Uma and lord of created things, the three-eyed Mahadeva, the wielder of the trident and the slayer of the Asura called Bhaga-netra, the mighty god of the fierce bow, surrounded by multitudes of spirits in their hundreds and thousands, some of dwarfish stature, some of fierce visage, some hunch-backed, some of blood-red eyes, some of frightful yells, some feeding upon fat and flesh, and some terrible to behold, but all armed with various weapons and endued ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... professional struggles of the more resolute and enterprising members of the race on every hand. While these endeavors are in many instances healthy and promising in character, the greater multitude are skeleton-like in shape and dwarfish in proportion, indicating to a pitiful degree the lack of blood to supply and brain to conduct the enterprise, it matters little whether it be of the professional or business type. The medical practitioner and undertaker are striking exceptions to the non-prosperous and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... about the palace; and a few moments after, Peri-Banu who had ceased her conjurations cried, "Lookye my brother Shabbar cometh! canst thou distinguish his form?" The Prince looked up and saw a mannikin in stature dwarfish and no more than three feet high, and with a boss on breast and a hump on back; withal he carried himself with stately mien and majestic air. On his right shoulder was borne his quarter staff of steel thirteen score pounds in weight. His beard was thick and twenty cubits in length but ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Little Muck, who is properly called Mukrah, lived here in Nicea, a respectable, but poor man. He kept himself almost as retired as his son does now. The latter he could not endure, because he was ashamed of his dwarfish figure, and let him therefore grow up in perfect ignorance. When the Little Muck was still in his seventeenth year, a merry child, his father, a grave man, kept continually reproaching him, that he, who ought long before ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... young girls frequently yield themselves in this manner? She felt herself attracted towards him by the purely physical and magnetic phenomenon which impels the female towards the male; for we shall try in vain and talk in vain, raise ourselves on our dwarfish heels, talk of the ethereal essence of our soul and the quintessence of our feelings, idealize woman and deify love, there always comes a moment when we become like the brute, and when the passion of seraphims cannot be distinguished in anything ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... gum-leaves, which fluttered high over-head in the gentle morning breeze, and still bathed, as it were, in tears for the late elemental strife, made them sparkle like glittering gems in the roof of their arboreous edifice. The aromatic exudation from the dwarfish wattle, with its May-like blossom, which seemed to flourish under the protection of its gigantic compeers; and the bright acacia, decking, with its brilliant hue, the sloping sward, both lent their aid in the general pageant. The shrill cry of the parrots, which, with their rich plumage ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... on our table, Like a pigmy castle-warder, Dwarfish to see, but stout and able, Arms and accoutrements all in order; And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth, Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... it bee but one Cutwolfe, a wearish dwarfish writhen fac'd cobler, brother to Bartoll the Italian, that was confederate with Esdras of Granado, and at that time stole away my curtizan, when ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... had left Isenland he rode on and on until he came to a great mountain. Here near a cave he found two little dwarfish Nibelungs, surrounded by twelve foolish giants. The two little Nibelungs were princes, ...
— Stories of Siegfried - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... nests? these green canopies, overgrown with moss? He pinched himself, and gazed again. Countless flowers nodded to him, and seemed, like himself, on tiptoe with curiosity, he thought. He beckoned one of the busy, dwarfish little brownies toward him. ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... less hoarse and gruff since the pond had been no more, and she had acquired an expression, so suffering, so concentrated, so thoughtful, that, together with her heavy black eyebrows, large face, profuse black hair, and unlustrous eyes, it gave her almost a dwarfish air, increased by her awkward deportment, which concealed that she was in reality tall, and on a large scale. She looked to so little advantage in bright delicate colours, that Albinia was often incurring her displeasure, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... then filled by Colonel John J. Hardin—was his future antagonist, Stephen A. Douglas. Neither seemed to have any presentiment of the future greatness of the other. Douglas thought little of the raw youth from the Sangamon timber, and Lincoln said the dwarfish Vermonter was "the least man he had ever seen." To all appearance, Vandalia was full of better men than either of them—clever lawyers, men of wit and standing, some of them the sons of provident early settlers, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... The proclamation was on the twelfth of December. On the twenty-first, a noted sorcerer came to Ossossan. He was of a dwarfish, hump-backed figure,—most rare among this symmetrical people,—with a vicious face, and a dress consisting of a torn and shabby robe of beaver-skin. Scarcely had he arrived, when, with ten or twelve other savages, he ensconced himself in a ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... feel His secret murders sticking on his hands; Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach; Those he commands move only in command, Nothing in love; now does he feel his title Hang loose about him like a giant's robe Upon a dwarfish thief. ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... kid? And even the young plant—what think you would be the effect, if its leaves and branches could not move gently with the soft breezes? Would the fluids circulate, and health be promoted: or would they stagnate, and a morbid, sickly and dwarfish ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... more than one at a time palls upon the palate. It is much used among the Cubans as an agreeable flavoring for soups and puddings. Of the fruit trees the lemon is perhaps the most attractive to the eye; for though small and dwarfish, yet it presents the flowers, small green lemons, and the ripe yellow fruit all together, reminding one of the Eastern alma. The green leaves when young are nearly as ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... statements are derived from the writings of a learned scholar of Bonn on the condition of savage nations, the facts of which are based either on the depositions of an African slave of the Doko tribe, a dwarfish people in the south of Shoa, or on the assertions of Bengalese planters, or perhaps on the observations of a sporting adventurer, that a mother and daughter, and at another time a man and woman, were found in India in a semi-animal condition. On the other hand, not only have neither ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... and regulations, civil and ecclesiastical, and whatever records the industry of antiquarians has brought to light in their provincial, municipal, and monastic histories:—tall tomes and huge! undegenerate sons of Anak, which look down from a dizzy height on the dwarfish progeny of contemporary wit, and can find no associates in size at a less distance than two centuries; and in arranging which the puzzled librarian must commit an anachronism in order ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... extinct. In his annual report for 1904 the acting administrator of British New Guinea stated that on a visit he paid to their district he saw six males and four females. The Agaiambo live in huts erected on piles in the lakes and marshes. Dwarfish in stature but broadly built, they are remarkable for the shortness of their legs. They live almost entirely in their "dug-outs'' or canoes, or actually wading in the water. Their food consists of sago, the roots of the water-lily and fish. The ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... world in ease and peace. Alcibiades, in Plato, had rather die young, beautiful, rich, noble, and learned, and all this in full excellence, than to stop short of such condition; this disease is, peradventure, excusable in so strong and so full a soul. When wretched and dwarfish little souls cajole and deceive themselves, and think to spread their fame for having given right judgment in an affair, or maintained the discipline of the guard of a gate of their city, the more they think to exalt their heads the more they show their tails. This little well-doing has neither ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... "He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud; he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength;" but "in social ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Colne's5 clear flood, Or where Cassivelan's grey turrets stood! There thou shalt cull me simples, and shalt teach Thy friend the name and healing pow'rs of each, 210 From the tall blue-bell to the dwarfish weed, What the dry land and what the marshes breed, For all their kinds alike to thee are known, And the whole art of Galen6 is thy own. Ah, perish Galen's art, and wither'd be The useless herbs that gave not health to thee! Twelve evenings since, as in poetic dream I meditating ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... mad, in that thou showest me this hour past, first to a pair of greybeards, in each of whom are two faults, and then thou proferrest me to my lord Shihab al-Din wherein be three defects; and thirdly, he is dwarfish, secondly, he hath a nose which is big, and thirdly, he hath a beard which is long. Of him quoth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... DESCARTES lamented, as a blot in their escutcheon, that Descartes, who was born a gentleman, should become a philosopher; and this elevated genius was refused the satisfaction of embracing an unforgiving parent, while his dwarfish brother, with a mind diminutive as his person, ridiculed his philosophic relative, and turned to advantage his philosophic disposition. The daughter of ADDISON was educated with a perfect contempt of authors, and blushed to bear a name more illustrious than that of all the Warwicks, on her alliance ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... to Nancy's dwarfish plainness was what peculiarly provoked James Cheshire. He might have laughed at the criticisms on his wife, though the envious neighbors' wives did say that it was the old servant and not Mrs. Cheshire who produced such fine butter and cheese; for wherever she appeared, spite ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... to accept the proposal, or not," she consequently said, "you can anyhow speak nicely. It isn't worth the while dragging this one in and involving that one! The proverb adequately says: 'In the presence of a dwarf one mustn't speak of dwarfish things!' Here you've been heaping insult upon me, but I didn't presume to retaliate. These two young ladies have however given you no provocation whatever; and yet by referring, as you've done, in this way and that way ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... had passed?" Being answered in the negative he walked into the room where I was, and speedily by his appearance, removed any apprehensions I had felt as to my safety. Nothing could less resemble the tall port and sturdy bearing of a gendarme, than the diminutive and dwarfish individual before me. His height could scarcely have reached five feet, of which the head formed fully a fourth part; and even this was rendered in appearance still greater by a mass of loosely floating ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Dwarfish, compared with this gigantic figure, appeared the proportions of the other Indian, who, within twelve inches of my face, was stooping over the thing he was dragging in a position that lent to his person the additional horror ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... induced to restore to me his acquisitions, without pressure, merely by amicable converse. I conjured up before me the probable appearance of the man I was to meet; perhaps gross and greedy like Satronius Satro, perhaps dwarfish and mean like Vedius Vedianus, probably like anyone of the avaricious magnates, associated with Pullanius, whom I had ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White |
