"Bigness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little above the average height ... with the deep chest and deep voice that always go with the born leader of men; the bigness and strength of the hands ... the clear eye and broad, firm, and expressive mouth, and the massive head that suggests irresistibly a combination of ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... flocked to obey, scurrying like scared rats, glancing at him in timid hate. He came striding along the weather side of the deck from the remote, august poop; he was like a dreadful god making a dreadful visitation upon his faithful. Short-legged, tending to bigness in the belly, bearded, vibrant with animal force and personal power, his mere presence cowed them. His gross face, the happy face of an egoist with a sound digestion, sent its lofty and sure regard over them; it had a ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... behind the door, facing Tom's bigness and his inexorable strength, Mary Hope put on her Indian tanned, beaded buckskin gloves that were in the pockets of her coat. Tom waited until she had tucked the coatsleeves inside the gauntlets. He took her by the arm and pulled her to the door, pushed her through it and held ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... my discourse naturally divides itself, like the conventional sermon, into two heads—the precise date of 'geological times,' and the exact bigness of the animals that lived in them. And I may as well begin by announcing my general conclusion at the very outset; first, that 'those days' never existed at all; and, secondly, that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... summer nights and be so filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and, pushing open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out beyond his white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some fine impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that was absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the stars and listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the tears sprang ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... render the national intellectual spirit at least as valuable a service as he could through a study of some legend of ancient Britain or some epic of an extinct race. As Mr. Percy Boynton has said, "To foster in a whole generation some clear recognition of other qualities in America than its bigness, and of other distinctions between the past and the present than that they are far apart is to contribute towards the consciousness of a national individuality which is the first essential of national life.... We must put our minds upon ourselves, we must look to our past and to our present, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... read in the papers of the dramatic happenings of the day before and of Jim Weeks's going to Chicago, presumably for a conference with the Governor. The bigness of it appalled her a little, and again the courage she had been storing up over night to write the note oozed away. For after all it was a question of courage, courage to do something which common sense called absurd on the bare chance that ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... contempt of Christ and his holy religion, but had also taught the idolaters both how to make and use them. While I remained in Calicut, I saw them give a mould to the idolaters, by which they might cast brass cannon of sufficient bigness to receive a charge of 105 cantaros or measures of powder. At this time also there was a Jew in Calicut who had built a handsome brigantine, in which were four large iron cannons; but Providence soon after gave him his due reward, as he was drowned ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... shouldered his pack, took up his rifle, looked up at the cloudy and blustering sky, and pushed up the hill, still talking to himself, and saying: "A little boy of about his haighth and bigness ain't a ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... all, for crawling together on flat tables of rock or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports I beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the one woman for whom he had always sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the one thing to be desired. Opposite, across the table, her husband, the ex-wrestler, chasseur d'Afrique, elephant poacher, bulked large as an ox. Men felt as well as saw his bigness. Captain Hardy deferred to him on matters of trade. The purser deferred to him on questions of administration. He answered them in his big way, with big thoughts, in big figures. He was fifty years ahead of his time. He beheld the Congo open to the world; in the ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... relation either to figures present—or to figures past—or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For, as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be—as if it was a million times as big. There is no more sublimity—per se—in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... were shoulders, legs, and loins shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wing of a lark. I eat them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time, about the bigness of musket bullets. They supplied me as they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment at ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... wholly upon the roof. You will lose, too, under the flat roof, the roomy garret of the old high-roofed houses. These have for me a wonderful fascination. Whether the rain upon the shingles, the mingled fragrance of seeds and drying herbs, the surprising bigness of the chimney, the mysteries hidden in the worm-eaten chests, the almost saintly charm of the long-unused spinning-wheels, crumbling mementos of the patient industry of former generations, or the shine of the stars through the chinks in ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... bigness, the world was till quite recently little more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... an Armadillo, a Thing which I can liken to nothing so well as a Rhinoceros; 'tis all in white Armour, so jointed, that it moves as well in it, as if it had nothing on: This Beast is about the Bigness of a Pig of six Weeks old. But it were endless to give an Account of all the divers wonderful and strange Things that Country affords, and which we took a great Delight to go in Search of; tho' those Adventures are oftentimes fatal, and at least dangerous: But ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... nourished, and himself should be in imminent danger; but he believed that God would some way for certain procure the safety of the child, in order to secure the truth of his own predictions. When they had thus determined, they made an ark of bulrushes, after the manner of a cradle, and of a bigness sufficient for an infant to be laid in, without being too straitened: they then daubed it over with slime, which would naturally keep out the water from entering between the bulrushes, and put the infant into it, and setting it afloat upon the river, they left its preservation to God; so ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Marquesas or Tahiti: a more gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations with their countless regular avenues of palms. The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our waters in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a great volume of sound, so that once I thought I was passing near a mill, and it was only the voice of the river. I am not specially attracted by ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had said the right thing—"It's a great business!" It was the greatness of the thing that had absorbed Tarboe. It was the bigness made him feel life could be worth living, if the huge machinery were always in his fingers. Yet he had never expected it, and life was a problem. Who could tell? Perhaps—perhaps, the business would always be his in spite of the second will! Perhaps, he would have his chance to make good. He got ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... whole leg of a sheep as an insult) that night, half-a-dozen slap jacks, and a trifle of mushrooms." "How big were the mushrooms?" I asked. "Oh, they was rather fine ones, mum, I won't deny: they might have been the bigness of a plate." Now even supposing them to have been perfectly wholesome, a few dozen mushrooms of that size, eaten half raw with a whole shoulder of mutton, are quite enough to my ignorant mind to account for so severe a fit ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... resembled Perry Bridewell, who was, in fact, his distant cousin, but the likeness consisted solely in a certain evident possession of virile power—a quality which women are accustomed to describe as masculine. He was not tall, and yet he gave an impression of bigness; away from him one invariably thought of him as of unusual proportions, but, standing by his side, he was found to be hardly above the ordinary height. The development of his closely knit figure, the splendid breadth of his chest and shoulders, the slight projection ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... and took her hand with one gesture. She shut the door. He waited in suave silence. There was barely space for them together in the narrow lobby, and she scarce dared look up at him. He easily dominated her. His bigness subdued her, and the handsomeness of his face and his attire was like a moral intimidation. He had a large physical splendour that was well set off and illustrated by the brilliance of his linen and his broadcloth. She was as modest as a mouse beside him. The superior ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... fallen in love with her. But I well know how this good head of the dervises may cure her; the thing is very easy, and I will explain it to you. He has a black cat in his convent, with a white spot at the end of her tail, about the bigness of a small piece of Arabian money; let him only pull seven hairs out of the white spot, burn them, and smoke the princess's head with the fume, she will not only be immediately cured, but be so safely delivered from Maimoun, the son of Dimdim, that he will ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... me and the West were of harder stuff, and more ancient than the paper pyramids of the green portfolio. Yet it was not till I came to the base of the great Pyramid that reality began to weigh upon my mind. Strange to say, the bigness of the distinct blocks of stones was the first sign by which I attained to feel the immensity of the whole pile. When I came, and trod, and touched with my hands, and climbed, in order that by climbing I might come to the top of one single stone, then, and almost ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... compact: a domino of tiled houses and walled gardens, dwarfed by the disproportionate bigness of the church. From the midst of the thoroughfare which divided it in half, fields and trees were visible at either end; and through the sally-port of every street, there flowed in from the country a silent invasion of green grass. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of life and of her work finds teaching school the very reverse of drudgery. Each day is an exhilarating experience of life. Her pupils are a part of life to her. She enjoys life and, hence, enjoys them. They are her confederates in the fine game of life. The bigness and exuberance of her abundant life enfolds them all, and from the very atmosphere of her presence they absorb life. Their studies, under the influence of her magic, are as much a part of life to them as the air they breathe or the food they eat. No two ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... the difference of fine things from other. In fine, having dressed her exactly as she herself used to be when she received Octavio's visits in bed, she embraced her, and fancied she was much of her own shape and bigness, and that it was impossible to find the deceit: and now she made Antonet dress her up in her clothes, and mobbing her sarsenet hood about her head, she appeared so like Antonet (all but the face) that it was not easy to distinguish them: and night coming on ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... East, where, if any bled at the nose, it was a manifest sign of inevitable death; nay, but in men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... his second Book relates, that Pythagoras, in passing by a Smiths Shop, found that the Sounds proceeding from the Hammers were either more grave or acute, according to the different Weights of the Hammers. The Philosopher, to improve this Hint, suspends different Weights by Strings of the same Bigness, and found in like manner that the Sounds answered to the Weights. This being discover'd, he finds out those Numbers which produc'd Sounds that were Consonants: As, that two Strings of the same Substance and Tension, the one being double the Length, of the other, give ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... will, out of his Staines house, four pounds to buy a bull for the use of the poor of Wokingham parish, to be increased to six pounds after the death of his wife and her daughter; the bull to be baited, and then cut up, 'one poor's piece not exceeding another's in bigness.' Staverton must have been an amateur of the bull-bait; for he exhorts his wife, if she can spare her four pounds a-year, to let the poor have the bull at Christmas next after his ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... there seemed to her morbid imagination—diseased and disturbed with long brooding, sick with the monotony of repeated sensation—to be disengaged from all this immensity, a sense of a vast oppression, formless, disquieting. The terror of sheer bigness grew slowly in her mind; loneliness beyond words gradually enveloped her. She was lost in all these limitless reaches of space. Had she been abandoned in mid-ocean, in an open boat, her terror could hardly have been greater. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... time lightning rods were rare and attracted an unreasonable amount of attention. One Forquer, who was Lincoln's opponent, had recently rodded his house—and every one knew it. This man's speech consisted partly in ridiculing his opponent, his bigness, his awkwardness, his dress, his youth. Lincoln heard him through without interruption and then took the stand ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... colour and kind of jewel, and these fruits were of all colours, green and white and yellow and red and what not else of colours. Their glitterance outshone the rays of the sun in its forenoon splendour and the bigness of each jewel overpassed description; suffice it that not one of them might be found with the greatest of the kings of the world, [237] no, nor a gem half the bigness of the smallest that ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... 'I recited the leading particulars to my able and intelligent friend Cardwell, not in the cabinet but then holding office as president of the board of trade. He was so bewildered and astounded at the bigness of the scheme, that I began to ask myself, Have I a right to ask my colleagues to follow me amidst all these rocks and shoals? In consequence I performed a drastic operation upon the plan, and next day I carried ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of comparison between his somewhat morbid and warped self and the bigness and nobility of his friend passed through Aladdin's mind. He glanced covertly at the strong, emaciated face beside him, and noted the steadiness and purity of the eyes. A little quixotic flame, springing like an orchid from nothing, blazed suddenly in his heart, and for the instant he was ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp—a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second impulse is to laughter. And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last. Something in the attitude of the manikins—faces they have none, they are too small for that—something in the way they swing these monstrous volumes to their singing, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Roebuck or Mr. Lowe debauch the minds of the middle classes, and make such Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are told they have [41] done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But teaching ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... from below, the horizon is placed high up in the canvas instead of low down; the consequence is that compositions so treated not only lose in grandeur and truth, but appear to be toppling over, or give the impression of smallness rather than bigness. Indeed, they look like small pictures enlarged, which is a very different thing from a large design. So that, in order to see them properly, we should mount a ladder to get upon a level with their horizon line (see ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... walked through this valley, I perceived it was strewed with diamonds, some of which were of surprising bigness. I took pleasure in looking upon them; but shortly saw at a distance such objects as greatly diminished my satisfaction, and which I could not view without terror, namely, a great number of serpents, so monstrous that the least of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... most others, grow near the Root; they are usually no more than two in number, their bigness somewhat exceeding that of an ordinary Nutmeg both contained in one strong Siliqua, or purse; which, together with the whole root of the plant, is commonly thick set with numerous Fibrilla ...
— The Ladies Delight • Anonymous
... stately octavo editions of the same writers; and finally of the myriad infra that have swarmed from the press during the last century. But, when we walk through a library that offers a representative collection of books from the invention of printing to the present, we realize that the bigness of the folios and quartos has deceived us as to their relative number, all forms ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... next Morning, Santee Jack told us, we should reach the Indian Settlement betimes that Day; about Noon, we pass'd by several fair Savanna's, very rich and dry; seeing great Copses of many Acres that bore nothing but Bushes, about the Bigness of Box-trees; which (in the Season) afford great Quantities of small Black-berries, very pleasant Fruit, and much like to our Blues, or Huckle-berries, that grow on Heaths in England. Hard by the Savanna's we found the Town, where ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... by Frederick G. R. Roth, are interesting artistically, not only for the eager sweep and sense of bigness not usual in the narrow scope of a spandrel, but especially for their warm decorative value to the wall surface and the aspiring way in which they follow the rising line of the archway over which they are placed. The spandrels are made in very vigorous ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... could hardly be said that this Corsair was a handsome man, still he had fine Corsair's eyes, full of expression and determination, eyes that could look love and bloodshed almost at the same time; and then he had those manly properties,—power, bigness, and apparent boldness,—which belong to a Corsair. To be hurried about the world by such a man, treated sometimes with crushing severity, and at others with the tenderest love, not to be spoken to for one fortnight, and then to be embraced perpetually for another, to be cast every now and then ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Supreme Court makes clear that there is nothing in the statute which condemns combinations of capital or mere bigness of plant organized to secure economy in production and a reduction of its cost. It is only when the purpose or necessary effect of the organization and maintenance of the combination or the aggregation of immense size are the stifling ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... leaned up against the tree-roots; we each sat astride facing each other, the bigness of the tree making it rather an uneasy seat; I slung the wallet round and placed it between us, and had just thrust in my hand, while Pomp wrenched himself round to hang the ammunition pouches close to the gun on a ragged root behind him, when, all at once, the boy's left leg flew over and kicked ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... the triumph died out in her, all the exquisite consciousness of the freedom, the colour, the bigness of life. For there was a black spot on the sun—humanity, God's mistake in the great plan of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even surely conquered, the light. She wondered whether she would always feel the cold of the sunless ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... looked very big as it fluttered down between the walls, and as it neared them the children saw that its bigness was caused by a basket of boiled chestnuts which it carried in one claw. In the other it held a piece of bread. And in its beak was a very large pear. The pear was juicy, and as good as a very small ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... those silences in which men whose spirits, though different, have a certain bigness in common—can say so ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... cut down, within a few years before, as amounted to 3,000l.; and in 1759, a Mr. Miller lamented that "the trees on Box Hill had been pretty much destroyed; though many remained of considerable bigness." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... I know as Hankey cannot know, how much of his strength lies in his personal touch and presence:—spread his powers too wide he loses that touch. Felt the better for my talk with Hankey. He can grasp the bigness of what we are up against and can yet keep his head and see that the game is worth the candle and that it is in our hands the moment we make up our minds to pay the price ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... wrote in the latter period of his life are instinct with a literary beauty of which he never could divest himself, and which gave an artistic value even to his sermons, so his earlier novels show a profound concern for the welfare of society, a broad, humanitarian spirit, a bigness of soul that included ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... to stoop to mean ways and unworthy ends, we shall have tasted of but a sample of what life holds in substance and bigness.—George ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Truedale said—she was sitting beside him by the outdoor fire—"I want you always to remember that I am more grateful than words can express for your—bigness, your wonderful understanding. I did not expect that even you, ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... "I have played the damosel [person of rank—used of the younger nobility of both sexes] so long time, I would fain be a little maid a season. I looked forth from the lattice this morrow, and I saw far down in the base court a little maid the bigness of me, washing of pans at a window. Now, prithee, have yon little maid up hither, and set her under the cloth of estate in my velvets, and leave me run down to the base court and wash the pans. It were rare mirth for both ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... the critics of such things find plenty of fault with St. Paul's; and even I could see that its bigness was a little prosy, that it suggested the historic rather than the poetic muse; yet, for all that, I could never look at it without a profound emotion. Viewed coolly and critically, it might seem like a vast specimen of Episcopalianism in architecture. Miltonic in its grandeur and proportions, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... felt it, too, and more than once had sat down with her pencil to transcribe her thoughts. She thought that it was not exactly fear, but an overpowering realization of her own atomity; a sort of cringing of the soul away from the utter vastness of the world; a growing consciousness of the unlimited bigness of things; an insight of the infinite power of God—the yearning of the soul for understanding of the mysteries ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... handled a rifle. They had neither guide nor interpreter, and were totally ignorant of the way to deal with the savages, or provide food for themselves during long marches over barren plains and wild mountains. In this predicament Captain Sublette found them, and in the bigness of his heart kindly took them in tow. Both parties travelled amicably together, and they arrived without accident on the upper branches of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... to indicate that it recognizes the urgency and bigness and significance of the momentous situation which ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn
... too, to the American boys of this particular group whenever "skin the snake" is played. It is altogether too bad that the play-life of the adolescent in non-christian lands is so meager, for here in physical prowess is a real contact for the American boy. The bigness of life is the ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... him his horses should suffer for it; and, within a short time, all his four horses died; after which he sustained many other losses, in the sudden dying of his cattle. He was also taken with a lameness in his limbs, and so far vexed with lice of an extraordinary number and bigness, that no art could hinder the swarming of them, till he burned up two suits of apparel."—"Margaret Arnold testified that Amy Dunny afflicted her children: they (the children), she said, would see mice running round the house, and, when ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... waiting him now, and his heart throbbed with their bigness as his regiment took its place. It was a wonderful company that fell into line and swung up the Peiho river that August afternoon. The world never saw its like before, and may never see it again. Not ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... immensely. He liked his bigness, and his honest youngness, and his clean-heartedness, written all over him. Elinor liked him too. And the boy had not been in the house five minutes before Ross and Elinor both had read his story in his blue eyes. Those blue eyes never once ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... at arm's length to get a good squint at its bigness and its redness. Then he turned to look wonderingly after the disappearing automobile with the lady who had tossed him the apple for directing her to the post office. A long trail of dust rose from the unpaved ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... him as soon as he was old enough to think for himself, or make others listen to him, "amending the great errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;" inventing instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in colonization and extended markets for home manufactures, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... (1624) she had under her armhole a small scarlet bag full of many things, which one that was there delivered unto me. There were in this bag several sigils, some of Jupiter in Trine; others of the nature of Venus; some of iron, and one of gold, of pure virgin gold, of the bigness of a thirty-three shilling piece of King James coin. In the circumference on one side was engraven, Vicit Leo de Tribu Judae Tetragrammation: within the middle there was engraven a holy lamb. In the other circumference there ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... would feel entirely at ease—as he could not with them—in trusting the navigation of the brig in my hands. As to the practical part of the work, that was a matter that with my quickness I would pick up in no time; and my bigness and strength, he added, would come in mighty handily when there was trouble among the crew, as sometimes happened, and in keeping the blacks in order, and in the little fights that now and then were necessary with folks on shore. And then he came to the ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... secretly gratified; 'I never expect to see anything like it for situation, whatever other way it's deficient. Now I'm free to confess it's only a village to your London, for forty thousand wouldn't be missed out of two or three millions; but bigness ain't the only beauty in the world, else I'd be a deal prettier than my girl Bell, who's not much taller than my walking-stick, and the fairest lass ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... epic is not at all primitive in form, it deals essentially with elemental moods and ideals. Epical poetry is poetic not because it is metrical and conformative to rhythmical standards,—though it usually is both,—but it is poetry because of the high sweep of its emotional outlook, the bigness of its thought, the untamed passion of its language, and the musical flow of ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... it. Do you know, she has a strange look of you? When I was half off my head I used to mix you up together. She has such a generous and holy bigness—the generosity of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... went on Wilbur, "is the bigness of the whole thing and the chance a chap has to show what he's made of. ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... mother. It was the first time that he had seen them since, four years ago, he had quitted the low, narrow, white-walled farmhouse for the castle of the great Earl of Mackworth. He had never appreciated before how low and narrow and poor the farm-house was. Now, with his eyes trained to the bigness of Devlen Castle, he looked around him with wonder and pity at his father's humble surroundings. He realized as he never else could have realized how great was the fall in fortune that had cast the house of Falworth down from its rightful ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... smoothed plank, The suburb of their straw-built citadel, New rubbed with balm, expatiate, and confer Their state-affairs: so thick the airy crowd Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given, Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless—like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount; or faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side Or ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... asleep or awake?" George asked himself. He could not decide. At any rate the scene impressed him. The bigness of the plain, the summons, the silence, the utter absence of an expression of reproof or ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... only a small plot of ground, he makes the most of that ground by running his building up into the sky. Learn to do likewise.—And then, when the great-souled, large-hearted, rapid-minded people of America have waked you to enthusiasm with their bigness, go off to Japan and see a little people nobly doing their best to become great.—Then to Palestine, and spend months in tracing the footsteps of the greatest human life ever lived. Take Egypt on your way home, just to remind yourself ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... State, except in an inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies. Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the city, and, in truth, had lost track of most of them. "The Friends of the Ace," once bound by oath to succour one another in peril or poverty, were long ago dispersed; one or two had died; one or two had gone to live elsewhere; the others were disappeared into the smoky bigness of the heavy city. Of the brethren, there remained within his present cognizance only his old enemy, the red-haired Kinney, now married to Janie Sharon, and Charlie Johnson, who, out of deference ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... time was about my own bigness, or rather "littleness," for I knew that I was still but a very small shaver— smaller even than my age would indicate—though I had a well-knit frame, and was tolerably tight and tough. I had some doubt, however, about ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... gentleman who only wanted to let you know—and why he should want it so much Verena couldn't guess—that he thought you quite preposterous? Olive took her from place to place, and she ended by forgetting everything but the present hour, and the bigness and variety of New York, and the entertainment of rolling about in a carriage with silk cushions, and meeting new faces, new expressions of curiosity and sympathy, assurances that one was watched and followed. Mingled with this was ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... little boy as though no meddlesome hands had even been laid upon him. In size he was quite the same, and, as Mother stood peering in at him, she presently heard a small, far-away voice. In it was the whispered awe of a child who feels the bigness of the night about him and the strangeness of silvery ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... to strike in a leetle mite higher up, and slosh down till he kin git acrost by them big rocks. Take your time, friend, and if ye see him comin' your way, let him come on and don't shoot till he turns and ye kin see the hull bigness ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... at the Normal School, when I first came across the information in some reader that the Sun was hundreds and thousands of times as big as the Earth, I at once disclosed it to my mother. It served to prove that he who was small to look at might yet have a considerable amount of bigness about him. I used also to recite to her the scraps of poetry used as illustrations in the chapter on prosody or rhetoric of our Bengali grammar. Now I retailed at her evening gatherings the astronomical tit-bits I ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... we going to dress?" asked Amy. Nina, instantly diverted, suggested that they go in. Nina's awkward bigness and Amy's mousy neutral tones were as well displayed in one garment as another, but both girls debated over pinks and blues, crepes and mulls, every evening, as if the world was watching them alone. Harriet lingered for ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... cloth" and a magnificent jewel. It was because this jewel could not be got ready at once that he had staid on; and it was worth waiting for. "The jewel was his Highness's picture in a case of gold, about the bigness of a five-shillings piece of silver, set round the case with sixteen fair diamonds, each diamond valued at L60: in all worth about L1000." The Count wore the jewel tied with a blue ribbon to his breast so long as he was in sight, barging down ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... through two or three such fights, than encounter such another storm as we had off the coast of Portugal, for four days. It seemed that we must be lost, the waves were of such exceeding bigness—far surpassing anything I had ever seen before. My heart was in my mouth scores of times, and over and over again I thought that she would never rise again, so great was the weight of water that poured over her. Truly ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... depends upon having a well-constructed kiln. For the convenience of putting the hops on the kiln, a side hill is generally chosen for its situation; it should be a dry situation. It should be dug out the same bigness at the bottom as at the top; the side walls laid up perpendicularly, and filled in solid with stone to give it a tunnel form: twelve feet square at the top, two feet square at the bottom, and at least eight feet deep, is deemed a convenient size. On the top of the walls sills are laid, having joists ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... water be warm before you put in the honey; and then put in the whites of 3 or 4 Eggs well beaten, to make the scum rise. When the honey is throughly melted and ready to boil, put in an Egge with the shell softly; and when the Egge riseth above the water, to the bigness of a groat in sight, it is strong enough of the honey. The Egge will quickly be hard, and so will not rise; Therefore you must put in another, if the first do not rise to your sight; you must put in more water and honey proportionable ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... makes no difference; bigness is nothing to a good boxer," said Flossie with an air of superior knowledge. "Mr. Butterwick says he doesn't mind taking on the biggest man in England, if he's not a boxer. And he knows that Mr. Vance isn't a boxer, because I asked him about boxing—knowing ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... his mind of the bigness of the sum any one of the several great dailies would give to have the story. And then there followed a sense of shame that he could ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... great wisdom and understanding. I have made for thee a great match. Heed my words and walk in the way of my words, go when I say go, come when I bid thee come, and we shall grow fat with the wealth of this big white man who is a fool according to his bigness." ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... (or scarce any Christian) had ever traded before, where they showed their commodities and offered them to be vended. The Moors came down in multitudes, much taken with the beauty of their ship, for they had never seen any of that bigness or burthen before, but when they had taken a serious view of their commodities as hatchets, knives and looking-glasses, fish-hooks, &c. but especially their cloth and kersies of several sizes and colours, they brought them gold in abundance for it was more plentiful with them ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... like the moon of a morning. But few of them were visible, and these ten times larger (as well as I could judge) than they seem to the inhabitants of the earth. The moon, which wanted two days of being full, was of a terrible bigness. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... him, and on this occasion the venomous little foreigner found him most ready to oblige. It wanted but a slight jostle, an Italian oath hissed out, a few words in broken English to the effect that big men were proverbially clumsy, and that bigness and courage were not always to be found united. Stokoe knew very well who his assailant was, knew his reputation, and the slender chance the ordinary swordsman might expect to have against this foreigner's devilish skill, but his weapon was unsheathed almost before the Italian had ceased ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... atoms possessed no distinction of parts (and hence filled no space), a group of even a thousand atoms would not differ in extension from a single atom, and the different kinds of extension—minuteness, shortness, bigness, length, &c.—would never emerge. If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the atoms also have distinct sides, they have parts and are made up of those parts, and those parts again are made up of their parts, and so on ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... built up by the legitimate processes of business, by economy, by efficiency, is natural; and I am not afraid of it, no matter how big it grows. It can stay big only by doing its work more thoroughly than anybody else. And there is a point of bigness,—as every business man in this country knows, though some of them will not admit it,—where you pass the limit of efficiency and get into the region of clumsiness and unwieldiness. You can make your combine so extensive that you can't digest it into a single system; ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... a head like a Swine,—a taile like a Rat, and is of the bigness of a Cat. Under the belly she hath a bagge, wherein she lodgeth, carrieth and suckleth ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... vast, silent reaches of green-brown plain that stretched and yawned into aching distances; the wonderfully blue and cloudless sky that covered it; they would have overlooked the timber groves that spread here and there over the face of the land, with their lure of mystery. No thoughts of the bigness of this country would have crept in upon them—except as they might have been reminded of the dreary distance from the glitter and the tinsel of the East. The mountains, distant and shining, would have meant nothing to ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... their green liveries interwoven with beautiful flowers of most glorious colors, which the several seasons afford; hedged in with pleasant groves of the ever famous tulip tree, the stately laurels and bays, equalizing the oak in bigness and growth, myrtles, jessamines, woodbines, honeysuckles, and several other fragrant vines and evergreens, whose aspiring branches shadow and interweave themselves with the loftiest timbers, yielding a pleasant prospect, shade ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... selves, they invited us to the Pallace [58]of their Prince or chief Ruler, some two miles distant off from the place where we landed; which we found to be about the bigness of one of our ordinary village houses, it was supported with rough unhewn pieces of Timber, and covered very artificially with boughs, so that it would keep out the greatest showers of Rain, the sides thereof were adorned with several forts of Flowers, which the fragrant ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... most of them had the care of smaller brothers, or even babes in arms, whom they were thus early inuring to the perils of the situation. The boys were dressed in pantaloons and shirts which no excess of rolling up in the legs and arms could make small enough, and the incorrigible too-bigness of which rendered the favorite amusements still more hazardous from their liability to trip and entangle the wearers. The little girls had on each a solitary garment, which hung about her gaunt person with antique severity of outline; while ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... and give such a motion to it as shall convey him through the air. And this, perhaps, might be made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with food for their viaticum, and commodities for traffic. It is not the bigness of anything in this kind that can hinder its motion if the motive faculty be answerable "hereunto. We see that; great ship swims as well as a small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat. This engine may be contrived from the same principles by which Archytas ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... Raeburn. Mr. Rolles opened the case, and drew a long breath of almost horrified astonishment; for there lay before him, in a cradle of green velvet, a diamond of prodigious magnitude and of the finest water. It was of the bigness of a duck's egg; beautifully shaped, and without a flaw; and as the sun shone upon it, it gave forth a lustre like that of electricity, and seemed to burn in his hand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a kid! 'Tain't the bigness of her, it's the nerve. She's got the coldest kind of nerve you ever seen. Hain't she, Bill?" And ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... necessarily vulgar, does not seem admissible. It would be quite as just to condemn the paintings on a colossal scale in which Tintoretto and Veronese so nobly manifested their exceptional powers. The size of a work of art per se is an indifferent matter. Mere bigness or mere littleness decides nothing. But a colossal work has its conditions of being: it must conform to certain laws. It must be executed in a large style; it must represent a grand idea; it must possess ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... it especially, are gravely significant to those who would fain seek in current events instruction for the future, whether of warning or of encouragement. These are the almost complete failure of the British Government and people to recognise at the beginning the bigness of the task before them; and, in the second place, the enthusiasm and practical unanimity with which not South Africa only but the other and distant British colonies offered their services {p.074} to the mother country. The philosophical reflector ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... was able to enjoy the girl's beauty and study her individuality. Pretty as she was—and more than pretty—it was her personality which pleased him—the bigness of her nature, the evidence of her wide-mindedness and her quick grasp of fresh subjects, and above all, in her, as in Freddy, there was the ring ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... of her lord Al-Rashid and that which had betided him after her loss and wept with sore weeping. Presently, she heard a blowing behind her;[FN200] so she turned and behold, a Head without a body and with eyes slit endlong: it was of the bigness of an elephant's skull and bigger and ha] a mouth as it were an oven and projecting canines as they were grapnels, and hair which trailed upon the ground. So Tohfah cried, "I take refuge with Allah from Satan the Stoned!" and recited the Two Preventives;[FN201] ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... by care; and in some moods it seems supremely incredible that we should be of such worth in the scale of Creation as that the Lord of all things should, in a deeper sense than the Psalmist knew, have dwelt with us and be with us still. But bigness is not greatness, and there is nothing incredible in the belief that men, lower than the angels, and needing God more because of their sin, do receive His visitations in an altogether special sense, and that, passing by the lofty and the great that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... room for a dressing, or preparing place, at times of triumphs. On the other side, which is the household side, I wish it divided at the first, into a hall and a chapel (with a partition between); both of good state and bigness; and those not to go all the length, but to have at the further end, a winter and a summer parlor, both fair. And under these rooms, a fair and large cellar, sunk under ground; and likewise some privy kitchens, with ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... There was a knock at the study door, discreet, insistent, menacing, and it was Mr. Cowl's knock. He entered, smiling gravely and yet, as it were, teasingly. His easy bigness, florid and sinister, made a disturbing contrast with the artless and pure simplicity of Audrey in her new black robe, and even with Miss Ingate's pallid maturity, which, after all, was passably innocent and ingenuous. Mr. Cowl resembled a great beast good-humouredly ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... plain, by the which ran most pleasant rivers on every side of the same, having besides within the compass of a circuit of seven miles, seven small seas: he saw also therein many fair places, and goodly buildings, the duke's palace, and the mighty strong castle, which is in a manner half the bigness of the town. Moreover, it liked him well to see the hospital of St. Mary, with divers other things: he did there nothing worthy of memory, but he departed back again towards Bologna, and from thence to Florence, where ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... such a character to make a vital decision rightly is a career. On the night of the Tap Day which had so shaken him, he had struck the key-note. He had resolved to use his life as if it were a tool in his hand to do work, and he had so used it. The habit of bigness, once caught, possesses one as quickly as the habit of drink; Johnny McLean was as unhampered by the net of smallnesses which tangle most of us as a hermit; the freedom gave him a power which was fast making a ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... wall, on my side of the deck. He was so still he appeared to be lifeless, a part of the ship; I looked hard before I decided it was a man. It was too dark to make out his features, almost too dark to discern outline, but by the bigness of the blot he made against his background I was sure the man was Newman. What he was doing in such a position I could not guess, but I was so sure of my man, I did not hesitate to move towards him. I even spoke his name, in an ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... for the Thanksgiving dinner her brother, Donald Brown, was giving that afternoon, he experienced a peculiar sensation in the region of his throat. He was possessed of a vivid sense of humour which at times embarrassed him sorely. If it had not been that his bigness of heart kept his love of fun in order he would have had great difficulty, now and then, in comporting ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred yards long, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man could heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a rock about the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel could touch the rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a mud bottom, twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little stream of cold fresh water brawling in at the head. A cliff walled it on the south. A low, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... thus reciting he wept till he wetted the hard dry ground; but anon without loss of time he rose and fared on again over waste and wold, till there came out upon him a lion, with a neck buried in tangled mane, a head the bigness of a dome, a mouth wider than the door thereof and teeth like elephants' tusks. Now when Uns al-Wujud saw him, he gave himself up for lost, and turning[FN44] towards the Temple of Meccah, pronounced the professions of the faith and prepared for death. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do? Oh! the littleness of the lives that we are living! Oh! the way in which we fail to comprehend, or when we do comprehend, deny to ourselves the bigness of that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God! Sometimes it dawns upon us that we can see it opening into the vision of these men and women in the New Testament. Sometimes there opens to us the picture of this thing that we might be, and then there are truly the ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... handsomer, though the fanciers cared little for that. He seemed fully aware of his importance, and early showed a disposition to bully his smaller cousins. His owner prophesied great things of him, but Billy, the stable-man, had grave doubts over the length of his neck, the bigness of his crop, his carriage, and his over-size. "A bird can't make time pushing a bag of wind ahead of him. Them long legs is dead weight, an' a neck like that ain't got no gimp in it," Billy would grunt disparagingly as he cleaned out the ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... returned to the ship and set sail. As soon as they were out of sight, I came down from the tree and going to the place I had seen them fill up, made shift to clear away the earth, till I came to the trap-door, which was of wood, the shape and bigness of a mill-stone, and raised it, when there appeared underneath a winding stair of stone. At this I wondered and descending, came to a fair chamber, spread with various kinds of carpets and hung with silken ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... yours was a perfectly good parallel," she asserted stoutly. "And you'll have to admit that you did believe it was wonderful then. Uncle Cal has told me how breathlessly you called it the 'city.' But is it as wonderful, now? Hasn't familiarity with real bigness ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... and his air of absolute confidence gave a dubious tone to the words of the quidnuncs who were allowing Quigley three minutes to whip him out of all recognition. Done looked slight and small before his big opponent, but Pete's bigness was due largely to surplus material, and Pete had been anything but a temperate man of late. Jim recollected this in calculating his chances and determining ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... could see him very plain, the moonlight shining full upon him—a large, stout gentleman with a round red face, and clad in a fine laced coat of red cloth. Amidship of the boat was a box or chest about the bigness of a middle-sized traveling trunk, but covered all over with cakes of sand and dirt. In the act of passing, the gentleman, still standing, pointed at it with an elegant gold-headed cane which he held in his hand. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... many of them were always together, should be the occasion, and Fred Wood was to lead up to the matter by asking Jack some questions as to the relative bigness of ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... fire and boil; strain it through a strainer, or sieve, to the thickness of a cream, and put half of it to your lobsters, and save the other half to sauce them with after they are baked. Put to the lobster the bigness of an egg of butter, a little pepper and salt; squeeze in a lemon, and warm these over the fire enough to melt the butter, set it to cool, and sheet your patty pan or a plate or dish with good puff paste, then put in your lobster, and cover it with ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming conceptions which the truth should disappoint. And here again came in a strange temptation. If life and ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Chapter House area, as we should, it equalled in area or slightly exceeded alike its successor and Cologne and Florence, and was surpassed only by the new St. Peter's, Milan, and Seville. "See the bigness," said Bishop Corbet of Norwich, "and your eye never yet beheld such a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... a big face. Had he looked less powerful the bigness of his features, the spread of cheek and jowl, would have been grotesque. As it was, the face was impressive, especially when one recalled how many, many millions he owned and how many more he controlled. The control was better ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... for no other," continued O'Malley, "I count my experience with that man as memorable beyond ordinary. 'If for no other,' because from the very beginning there was another. Indeed, it was probably his air of unusual bigness, massiveness rather,—head, face, eyes, shoulders, especially back and shoulders,—that struck me first when I caught sight of him lounging there hugely upon my steamer deck at Marseilles, winning my instant attention before he turned and the expression on his great ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... music, the door flung wide and the entrance of the cowboy. She did not recall how he had looked or what he had done. And the next instant she saw him cool, smiling, devilish—saw him in violence; the next his bigness, his apparel, his physical being were vague as outlines in a dream. The white face of the padre flashed along in the train of thought, and it brought the same dull, half-blind, indefinable state of ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... cheap, so that a family may live cheaper here than in any town in England of its bigness within such a small distance ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... thought I did about the bigness of London, I found that morning that I never had any idea of what an everlasting town it is. It is like a skein of tangled yarn—there doesn't seem to be any end to it. Going in this way from Nelson's Monument out ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... by the taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins, shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wings of a lark. I ate them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time about 30 the bigness of musket bullets. They supplied me as fast as they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment at my bulk and appetite. I then made another sign that I wanted drink. They found by my eating that a small quantity would not suffice me, and, being a most ingenious people, they ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... spoke, with its vivid glare showing to Cleggett the enemy magnified to a portentous bigness against a background of chaotic night. Two or three of them stood, leaning keenly forward; several of the others had dropped to one knee; the rifle discharge had checked the rush, and they also were waiting for the lightning. ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... see us merely as one of the thousand small details that make up the whole picture. Suddenly she darted out her hand like a flash, making me start at the unexpected motion, and quickly withdrawing it, held up a finger before me. From its tip a minute gossamer spider, about twice the bigness of a pin's head, appeared suspended from a fine, scarcely visible line three or ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... to musing over a bar of common laundry soap on the stationary wash-stand. It was impossible not to contrast this humble detergent—for it was of a bigness and coarse yellowness to suggest the largest possible quantity for the smallest possible price—with the dead man's wealth, and to wonder a little at such petty economies as were signified by it, by the paraffin candles, the absence of servants, and ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... she answered gently. "Before the war is just a different age." For a while she was silent; then she drew a deep breath. "Don't you feel it as I feel it?" she whispered. "The bigness of it, the wonder of it. Underneath all the horror, underlying all the vileness—the splendour of it all. The glory of human endurance. . . . People wondered that I could stand it—I with my idealism. But it seems to me that out of the sordid ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... along. The sun had already passed the zenith, the barbecue-fires were dying out, on the western sky-line rested a cloud in bigness like to a man's hand and of the blackness of night itself. Would they ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... how lonely I was. You had Fanny and Jimmie and the baby, but I had no one. As I sat alone in the house—the bigness of which seemed to make it all the lonelier—I thought of you, and your goodness, and sweetness and there I fought things out—I fought them out, and now I can make you ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... hate it!" cried Cartwell. "You must let me show you its bigness. It's as healing ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... terriblest little cloud o' dust iver raised, an' not a bit o' wind in it at all," so that a fairy migration is sometimes the talk of the county. "Though, be nacher, they're not the length av yer finger, they can make thimselves the bigness av a tower when it plazes thim, an' av that ugliness that ye'd faint wid the looks o' thim, as knowin' they can shtrike ye dead on the shpot or change ye into a dog, or a pig, or a unicorn, or anny other ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... she had seen the world—its bigness and noise and confusion—after her longing was answered, she would turn back to him. Already he was oppressed by a feeling of strangeness, of loss at leaving the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which it seems as if time itself stood still. During the spellbound fragment of time a girl, looking out from under a cupped hand, noted a man and marvelled at him. By his sheer physical bigness, first, he fascinated her. He was like the night and the storm itself, big, powerful, not the kind born to know and suffer restraint; but rather the type of man to dwell in such lands as stretched mile after unfenced mile "out yonder" beyond the mountains. ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... carriages were contriving to improve the time by a good deal of quiet, or even noisy, flirtation. His lodgings were on the Old Steine, close by. But he did not go home immediately. There are times in a man's life when four walls are to small too hold the bigness of his thoughts. Captain Winstanley paced the Marine Parade for half-an-hour or so before ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... foretime until thou camest to thy dawn, and what remains is infinite on through Hades: what share is left for life but the bigness of a pinprick, and tinier than a pinprick if such there be? Little is thy life and afflicted; for not even so it is sweet, but more ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... She liked the bigness of him, felt the old satisfaction at sight of the strong, rugged face, the old craving for confidence and approval. Strange how different one felt in company with different people. Tete- a-tete with Ralph Percival, ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I guess you'll ha' to take us to our comrade yourself, for I'm inclined to opine that you know more about him than's good for ye; so if ye try to ride off, I'll see whether a ball—sixteen to the pound—'ll not stop ye, for all yer bigness." ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... up where I come from. There's no objection to a clean fight. But if you don't pick your bigness you must expect that your bigness will offer himself mighty sudden." Latisan was not recollecting what he had said to the chaps of Tech; he was putting before his mind one of his fundamental principles as he listened to the laments of the stricken giant and urged the horses down the tote road. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... rare circumstance in the case of commoners. These supporters are two Saracens, and were granted in consideration of services in the Crusades. "Sir Baldwin de Fulford fought a combat with a Saracen, for bulk and bigness an unequal match (as the representation of him cut in the wainscot at Fulford doth plainly shew), whom yet he vanquished, and rescued a lady." This gentleman's granddaughter was the mother of Henry VIII.'s ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... the girl for confirmation of what needed no confirmation, and her eyes smiled into his with a certain pride. She seemed to Harley to admire his bigness, his openness of manner and speech, and his wholesome character. After all, he was her uncle; the look that she gave him then was that of one who received protection, half ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic at her ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... shoe, her light, dilated eyes staring above his head. She was spare, and yet withal a roundness left to the cheek and forearm. Long-waisted and with a certain swing where it flowed down into straight hips, there was a bony, Olympian kind of bigness about her. Beneath the washed-out blue shirtwaist dress her chest was high, as if vocal. She was not without youth. Her head went up like a stag's to the passing of a band in the street, or a glance thrown after her, or the ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... to say that the whole lower part of—well, his face—was tightly bound about with bandages, leaving little more than his nostrils, part of his cheeks, and his eyes clear. He was frowning now and again, just shaking his head to denote a negative, and his left hand, bound to the bigness of a football in bandages, moved slowly in an endeavor to ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... firstly, lord, firstly we have the great Mangon or mangonel, fundis fundibula, that some do also term catapultum, the which worketh by torsion and shall heave you great stones of the bigness of a man fully two hundred yards an it be dry weather; next is the Trebuchet, like to the mangon save that it swingeth by counterpoise; next cometh the Balista or Springald that worketh by tension—a ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... want to live in Ireland with its penny-farthing politics! London for him! London and a sense of bigness, of wide ideas and the ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... barn. The house was old, Though so well kept, as age by years is told In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast, Stood new and straight and strong—all battened fast At every opening; and where once the mow Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man, Aslant from left to right, athwart the span, And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed, I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed To this point and to that point, and then burst In the impotent questionings rejected first. What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell. Who ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... Bruise ym it must stand & be stirred 3 or 4 times in ym Day & then Strain out out all ye gawells all ten Days and 2 Ounces of Clear Gummary Beck & 1/2 an Ounce of Coperous 1/2 an Ounce of Rock Alum half an Ounce of Loafe sugar ye Bigness of a Hoarsel nut of Roman Vitterall Bray ym all small Before they be put in it must be stirred very well for ye ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... plenty of time; and if the fog is brown outside, the fire is red within. I like the quiet of this season; the glowing chimney-corner, in the midst of the December mirk, makes me think, as I sit by it, of all sorts of things. The idea that is almost always uppermost is the bigness and strangeness of this London world. Long as I have lived here,—the sixteenth anniversary of my marriage is only ten days off,—there is still a kind of novelty and excitement in it It is a great pull, as they say here, to have remained sensitive,—to have kept one's own ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... fashion. Even after the lapse of many years the stone swung round, showing a little opening, through which a man might scarcely creep. As it swung, a mighty bat, white in colour as though with unreckoned age, and such as I had never seen before for bigness, for his measure was the measure of a hawk, flew forth and for a moment hovered over Cleopatra, then sailed slowly up and up in circles, till at last he was lost in the bright light of ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... real bigness of the woman caught my allegiance and fixed it. She had sacrificed the thing which was most precious to her to keep her ideal of honor unsullied. I felt that I could never have made a similar sacrifice, but I mentally saluted her for ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... soused the molasses all over her, and there she sat, looking like Mount Vesuvius, with the lava running deown its sides; ye see, she was kivered with love, transport, and molasses. She was a master large gal, of her bigness, she weighed three hundred averdupoise, and a breakfast over. She could throw eanermost any feller in our neighborhood, at Indian hugs. Arter awhile, she kum tu, and I imprinted a kiss right on her ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... the house. Then every object of which I thought enlarged in proportion. When this goes off the sense of the contraction is equally singular. My head felt about the size of a pin's head; our church and everybody in it appeared about the bigness of a cup, etc. These strange sensations terminate invariably with one still more singular and particularly pleasant. I can not describe it—it is a sense of smoothness and a little of dizziness. If you never had such feelings this will be all nonsense to you, but if you have ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... The next morning she stated that she had dreamt that the bed was much too small for her, so that she could find no place in it. To explain this dream as a wish is easy when we remember that to be "big" is a frequently expressed wish of all children. The bigness of the bed reminded Miss Little-Would-be-Big only too forcibly of her smallness. This nasty situation became righted in her dream, and she grew so big that the bed now became too small ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... ever shone on, no matter if they be under cover." She wandered up and down the tables, caressing the rounded outlines of the fruit with her loving gaze. The apples, rich and fragrant, were a glory and a joy. There were great pound sweetings, full of the pride of mere bigness; long purple gilly-flowers, craftily hiding their mealy joys under a sad-colored skin; and the Hubbardston, a portly creature quite unspoiled by the prosperity of growth, and holding its lovely scent and flavor like an individual charm. There was the Bald'in, stand-by ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... meikle stane would build a bra' chappin-block for my Lord Provost," said royalty, its head again stationed at the window, surveying with solemn curiosity an egg-shaped stone of the boulder sort, which, sure enough, was of a remarkable bigness, though not of that rarity or infrequence that should have drawn forth the wonder of a king. His native dialect he generally employed on jocose and familiar subjects. In affairs of importance he affected the use ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... though some blanks are filled up. I have in truth thought it my duty, without in the least committing myself or anyone else, to think through the subject as well as I could, being equally convinced of its urgency and its bigness.' ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Friar did, who wasted two whole hours in a sermon about Christ's Passion, and concerning this question: Utrum quantitas realiter distincta sit a substantia-whether the quantity in itself were divided from the substance? He showed this example, and said, "My head might well creep through, but the bigness of my head could not;" insomuch that, like an idiot, he divided the head from the bigness thereof. A silly grammarian might easily have solved the same, and said, The bigness of the head, that is, the big ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther |
