"Pigmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the mink being with us a much stouter animal than its Scandinavian and Russian kinsman, while the reverse is true of our sable or pine marten. No one can say why the European red deer should be a pigmy compared to its giant brother, the American wapiti; why the Old World elk should average smaller in size than the almost indistinguishable New World moose; and yet the bison of Lithuania and the Caucasus be on the whole larger and more formidable ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and relation. Before the ant a man looms as large as a mountain before us. An insect does not see things as they are but as they seem to it. Growth in intelligence necessitates a truer appreciation of proportions and relations. The pigmy also sees little but himself, but years and experience leave behind them wisdom. The civilized races have all risen from barbarism and savagery—that is, from a state of imperfect thinking as well as of imperfect loving and choosing. Experience and culture bring larger knowledge ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... encountered a broad back. A man stood there in the far corner of the doorway, his back to the street, his head seemingly bowed in his arms. A man of such huge proportions, that Martin, but two inches less than six feet, himself, felt like a pigmy in comparison. The man's outline was vague and enhanced by the gloom; Martin, a-tingle with the unexpected collision, had the first thought it was a ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his colossusship had ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... rapids of the St. Louis has been well described: "Like specks on the broad bosom of the waters, two pigmy vessels held their course up the lonely St. Lawrence. They passed abandoned Tadoussac, the channel of Orleans, the tenantless rock of Quebec, the wide Lake of St. Peter with its crowded archipelago, and the forest plain of Montreal. All was solitude. Hochelaga had vanished, and of the savage ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... risen, plumage puffed out, strutting with wings bowed and tail spread, facing the dog. The sudden pigmy defiance thrilled her. "Brave! Brave!" she exclaimed, enraptured; but at the sound of her voice the bird crouched like a flash, large dark liquid eyes shining, long ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... mistaken the scope of his poetic philosophy, and exclaiming, with the most perfect naivete, how mortifying it was for men of original and profound genius to be misconceived and misrepresented by pigmy whipper-snapper ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... amazement at the revelation of volcanic passions which slumbered beneath his pigmy form. For the moment, too, he was swept from his feet by the rush of emotion. And again his eye rested on the smiling face of Nan looking at him from the ivory ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... in his majesty; Ahchoogah was like a pigmy before him. "Tell him to go!" cried the policeman. "His mouth is full of lies and bad talk. Tell him to have the dug-out or the two canoes here by to-morrow morning or I'll ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... strong notes of the Western meadowlark ringing over the hills and meadows. The wise, and rather murderous, magpie goes chattering about. Here and there the quiet bluebird is seen. The kingfisher is in his appointed place. Long-crested jays, Clarke's crows, and pigmy nuthatches are plentiful, and the wild note of the chickadee is heard on every hand. Above the altitude of eight thousand feet you may hear, in June, the marvelous melody of ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... the vast silence that seemed to engulf them. Every evening the squads returned, desert-stained and weary, to their rest under the lonesome stars. Every morning the sun broke fiercely up from the long level of the eastward plain to pour its hot strength down upon these pigmy creatures, who dared to invade the territory over which he had, for so many ages, held undisputed dominion. Every evening the sun plunged fiercely down behind the purple wall of mountains that shut in the Basin on the west, as if to gather ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... grew, and failed to freeze again. Then the ice ripped from the shore and uprose bodily a yard. But still the river was loth to loose its grip. It was a slow travail, and man, used to nursing nature with pigmy skill, able to burst waterspouts and harness waterfalls, could avail nothing against the billions of frigid tons which refused to run down ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... through the mouth of his modern science,—he is not of real importance withal. The little planet on which he dwells would, to all seeming, move on in its orbit in the same way as it does now, without him. In itself it is a pigmy world compared with the rest of the solar system of which it is a part. Nevertheless, the fact cannot be denied that his material surroundings are of a quality tending to either impress or to deceive Man with a sense of his own value. The world is his oyster which he, with the sword of ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... little girl, your ambitions are only for those of unquestioned strength. You are but a pigmy. Certain organs, essential to the conversion of food into energy, were injured beyond all repair in your first illness. Other damage which neither time nor skill can make good was inflicted by your first operation. Your eyes are entirely inadequate for the merciless ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... so convincingly ludicrous as to show at once the theory on which it was founded for the absurdity it was. Instead of walking on together in simple equality, in mutual honour and devotion, each helping the other to be better still, to have the woman, large and noble, come cowering after her pigmy lord, as if he were the god of her life, instead of a Satan doing his best to damn her to his own meanness!—it is a contrast that needs no argument! Not the less if the woman be married to such a man, will it be her highest glory, by the patience of Christ, by the sacrifice of self, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... nearly all the regular vaqueros were cutting timbers in the encinal that day with which to build new corrals at one of the outlying tanks. As he would not return before dark, and I knew the padre was due at Santa Maria that evening, my description of him made Don Blas a mere pigmy in comparison. But we finally reached the house, and on our reentering the sitting-room, young Travino very courteously arose and stood until Father Norquin should be seated. But the ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the Man, the pigmy man, on it—and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;—it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that 'little world of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... man throw away canvas and brushes into the bottomless precipices, enough to make one weep with despair at his utter and absolute impotence. Nature is God, Anna, and the greatest artist of us all a pigmy. When I think of those ateliers of ours, the art jargon, the decadents with their flamboyant talk I long for a two-edged sword and a minute of Divinity. ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the famous Palace of Glass, which, in this Annus Mirabilis, received under its roof six millions of the people of all nations, tongues, and creeds. In extent, the conservatory at Chatsworth is but a pigmy compared with that which glorifies Hyde Park: but it is filled with the rarest Exotics from all parts of the globe—from 'farthest Ind,' from China, from the Himalayas, from Mexico; here you see the rich banana, Eschol's grape hanging in ripe profusion beneath the shadow of immense paper-like leaves; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... aloft on his imperial throne, So distant, O ye gods! from every one, The royal virtues are like many a star, From this our pigmy system rather far: Whose light, though flying ever since creation, Has not yet pitched upon our nation. [Footnote: Such was the sublime opinion of the ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... You defy me?—you pigmy, you insolent scrap! What!—this to my teeth, that have worried a score Of the biggest rats bred in the granary floor! Come on, and be swallowed! ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... were busied here and there, bulking grotesquely as they moved about the fire, seeming disheveled demons of the pit. Like some master imp torturing a pigmy over the flames, old Ben York was kneeling close beside the blaze, holding to the coals a hickory stick, which served as spit for the roasting of a squirrel. The brilliance shone full on the frowsy gray whiskers, and, above ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... fiery soul which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay; And o'er informed ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... marked is this difference among some species that the male must be regarded as a fallen representative of the female, having not only greatly diminished in size, but undergone thorough degeneration in structure.[19] In certain extreme cases what have been well called "pigmy males" illustrate this contrast in an almost ridiculous degree. This is well seen among the common rotifers, where the males are much smaller than the females and very degenerate. Sometimes they seem to have dwindled ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Senator has really taken hold of this matter, I may look for that invitation to his house at, any moment. I am perishing to go! I do long to know whether I am only simply a large-sized pigmy among these pigmies here, who tumble over so easily when one strikes them, or whether I am really—." Her thoughts drifted into other channels, for a season. Then she continued:—"He said I could be ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... the tangent organ wander o'er The rock-built mountain, and the winding shore; No apt ideas could the pigmy mite, Or embryon emmet to the touch excite; But as each mass the solar ray reflects, The eye's clear glass the transient beams collects; Bends to their focal point the rays that swerve, And paints the ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... purely tropical family of birds on earth, are mostly greenish; and among the smaller and more defenceless sorts, like the familiar little love-birds, where the need for protection is greatest, the green of the plumage is almost unbroken. Of the tiny Pigmy Parrots of New Guinea, for instance, Mr. Bowdler Sharpe says: 'Owing to their small size and the resemblance of their green colouring to the forests they inhabit, they are not easily seen, and until recent ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... creature, That speaks a fool in every feature.' 'The woman's blind,' the mother cries; 'I see wit sparkle in his eyes.' 20 'Lord! madam, what a squinting leer; No doubt the fairy hath been here.' Just as she spoke, a pigmy sprite Pops through the key-hole, swift as light; Perched on the cradle's top he stands, And thus her folly reprimands: 'Whence sprung the vain conceited lie, That we the world with fools supply? What! give our sprightly race away, For the dull helpless sons of clay! 30 Besides, by partial fondness ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... down and looked below at the house—a doll's house; at the toy corrals and tiny sheds and stables. Slim, walking down the hill, was a mere pigmy—a short, waddling insect. At least, to a girl unused to gazing from a height, each object seemed absurdly small. Flying U coulee stretched away to the west, with a silver ribbon drawn carelessly ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... guidance of the hesitating dunce. The Titans on the heights contend full soon— On this side Webster and on that Calhoun, The monstrous conflagration of their fight Startling the day and splendoring the night! Both are unconquerable—one is right. Will't keep the pigmy, if we make him strong, From siding with a giant in the wrong? When Genius strikes for error, who's afraid To arm poor Folly with a wooden blade? O Rabelais, you knew it all!—your good And honest judge (by men misunderstood) Knew ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... of the poor creatures. Their scent is as keen as an animal's; they are agile as monkeys, and make off to hide in the hollow trunks of trees, or bury themselves in the decaying vegetation until danger is past. Poor pigmy! What place will he occupy in the life that ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... thy range; with varied style Thy Muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle To that hoar pile which still its ruin shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy-folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground! Or thither, where, beneath the showery West, The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid: Once foes, perhaps, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... interest is found in these old, dusty, leather-bound volumes, which is not in the inscriptions and not, alas, in the printed words. They are the chosen home of a race of pigmy spiderlings who love musty theology with an affection found in no one else nowadays. In these dingy homes they live and rear their hideous little progeny: for in the cold light of a microscope these tiny brown book-dwellers are not beautiful; they ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... approximates to mountainous. In other parts of the State the isolated hills generally present a rounded outline, and with a few exceptions do not inspire those strong emotions which one must necessarily experience while standing like a pigmy among the piled-up, craggy hills of northern Berkshire. Here is found the most lofty elevation in the State—Saddle Mountain—whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above tide water. Its name originated from the alleged resemblance of its top to a saddle, and is certainly ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... King, For thus his Royaltie doth speake in me: He is prepar'd, and reason to he should, This apish and vnmannerly approach, This harness'd Maske, and vnaduised Reuell, This vn-heard sawcinesse and boyish Troopes, The King doth smile at, and is well prepar'd To whip this dwarfish warre, this Pigmy Armes From out the circle of his Territories. That hand which had the strength, euen at your dore, To cudgell you, and make you take the hatch, To diue like Buckets in concealed Welles, To crowch in litter of your stable plankes, To lye like pawnes, lock'd vp in chests and truncks, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of Kratu, Samnati, brought forth the sixty thousand Valakhilyas, pigmy sages, no bigger than a joint of the thumb, chaste, pious, resplendent as the rays of the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the slip from tune to twang! Sweets bitter grow, as aye they did; For e'en the Roman poet sang "Surgit amari aliquid." Our pigmy worries turn us grey; And sorrows fierce are less acute; Our hearts are riddled every day With Rifts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts. He was very wealthy, besides his West India estate—owning a large estate in England. The wonderful piety of this devoted saint, during the long years of her widowhood, ought to humble pigmy Christians, like me, in the dust. Oh, can I ever be saved, if such men and ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... red. I wanted to take this pigmy by the throat. I wanted to shake him. He didn't give ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... constantly descending, until he reached the hard-packed earth, and judged himself to be in about the lowermost part of the valley. On every hand rose the ridges, rocks and peaks of the hills, until, as he looked up at the cloudy sky so far above him, he seemed but the merest pigmy. ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... game was then resumed. Wildeve won first, and Christian ventured another, winning himself this time. The game fluctuated, but the average was in Wildeve's favour. Both men became so absorbed in the game that they took no heed of anything but the pigmy objects immediately beneath their eyes, the flat stone, the open lantern, the dice, and the few illuminated fern-leaves which lay under the light, were the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... inlet—the promontory on each side being much lower. Thus, far from being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the precipice the Cliff ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... endless plan, To splendid wrath he must be wrought By pigmy creeds presumptuous man Sends ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... whey ran out. "My squeeze was in sooth better than yours," said he. The giant didn't know what to say, for he couldn't have believed it of the little fellow. To prove him again, the giant lifted a stone and threw it so high that the eye could hardly follow it. "Now, my little pigmy, let me see you do that." "Well thrown," said the tailor; "but, after all, your stone fell to the ground; I'll throw one that won't come down at all." He dived into his wallet again, and grasping the bird in his hand, ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... member of the Sittinae subfamily in America is the pigmy nuthatch, known scientifically as Sitta pygmaea, a genuine westerner, not known east of the plains. However, in the Rocky Mountain district he is an abundant species, his range east and west being from the plains to the Pacific coast, and north and south ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... his days of success, always attached more importance to etiquette than a prince born to the purple, and not quite a fool, would have been likely to do: but in the obstinacy with which, after his total downfall, he clung to the airy sound of majesty, and such pigmy toys of observance as could be obtained under his circumstances, we cannot persuade ourselves to behold no more than the sickly vanity of a parvenu. The English government acknowledged him by the highest military rank he had held at that time when the treaty of Amiens ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... as if the whole gang had been turned to stone, their self-constituted leader being the most rigid of the crowd, and he stared at Dick Winthorpe as a giant might stare at the pigmy who tried ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... purple clover cultivated by farmers, is the Dodder (Cuscuta trifolii), a destructive vegetable parasite which strangles the plants in a crafty fashion, and which goes by the name of "hellweed," or "devil's guts." It lies in ambush like a pigmy field octopus, with deadly suckers for draining the sap of its victims. These it mats together in its wiry, sinuous coils, and chokes relentlessly by the acre. Nevertheless, the petty garotter— like a toad, "ugly and venomous, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... ages curst: For close designs and crooked counsels fit; Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit; Restless, unfix'd in principles and place; In pow'r unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace: A fiery soul which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o'er-informed the tenement of clay. DRYDEN, Absalom ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... accustomed to camels for exploration, the beautiful horse sinks into the insignificance of a pigmy when compared to his majestic rival, the mighty ship of the desert, and assuredly had it not been for these creatures and their marvellous powers, I never could have performed the three last journeys which complete my public ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Clouds," and I could almost evoke the presence of General Joe Hooker, with his once grand proportions and noble mien, so deservedly famed as The Hero of Lookout Mountain. I afterward ascended another hill, which, although a pigmy in comparison with the Leviathan Lookout, would, in the monotony of our prairie country, be ranked as a mountain. It was upon its top were constructed the government water works, and upon which my brother William was employed for two years, occupying as ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... while an eye on his gate, guarded by his two monstrous dogs. He selected an elm tree twenty feet high, tore it up by the roots, pulled off the branches, and peeled it for a whip. This he jerked up and down to make ready for his task of thrashing "the pigmy." ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... representative in Greater New York, seemed a pigmy. The acoustics of the silent hall carried his soft voice up to us. "I would be afraid of drugs. Will we use ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... interspersed many women, some of whom might be seen supporting in their laps the heavy heads of their unconscious helpmates, while they occupied themselves, by the firelight, in parting the long black matted hair, and maintaining a destructive warfare against the pigmy inhabitants of that dark region. These signs of life and activity in the body of the camp generally were, however, but few and occasional; but, at the spot where Captain de Haldimar stood concealed, the scene was different. At a few yards from ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big stones into pieces. Then I realised that under this sound there was also a strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it every now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols. Then I knew what it was. I went to the window; and a great firelight flung across two meadows smote me where I stood. "Oh, my holy aunt," I thought, "they've ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... favourite—Punch a suppliant falls, And humbly for assistance calls; He humbly calls and begs you'll stop The gothic rage of Vander Hop, Wh'invades without pretence and right, Or any law but that of might, Our Pigmy land—and treats our kings Like paltry idle wooden things; Has beat our dancers out of doors, And call'd our chastest virgins whores; He has not left our Queen a rag on, Has forced away our George and Dragon, Has broke our wires, nor was ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's Bureau reports only incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible parenthood that is ignored by governmental ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... sweetest music the peace of the words stole over the dwarf's troubled spirit, soothing and fortifying him so that he felt himself no longer a weakling, a pigmy, but a veritable giant to fight and to endure. And with a smile upon his lips and a light not of earth in his sunken eyes, Bambo and his charges slipped noiselessly away from the bear, the monkey, and the caravan, and set out, not to seek the Happy Land, as Darby ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... of the most striking birds; but to give an idea of the variety of other birds which may be found in Sikkim, many of which are hardly less beautiful than those above described, we may learn from Gammie that among the birds of prey there are eleven eagles; the peregrine falcon, a little pigmy falcon, and five other falcons; a big brown wood-owl, 2 feet in length, a pigmy owlet measuring only 6 inches, and nine other owls; and six kites;—among the game-birds, besides pheasants, three quails, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... viverra, a sort of weasel, of three inches. I believe there are thirty varieties of antelopes known and described; eighteen of them are found in this country, and there are the largest and the smallest of the species; for we have the eland, and we have the pigmy antelope, which is not above six inches high. We see here also the intermediate links of many genera, such as the eland and the gnoo; and as we find the elephant, the rhinoceros, and Wilmot's friend, the hippopotamus, we certainly have ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... written half-a-dozen lives of him. But there is something left for her yet to do. She has no more comprehended magnum Erasmum, than any other pigmy comprehends a giant, or partisan ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... said farewell to the Casco and to Captain Otis, and our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy trading schooner, the Equator, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with a ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He is prepar'd; and reason too he should: This apish and unmannerly approach, This harness'd masque and unadvised revel This unhair'd sauciness and boyish troops, The king doth smile at; and is well prepar'd To whip this dwarfish war, these pigmy arms, From out the circle of his territories. That hand which had the strength, even at your door, To cudgel you, and make you take the hatch; To dive, like buckets, in concealed wells; To crouch in litter of your ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the first mud that comes to hand. A handful of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low. Will that become an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men of destiny, reversing ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... black, an hour before the dawn, when his eyes opened wide, and he sat up, listening. He heard it again, faint and far away, a feeble "pop-pop!" Then there were more, a sudden pigmy chorus of battle. He got to his feet, and ran to ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... bleak and barren, and, as you all know, the few scattered inhabitants make up for the scarcity of their numbers by their personal stature, for they are, without exception, the tallest people I have ever met. I felt quite a pigmy alongside them. They have large rolling eyes, long shaggy hair, and thick snub noses: indeed, they are as ugly a race as I ever set eyes on. Perhaps, for certain reasons, I might have been prejudiced, but of that you ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... globe, by not a cloud o'ercast From the ANTARCTICK, from the Land of Fire [Footnote 5] To where ALASKA'S [Footnote 6] wintry wilds retire; From mines [Footnote 7] of gold, and giant-sons of earth, To grotts of ice, and tribes of pigmy birth Who freeze alive, nor, dead, in dust repose, High-hung in forests to the casing snows.[a] Now mid angelic multitudes he flies, That hourly come with blessings from the skies; Wings the blue element, and, ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... broad-winged hawk, Mexican black hawk, Mexican goshawk, sparrow-hawk, barn-owl, long-eared owl, short-eared owl, great gray owl, barred owl, western owl, Richardson owl, screech-owl, snowy owl, hawk-owl, burrowing owl, pigmy owl and elf owl—live mostly on destructive mammals, insects, frogs and snakes, but they eat some birds and some of them occasionally catch poultry. Young ones do much more harm than the full-grown ones, probably because they find poultry and birds easier to obtain than other food. These species ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... A pigmy scraper wi' his fiddle, Wha us'd at trystes an' fairs to driddle. Her strappin limb and gausy middle (He reach'd nae higher) Had hol'd his heartie like a riddle, An' blawn't ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... voyage, and once more took ship at Balsora. After we had been at sea a few weeks, we were overtaken by a dreadful storm, and were obliged to cast anchor near an island which the captain had endeavored to avoid; for he assured us that it was inhabited by pigmy savages, covered with hair, who would speedily attack us in great numbers. Soon an innumerable multitude of frightful savages, about two feet high, boarded the ship. Resistance was useless. They took down our sails, cut our cable, towed the ship to land, and made us all go ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing 140 Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile[48] which still its ruins shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallow'd ground! 145 Or thither,[49] where, beneath the showery west, The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest, No slaves ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... River of Spirits is a deep forest which stretches back and back in a dense and chaotic tangle of strangled sapling and parasitic weed to the edge of the Pigmy forest. No man—white or brown or black—has explored the depth of the Forbidden Forest, for here the wild beasts have their lairs and rear their young; and here are mosquito in dense clouds. Moreover, and this is important, a certain potent ghost named Bim-bi stalks restlessly from one border ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... jumped Tokay 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, Twisted his thumb in his red moustache, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... represent a human head, was embellished with a strip of scarlet cloth of European manufacture. It required little observation to discover that this strange object was revered as a god. By the side of the big and lusty images standing sentinel over the altars of the Hoolah Hoolah ground, it seemed a mere pigmy in tatters. But appearances all the world over are deceptive. Little men are sometimes very potent, and rags sometimes cover very extensive pretensions. In fact, this funny little image was the 'crack' god of ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... possessors of a lost globe, such as Lord Byron has described in "Cain" as beheld by the fratricide, when, guided by Lucifer, he wandered among the shadowy existences of those worlds which had been destroyed to make way for our pigmy earth. I will not attempt further to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of "brown gum" had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words that I can command would do justice to its Titanian ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... upon whose persistent declarations it is founded. This good man in his youth ran away from the discipline and frequent stripes of his preceptor, and hid himself under the hollow bank of a river. There he remained fasting for two days; and then two men of pigmy stature appeared, and invited him to come with them, and they would lead him into a country full of delights and sports. A more powerful temptation could not have been offered to a runaway schoolboy of twelve years old; and the invitation ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Many of these look forward to the day when posterity will canonize them, and lift them to the glory of those who were not received by their age because they were in advance of their age. So they regard with contempt the pigmy world, wrap the mantles of their mortified pride about them, and lie down in ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... profile, and the usual allowance of thunder, lightning, and earthquake. It struck me when I saw them, that two or three thousand such men would have small difficulty in dealing with a whole army of Mexicans, if the latter were all of the pigmy, spindle-shanked breed I had seen on first landing. These giants could easily have walked away with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... discussion in at least three foreign chancelleries, where old maps were being looked up and new ones bought and painted different colours, according as seemed most desirable by the bearded men, who sat in council to apportion the marsh, rock, dune, and forest of which the now absorbingly interesting pigmy State was composed. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... first: A Name to all succeeding Ages curst. For close Designs, and crooked Counsels fit; Sagacious, Bold, and Turbulent of wit: Restless, unfixt in Principles and Place; In Pow'r unpleas'd, impatient of Disgrace. A fiery Soul, which working out its way, Fretted the Pigmy-Body to decay: And o'r inform'd the Tenement of Clay, A daring Pilot in extremity; Pleas'd with the Danger, when the Waves went high He sought the Storms; but for a Calm unfit, Would Steer too nigh the Sands, to boast his Wit. Great Wits are sure to Madness ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... was very vivid indeed along the line from Dover to London at that time. For a space they traversed just such a country-side as he had known since his childhood, the small oblongs of field, hedge-lined, of a size for pigmy horses to plough, the little roads three cart-widths wide, the elms and oaks and poplars dotting these fields about, little thickets of willow beside the streams; ricks of hay no higher than a giant's knees, dolls' cottages with diamond panes, brickfields, and straggling village streets, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... under James the Second, in Prussia during the Seven Years' War, in the American colonies and the United States, in Portugal, in Greece, in various republics of Central and South America, even the assignats of the French Revolution—seem pigmy frauds in comparison with the present vast inundation of counterfeit ...
— The Paper Moneys of Europe - Their Moral and Economic Significance • Francis W. Hirst
... smit With a base passion—miserable dupes Who seldom mark their own worst bane of all. The black-skinned girl is "tawny like the honey"; The filthy and the fetid's "negligee"; The cat-eyed she's "a little Pallas," she; The sinewy and wizened's "a gazelle"; The pudgy and the pigmy is "piquant, One of the Graces sure"; the big and bulky O she's "an Admiration, imposante"; The stuttering and tongue-tied "sweetly lisps"; The mute girl's "modest"; and the garrulous, The spiteful spit-fire, is "a sparkling wit"; And she who scarcely lives for scrawniness ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... streamed the World, opening and shutting umbrellas. I believe I was thinking over some new work of my own, arranged for the future. Now the rain ceased, I went down the steps and walked across the road into the stone garden of the lions. Round their feet played pigmy children. I heard their cries mingling with the splash of the fountains, but I took no notice of them. Sitting down on a bench, I went on planning a picture—the legendary masterpiece, no doubt. I was certainly very deep in thought and lost to my surroundings, for when a ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... pigmy scraper, wi' his fiddle, Wha us'd at trysts and fairs to driddle, Her strappan limb and gausy middle He reach'd na higher, Had hol'd his heartie like a riddle, An' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... such a height as caused those looking at him from below to feel giddy as they gazed. It was, indeed, a strange and somewhat fearful spectacle— that slight human form, sixty or seventy feet above their heads, at such a vast elevation so diminished in size as to appear like a child or a pigmy, and the more fearful to them who could not convince themselves of the security of the slender stair upon which he was standing. They were half expecting that, at any moment, one of the pegs would give way, and precipitate the poor fellow ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... seem Alps, when veil'd in misty shroud, Some men seem kings, through mists of ignorance; Must we have darkness, then, and cloud on cloud, To give our hills and pigmy kings a chance? Must we conspire to curse the humbling light, Lest some one, at whose feet our fathers bow'd, Should suddenly appear, full length, in sight, Scaring to laughter the adoring crowd? Oh, no! God send us light!—Who loses then? The king of slaves and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... finished, Mr Cumming came up with the tobacco, and I could not but smile at the astonishment which I saw expressed in his countenance, upon perceiving himself, though six feet two inches high, become at once a pigmy among giants; for these people may indeed more properly be called giants than tall men. Of the few among us who are full six feet high, scarcely any are broad and muscular in proportion to their stature, but look rather like men of the common bulk, run up accidentally to an unusual height; and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... must she have suffered before she had dared to do this thing! He had taken up a burden and adjusted the weight to suit himself. He had had no thought for her, no care save that the seemliness of his own absorbed life might not be disturbed. And behind it all the other reason. What a pigmy of a man he ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beloved of artists and poets; but it also gained much. No longer did the Count of Limburg-Styrum parade his army of one colonel, six officers, and two privates in the valley of the Roehr: he and his passed under the sway of Murat, and the lapse of these pigmy forces made a national army possible in the dim future. No more did the Imperial lawyers at Wetzlar browse on evergreen lawsuits: justice was administered after the concise methods of Napoleon. The crops of the Swabian peasant were now comparatively ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some contention as to who should have the ears; but, in spite of his obstinacy, (deaf as these little creatures are to advice,) I contrived to get ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... each slumb'ring string, And (mighty subject!) of a Mushroom sing, Fair to the eye, and pleasant to the taste; Charm'd by the note, a pigmy group, in haste, Lay down their grainy loads, as slow they move Thro' lanes of reed and grass, to them a grove! As if an Orpheus thou, they gather round, Erect their tiny ears, and drink the sound. Gray was the sky, save where the eastern ray O'er fragrant ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... find no description. His honest eyes fire up, and sparkle, as if their depths were stirred by something bright. His broad chest heaves with pleasure. His strong loose hands clench themselves, in his earnestness; and he emphasizes what he says with a right arm that shows, in my pigmy view, like a sledge-hammer. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... bound for new service further Pacificward. Of Frijoles there remained barely enough to shudder at, with the collector's nasal bawl of "Free Holys!" and everywhere the irrepressible tropical greenery was already rushing back to engulf the pigmy works of man. It seemed criminally wasteful to have built these entire towns with all the detail and machinery of a well governed and fully furnished city from police station to salt cellars only to tear them down again and utterly wipe them out four or five years after ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... see the beginnings of that period of conquest on the part of the very rich using their surplus capital in effacing the less rich—a period which really opened with Astor and which has been vastly intensified in recent times. Clinton was accounted a rich man in his day, but he was a pigmy in that respect compared to Astor. With his incessant inflow of surplus wealth, Astor was in a position where on the instant he could take advantage of the difficulties of less rich men and take over to himself their property. A large amount ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... &c adj.; smallness &c (of quantity) 32; exiguity, inextension^; parvitude^, parvity^; duodecimo^; Elzevir edition, epitome, microcosm; rudiment; vanishing point; thinness &c 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy^, Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon^, urchin, elf; atomy^, dandiprat^; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my-thumb^; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling^, cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet^, fly, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... relinquished their prize, though defended only by the courage and address of a single man. On his proper element, Yawkins was equally successful. one occasion, he was landing his cargo at the Manxman's lake, near Kirkcudbright, when two revenue cutters (the Pigmy and the Dwarf) hove in sight at once on different tacks, the coming round by the Isles of Fleet, the other between the point of Rueberry and the Muckle Ron. The dauntless free-trader instantly weighed anchor, and bore down right between ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... spoken it; to watch, to follow, adore her; became the business of his life. Meanwhile, as is the way often, his idol had idols of her own, and never thought of or suspected the admiration of her little pigmy adorer. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Forty persons can find standing-room within the mighty head, which is 14-1/2 feet in diameter. A six-foot man standing on the lower lip could hardly reach the eyes. The index finger is 8 feet in length and the nose 3-3/4 feet. The Colossus of Rhodes was a pigmy compared ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... Phoenician with his pigmy freight Haply thy herald was, who drave of yore Deep-laden from Bolerium by the Strait Of Gades, and beside his city's gate Chaffered in ingots cast ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cannot account for the madness of the thing. There, some twenty, or thirty Hudson's Bay men—mere youths most of them—were coming with all speed to head us off from the river path, at a wooded point called Seven Oaks. What this pigmy band thought it could do against our armed men, I do not know. The blunder on their part was so unexpected and inexcusable, it never dawned on us the panic-stricken settlers had spread a report of raid, and these poor valiant defenders had come out to protect the ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... ever and anon eyed me with a furious glance of canine hunger for my destruction. Nothing was more evidently mortifying to her, than the procrastination of her malice; nor could she bear to think that a fierceness so gigantic and uncontrollable should show itself in nothing more terrific than the pigmy spite of a chambermaid. For myself, I had been accustomed to the warfare of formidable adversaries, and the encounter of alarming dangers; and what I saw of her spleen had not power sufficient to ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... every breast; the power is everywhere,—in every brain. The giant and the pigmy are alike active in seeking out and finding out many inventions. And in this very universality of effort and result we discover another guaranty of the great future. The river of Progress multiplies its tributaries the farther it flows, and even ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... ye pigmy wits, beware, Nor with immortal Scaliger compare. For me, though his example strike my view, Oh! not for me his footsteps to pursue. Whether first nature, unpropitious, cold, This clay compounded in a ruder mould; ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... good man Paul would say the same thing if he were here to-day. (Cries from the world of "that's so!" and "hurrah for Paul!") I am satisfied to have a great man like Paul on my side, even if I must know that some of his pigmy disciples are against ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... is not large, however, in comparison with St. Paul's, and an ordinary parish church, called St. Margaret's, which must be, I think, quite as large as Trinity, New York, and stands within a hundred yards of the abbey, is but a pigmy compared with Westminster. I took a position in St. Margaret's church-yard, at a point where the whole of the eastern side of the edifice might be seen, and for the first time in my life gazed upon a truly Gothic structure of any magnitude. It was near sunset, and the ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... active as a boy and almost as impatient for the start for the Dark Continent. Ben slept at the Chester's home that night and if his dreams were not as populated with visions of elephants, leopards, deer, huge snakes and pigmy savages as theirs it was not any lack of interest in the coming expedition that was responsible ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... fortune in life. Born in Chopi, he was sent for by Kamrasi, who first gave him two women, who died; then another, who ran away; and, finally, a distorted dwarf like himself, whom he rejected, because he thought the propagation of his pigmy breed would not be advantageous to society. Bombay then marched him back to the palace, with 500 simbi strung in necklaces round his neck. When these two had gone, the Kamraviona arrived with two spears, one load of flour, and a pot of ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... forms have become extinct, while only the smaller types have survived to our day; and a similar fact is to be observed in many of the earlier geological epochs, a group progressing and reaching a maximum of size or complexity and then dying out, or leaving at most but few and pigmy representatives. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... among his new-born blisses, A four year's Darling of a pigmy size! See, where mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his Mother's kisses, With light upon him from his Father's eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, 90 Some fragment from his ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... trees. The vegetation has not, however, yet improved in proportion to our nearness to Soudan; for this dwarf forest of tholukh and various other trees cannot be compared to the splendid desert vegetation in the Aheer valleys; these are pigmy mimosas in comparison with those of Aheer. The surface of the ground is now undulating sand and red earth, and every trace of stone has almost disappeared; the soil is also covered with karengia and other herbs, all dry and sapless. We seem to be traversing a limitless ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... Before I enter upon the Description of the Philosophick PIGMY, (in this little Theatre of Secrets) overcoming and subduing GIANTS, I pray permit me here to use the words of Vanhelmont, taken out of his Book De Arbore Vitae, ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... the child to look through the large end of her field-glass,—a source of endless entertainment to them both. Suddenly Cecilia gave a little shriek of delight at the way her good friend, Mr. Grey, dwindled into a pigmy; upon which the Count, attracted apparently by her voice, left his chair and came and ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... for illustration it is to be noticed that the process of combination begins with 7 instead of with 6. Among others, the scale of the Pigmies of Central Africa[103] and that of the Mosquitos[104] of Central America show this tendency. In the Pigmy scale the words for 1 and 6 are so closely akin that one cannot resist the impression that 6 was to them a new 1, and was ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... pony for the two, and they were to ride "turn about"; but Chuar'ruumpeak, the chief, rides, and Shuts, the one-eyed, barelegged, merry-faced pigmy, walks, and points the way with a slender cane; then leaps and bounds by the shortest way, and sits down on a rock and waits demurely until we come, always meeting us with a jest, his face a rich ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... entirely in the future, and with this touch of romance he took new attributes. His Japanese cook inhabited the lower story through which one entered to mount to the main floor. Inside the place revealed the taste of the man of the world. It looked pigmy beside the enormous structures which began to rise hard by, but was all the more diminutively impressive. One passed it on the way to the works, and often by night drifted out the sound of Clark's piano ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... people of St. Petersburg; so I am immune. The worst they could do would be to order me out of the country, but even that is unthinkable. If any one attempted to interfere with me, I have only to act the hero of the penny novelette, draw myself up to my full height, which, as you know, is not that of a pigmy, fold my arms across my manly chest, cry, 'Ha, ha!' and sing 'Rule Britannia,' whereupon the villains would wilt and withdraw. But Jack has no such security. He is a Russian subject, and, prince or commoner, the authorities here could do what they liked with him. I always think of ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... large forest trees, with long horizontal branches, called "Canari" by the natives. There it attains a height of 50 feet and upwards, whereas from 20 to 30 feet may be taken as a fair average of the trees in the Straits' Settlements; but notwitstanding our pigmy proportions (adds Dr. Oxley), it does not appear, from, all I could ever learn, that we are relatively behind the Banda trees, either in quantity or quality of produce, and I am strongly impressed with the idea that the island ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... filled is enough of itself to arouse enthusiasm, whatever the object of the gathering may be. Ten thousand human beings, more or less, swarming on the floor, clustering on the walls, rising tier above tier, until in dim distance the pigmy throng seems soaring up into the very heavens, is a tremendous, a solemn, a heart-stirring sight, suggestive—I write with reverence—of the Judgment Day. And when such an assembly is convened for the purpose of considering matters of urgent importance, ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... wont is once a-year To lounge in watering-places, disagreeable and dear; Who on pigmy Cambrian mountains, and in Scotch or Irish bogs Imbibe incessant whisky, and inhale incessant fogs: Ye know not with what transports the mad Alpine Clubman gushes, When with rope and axe and knapsack to the realms of snow he rushes. O can I e'er the hour forget—a voice within cries "Never!"— ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... party, as they slowly rose to the surface. Marston seemed to be struggling against despair. For the first time, the impossibility of the great enterprise seemed to dawn upon him. He and his friends had undertaken a great fight with the mighty Ocean, which now played with them as a giant with a pigmy. To reach the bottom was evidently completely out of their power; and what was infinitely worse, there was nothing to be gained by reaching it. The Projectile was not on the bottom; it could not even have got to the bottom. Marston said it all in a few words to the Captain, as the Clubmen ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... coming of the navigable balloon and the flying machine. To begin with, these things open new gulfs for expenditure; in the end they mean possibilities of destruction beyond all precedent. Such things as the Zeppelin and the Ville de Paris are only the first pigmy essays of the aeronaut. It is clear that to be effective, capable of carrying guns and comparatively insensitive to perforation by shot and shell, these things will have to be very much larger and as costly, perhaps, as a ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... little merit except in the Scottish prelude, which is of high quality in style and pathos. It is curious how utterly his powers desert him the moment he leaves his native heath: like Antaeus, he is a giant on his mother earth and a pigmy off it. His first published book was 'Better Dead' (1887); it works out a cynical idea which would be amusing in five pages, but is diluted into tediousness by being spread over fifty. But in 1889 came a second masterpiece, 'A Window in Thrums,' a continuation of the Auld ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... PIGMY, n. One of a tribe of very small men found by ancient travelers in many parts of the world, but by modern in Central Africa only. The Pigmies are so called to distinguish them from the bulkier Caucasians ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... her. She could not rest her soul upon this pigmy. She felt revengeful rather toward him—revengeful, because he could sit there opposite her so capable and faithful, so truthful and decent, so utterly unlike the companion whom ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... is personified by another pigmy, the Geancanach (love-talker). He does not appear, like the Leprechaun, with a purse in one of his pockets, but with his hands in both of them, and a dudeen (short pipe) in his mouth, as he lazily strolls through lonely valleys making love to the foolish country lasses and ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... we enquire into its cause. This is always a question of some uncertainty. Is its cause something of absolute and substantive existence without me, or is it not? Is its cause something of the very same nature, as the thing that gave me a similar sensation in a matter of comparatively a pigmy and diminutive extension? ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... of deformities. A leg or an arm too long or too short is at once ugly and unserviceable, and the same is true if body and soul are disproportionate. For a strong and impassioned soul may 'fret the pigmy body to decay,' and so produce convulsions and other evils. The violence of controversy, or the earnestness of enquiry, will often generate inflammations and rheums which are not understood, or assigned to their true ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... was surrounded by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; an atmosphere which, while it stimulated vegetable growth, no living thing could breathe and continue to live. Hence it was, that vegetation, gigantic almost beyond conception, covered its surface. Fern, which is now a pigmy plant, nowhere higher than a few feet, grew tall and overshadowing like great oaks, while oaks, it is fair to presume, towered thousands of feet towards the sky. These stupendous forests stood alone upon the surface of the earth; no animals wandered through their fastnesses; no birds sported amidst ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... about the Picts, but cannot come to any satisfactory conclusion. Were they Celts? were they Laps? Macbeth could hardly have been a Lap, but then the tradition of the country that they were a diminutive race, and their name Pight or Pict, which I almost think is the same as petit—pixolo—puj—pigmy. It is a truly perplexing subject—quite as much so as that of Fingal, and whether he was a Scotsman or an Irishman I have never been able to decide, as there has been so much to be said on both sides of the question. Please present my kind remembrances to Mrs. Petrie and all friends, particularly ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... common in Ceylon; their rarity accordingly enhances their beauty. The largest English oak would be a mere pigmy among the giants of these wilds, whose stature is so wonderful that the eye never becomes tired of admiration. Often have I halted on my journey to ride around and admire the prodigious height and girth ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... ministers; but when Fox made a call for papers, Lord North opposed it, as liable to make discoveries prejudicial to the interests of the country. This drew down upon him a series of odious comparisons. Burke compared him to the "pigmy physician," who watched over the health of Sancho Panza, in the government of Barataria, and who snatched away every dish from his patient's well-supplied table, on various pretences, before he could get one mouthful. The house was convulsed with laughter, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... settled, And there the royal beast full sorely nettled. With foaming mouth, and flashing eye, He roars. All creatures hide or fly,— Such mortal terror at The work of one poor gnat! With constant change of his attack, The snout now stinging, now the back, And now the chambers of the nose; The pigmy fly no mercy shows. The lion's rage was at its height; His viewless foe now laugh'd outright, When on his battle-ground he saw, That every savage tooth and claw Had got its proper beauty By doing bloody duty; Himself, the hapless lion, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... things as between Count Maximilian and Mrs. Catherine, and the feelings which they entertained for each other. The woman loved him, that was the fact. And, as we have shown in the previous chapter how John Hayes, a mean-spirited fellow as ever breathed, in respect of all other passions a pigmy, was in the passion of love a giant, and followed Mrs. Catherine with a furious longing which might seem at the first to be foreign to his nature; in the like manner, and playing at cross-purposes, Mrs. Hall had ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... make them laugh; the wise man, when he reads them, will be far more inclined to weep. Let any young man who may see these words remember, that in him, as in Rabelais, the ape and the man are struggling for the mastery. Let him take warning by the fate of one who was to him as a giant to a pigmy; and think ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of meeting. But I was interrupted in my observations by the tiny little gentleman on the opposite side of the room coming across to take a place beside me. It is no difficult matter to a Frenchman to slide into conversation, and so gracefully did my pigmy friend keep up the character of the nation, that we were almost confidential ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... that white farm-house, across the river?" says a brave pigmy of a chap in navy uniform. "That is head-quarters for Secession. They were going to take the School from us, Sir, and the frigate; but we've got ahead of 'em, now you and the Massachusetts boys have come down,"—and he twinkled all over with delight. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... The pigmy palaces Where the tint hides, Opal and sapphire Half-pearl and half-fire ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... that in the face of such a wind all the pigmy appliances that the populace could bring to act upon such a mass of combustion would be unavailing. As much as could burn that night was burnt, while some of that which would not burn crumbled and fell as a formless heap, whence new flames towered up, and inclined to the north-east ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... they did me.' Well, no! not at all: he said, 'Oh! if I were strong and bold, I would defend the weak against the strong; for I am weak, and the strong make me suffer.' In the mean time, as he was too much of a pigmy to prevent the strong from molesting the weak, he prevented the larger beasts from injuring ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Wisbech as he gazed at the cars that they ran pigmy freight trains in the land he came from, and he was conscious of something that had a curious stirring effect on him in the clang and clatter of that giant rolling stock, as the engineer hurled his great train furiously down-grade. It was man's defiance ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... he's toed it ever since. An' I can tell you that the pictures he's paintin' now with his tongue for them poor blind boys to see is bigger an' better than any pictures he could have painted with—with his pigmy paints if he worked on 'em for a thousand years. An' it's YOU that's done it for him, jest ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... arms and offer her protection and tenderness. Absurd because, turning towards her, he was compelled to look upwards into her eyes, and the tall, strong figure at his side, walking erect, with firm square shoulders, dwarfed his conceit till he felt himself morally and physically a pigmy. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... encyclopedic learning, he was thus, from every point of view, the maker of an epoch. It is self-evident that by virtue of the necessities of the "System" he must very often take refuge in certain forced constructions, about which his pigmy opponents make such an ado even at the present time. But these constructions are only the frames and scaffoldings of his work; if one does not stop unnecessarily at these but presses on further into the building one will find uncounted treasures which hold their full value ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... Lord Saltire let me have the run of his library. Gibbon gave me a couple of enchanting weeks. You know the effect that he produces. You seem to be serenely floating upon a cloud, and looking down on all these pigmy armies and navies, with a wise Mentor ever at your side to whisper to you the inner meaning ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... you, O noxious, pigmy bird, whether it be you fly Or paddle in the stagnant pools that sweltering, festering lie— I curse you and your evil kind for that you do me wrong, Engendering poisons that corrupt my petted muse of song; Go, get thee hence, and nevermore ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... thirty feet high, in which are cut the steps of a not very solid staircase, forms here the curtain of the esplanade which carries the pigmy fort. The house of the commandant consists of a couple of huts placed in a square, and the soldiers occupy an oblong building a hundred feet away, at the foot of ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... exceedingly great. Rarely has a State unready for conflict been able to stand against a nation organised for war. The last of a long series of examples was the war between Russia and Japan, in which the vast resources of a great Empire were exhausted in the struggle with a State so small as to seem a pigmy in comparison with her giant adversary. On the 10th of February 1904, the day when the news reached England that the Russo-Japanese war had begun, I gave as follows my reasons for ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... where either, as in 'A Modest Proposal,' the proposition, or, as in the 'Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,' the arguments are absurd. He often shoots out incidental humorous or satirical shafts. But his most important and extended method is that of allegory. The pigmy size of the Lilliputians symbolizes the littleness of mankind and their interests; the superior skill in rope-dancing which with them is the ground for political advancement, the political intrigues of real men; and the question ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Child among his new-born blisses, A six years' darling of a pigmy size! See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, With light upon him from his father's eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the greater—that the God in whom you Churchmen and the millions of lay-folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers believe, should have commanded, 'Let the universe exist,' and have been obeyed, or that the stupendous pigmy Man should have dared to say, 'Let there be ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... familiar objects that are visible! The pureness of the medium through which things are seen presents distant objects with great distinctness, but it will not present them in their natural size, for it can not change the angle of vision. The villages upon the table-land were apparently pigmy villages, inhabited by pigmy men and pigmy women, surrounded with pigmy cattle, and garrisoned by pigmy soldiery. It is, by an optical illusion, Liliput in real life. Had the English satirist placed ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... the chief, bestowing upon Ivan Ivanovitch a glance such as a giant might cast upon a pigmy, a pedant upon a dancing-master: and he stretched out his foot and stamped upon the floor with it. This boldness cost him dear; for his whole body wavered and his nose struck the railing; but the brave preserver of ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the worst of my trying to give a consecutive narrative of my first years at the Lyceum. Henry Irving looms across them, reducing all events, all feelings, all that happened, and all that was suggested, to pigmy size. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... of eating the lover after the consummation of the nuptials, of making a meal of the exhausted pigmy, who is henceforth good for nothing, is not so difficult to understand, since insects can hardly be accused of sentimentality; but to devour him during the act surpasses anything that the most morbid mind could imagine. I have seen the thing with my own eyes, and I have not yet ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... centuries of human development has been on the whole in this second direction, has been towards differentiation. [Footnote: See Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman.] An adult white woman differs far more from a white man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male. The education, the mental disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman, reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore sex but to refine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with the distinctive elements of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... over the mile of sand road in fewer minutes than it takes to write it down here. There was another factor, new come into the problem, and we meant to follow it close. Expedition has not been too highly sung. An esoteric novelist hath it that a pigmy is as good as a giant if he arrive ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... paradoxes—the paronomasia as it were—of an intoxicated state of consciousness, but glimpses of reality. We are all of us participators in a world of concrete music, geometry and number—a world of sounds, odors, forms, motions, colors, so mathematically related and coordinated that our pigmy bodies, equally with the farthest star, vibrate to the music of the spheres. There is a Beautiful Necessity which rules the world, which is a law of nature and equally a law of art, for art is idealized creation: nature carried to a higher power by reason of its passage through ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor's bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air and sun: a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects; had never heard of such a beast; thought myself face to face with some incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality in science. Rarely have I been conscious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... climb there this afternoon. Lazily smoking a cigar I drank in the pastoral panorama spread out before me. The old Sumner road wound as a dusty-gray ribbon amid fields of grain and corn. Below were the pigmy figures of golfers, grotesque in their insignificance, ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... authors equal Juvenal and Tacitus; none certainly exceed them. But they are the last barriers that stem the tide. After them the flood has already rushed in, and before long comes the collapse. In Suetonius and Florus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race; in Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarfishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold enough to respond to them. The good emperor would do so if he ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... was a muddy stream, and with its low banks, scattered flat sand-bars, and pigmy islands, a melancholy river, straggling through the centre of vast prairies, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel trees standing at long distances from each ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... expostulations of his friends could drive this belief out of his head. Not only when he was engaged in writing, but even in the midst of an ordinary conversation, at supper, or whilst drinking a social glass of wine or rum, he would suddenly exclaim, "See there—there—that ugly little pigmy—see what capers he cuts. Pray don't incommode yourself, my little man. You are at liberty to listen to us as much as you please. Will you not approach nearer? You are welcome." (Here, and occasionally, he would accompany ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann |
