"Cyclopean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... priestess; then 'But come now,' she cries; 'haste on the way and perfect the service begun; let us go faster; I descry the ramparts cast in Cyclopean furnaces, and in front the arched gateway where they bid us lay the gifts foreordained.' She ended, and advancing side by side along the shadowy ways, they pass over and draw nigh the gates. Aeneas makes entrance, and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... were raised from the earth and made light enough to be readily moved and directed; and not improbably the same acquaintance with nature's finer forces greatly facilitated the labours of those who raised the enormous blocks of stone sometimes used in cyclopean architecture, or in the building ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... appearance, which vividly reminded me of those parts of Staffordshire where the great iron-foundries are most numerous. The day was glowing hot, and the scrambling over the rough surface and through the intricate thickets was very fatiguing; but I was well repaid by the strange Cyclopean scene. As I was walking along I met two large tortoises, each of which must have weighed at least two hundred pounds: one was eating a piece of cactus, and as I approached, it stared at me and slowly ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... overtops the highest trees of the forest, is terminated by a shelf of rock with a horizontal and smooth surface. Other trees crown this summit, which the missionaries call the peak, or Mogote de Cocuyza. This monument of nature, in its simple grandeur recalls to mind the Cyclopean remains of antiquity. Its strongly-marked outlines, and the group of trees and shrubs by which it is crowned, stand out from the azure of the sky. It seems a forest rising ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to the point, where the cyclopean wall of granite cliff which forms the western side of Lundy, ends sheer in a precipice of some three hundred feet, topped by a pile of snow-white rock, bespangled with golden lichens. As they approached, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and 193 ft., and may be taken as a representative type of bridges of this kind. The Wittingen bridge by the same engineers had a span of 390 ft., probably the longest timber [v.04 p.0535] span ever constructed. Of stone bridges in Great Britain, the earliest were the cyclopean bridges still existing on Dartmoor, consisting of stone piers bridged by stone slabs. The bridge over the East Dart near Tavistock had three piers, with slabs 15 ft. by 6 ft. (Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, ii. 43). It is reputed to have lasted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... daintiness of time and rhyme. He was no neater than wide Nature's wild, More metrical than sea-winds. Culture's child, Lapped in luxurious laws of line and lilt, Shrank from him shuddering, who was roughly built As cyclopean temples. Yet there rang True music through his rhapsodies, as he sang Of brotherhood, and freedom, love and hope, With strong wide sympathy which dared to cope With all life's phases, and call nought unclean. Whilst hearts are generous, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... arch bridge acted as a dam to the flood, and five towns were crushing each other against it. A thousand houses came down on the great wave of water, and were held there a solid mass in the jaws of a Cyclopean vise. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... widely scattered, at Samos and Delos, at Phigaleia, Thoricus, Argos and many other points. The very earliest are hardly more than random piles of rough stone. Those which may fairly claim notice for their artistic masonry are of a later date and of two kinds: the coursed, and the polygonal or Cyclopean, so called from the tradition that they were built by the Cyclopes. These Cyclopean walls were composed of large, irregular polygonal blocks carefully fitted together and dressed to a fairly smooth face (Fig. 23). Both kinds were used contemporaneously, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... world-wide popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the universality and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a master in the art of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour; and there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But these are mere surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power, to all forms of humour. Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to be attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or even to any depth of intellectuality. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the whispering voices of the girls faded from the corridor; the lights were lowered in the central hall, only the red Cyclopean eye of an enormous columnar stove, like a lighthouse, gleamed through the darkness. Outside, the silent night sparkled, glistened, and finally paled. Towards morning, having invested the sturdy wooden outer walls of the house and filmed with delicate tracery ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... that renders views taken by such means so deficient in air, or, as the artists term it, aerial perspective, most distant objects seeming almost as near as those in the foreground. This indeed is the main defect of all photographs: they are true representations of nature to one eye—cyclopean pictures, as it were—appearing perfectly stereoscopic with one eye closed, but seeming absolutely flattened when viewed by the two eyes. I remember being shown a huge photograph of the city of Berlin, taken from an eminence; and a more violent caricature of nature ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance of ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... in his Biography, Vol. II. 510. "The square Cyclopean figure was attired in a shabby ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... on which the Brownings had entered differed little from the Florence of to-day. The Palazzo Pitti, within a stone's throw of Casa Guidi, stood in the same cyclopean massiveness as now; the piazza and church of San Miniato, cypress-shaded, rose from the sweep of the hills, and the miraculous crucifix of San Giovanni Gualberto was then, as now, an object of pilgrimage. The wonder of the Italian sunsets, that "perished silently of their own glory," burned ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... farms, and villas, all glowed in an exceedingly charming manner in the morning sun;—and then, still further, to say something as brilliant as possible about a certain city, designated as the Great Metropolis,—how it resembled, perhaps, a Cyclopean type-form, with blocks of buildings for letters, domes, turrets, and towers for punctuation-points, church-spires for interrogation and exclamation marks, and squares and avenues for division-spaces between the paragraphs, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... crawling along the ground. When I was here in 1877, I remember looking with wonder at the Tribune building, hard by the Post Office, which was then considered a marvel of architectural daring. Now it is dwarfed into absolute insignificance by a dozen Cyclopean structures on every hand. It looks as diminutive as the Adelphi Terrace in contrast with the Hotel Cecil. I am credibly informed that in some of the huge down-town buildings they run "express" elevators, which do not stop before the fifteenth, eighteenth, twentieth ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... here rather deep, while at the back of it stood a collection of those curious and piled-up water-worn rocks that are often to be found in Africa. These rocks, lying one upon another like the stones of a Cyclopean wall, curved round the western side of the mound, so that practically it was only open for a narrow space, say thirty or forty feet, upon that face of it which looked on to ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... friend who died one day. A metal casket held his honored clay. Of cyclopean architecture stood The splendid vault ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... with holes, seemed to be fragments of ruined edifices, with broken windows and shattered portals. As the trap is columnar, and the columns are horizontal in their direction, the joints of the polygons show along the surface of the ramparts, causing them to look like the work of Cyclopean builders. The Indians and Mexicans of the expedition, deceived by the similarity between these freaks of creation and the results of human workmanship, repeatedly called out, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... flood. They are worn into every shape—pyramids, castles, towers—standing desolate and brown, in long ranges, like the ruins of mountains. The plain is scarred with deep gulleys, adding to the look of decay which accords so well with the Cyclopean relics of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... things themselves." Uriel, keenest of vision 'mid all the host of heaven, is his guardian angel. To follow him into the sanctuaries of great souls and become familiar with all their hopes and fears; to pass the portals of master minds and watch the gradual evolution of great ideas in these cyclopean workshops; to mount the hill of Mirza and from it view the Tide of Time rushing ever into the illimitable Sea of Eternity, and comprehend the meaning of that mighty farce-tragedy enacted on the Bridge of Life, were scarce so easy as listening to the buzzing ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Alcinous in the Odyssey is the ideal picture, and the temple of Pallas of the Brazen House at Sparta, adorned in the interior with a coating of reliefs in metal, a later, historical example. Of the heroic or so-called Cyclopean architecture, that "treasury," [206] a building so imposing that Pausanias thought it worthy to rank with the Pyramids, is a sufficient illustration. Treasury, or tomb, or both (the selfish dead, perhaps, being ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the coolies hurried us away from the kindly group in the Legation porch, across the inner moat and along the inner drive of the castle, past gateways and retaining walls of Cyclopean masonry, across the second moat, along miles of streets of sheds and shops, all grey, thronged with foot-passengers and kurumas, with pack-horses loaded two or three feet above their backs, the arches ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... resistless, irresistible, invincible, proof against, impregnable, unconquerable, indomitable, dominating, inextinguishable, unquenchable; incontestable; more than a match for; overpowering, overwhelming; all powerful, all sufficient; sovereign. able-bodied; athletic; Herculean, Cyclopean, Atlantean[obs3]; muscular, brawny, wiry, well-knit, broad-shouldered, sinewy, strapping, stalwart, gigantic. manly, man-like, manful; masculine, male, virile. unweakened[obs3], unallayed, unwithered[obs3], unshaken, unworn, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... of the Gun Club warmly congratulated the engineer Murchison; his cyclopean work had ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... was little suggestion of a disaster as we trudged through the sleeping town to the lava, two miles away. The brilliant moon gave us a superb view of the volcano, a gray-brown mass rising, expanding and curling in with a profile like a monstrous cyclopean face. But nothing in mythology gives a suggestion of the fascination of this awful force, presenting the sublime beauty above, but in its descent filled with the mysterious ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... with the deficient means, to such an authority in those who planned them and such a subordination in those by whom they were executed as cannot be conceived of either under the looser organizations of barbarism or the more equitable arrangements of modern life. The cyclopean walls, the imposing edifices, the subterranean aqueducts, the mountain terraces, of Peru tell the same tale as pyramids and temples, towers and palaces, in Egypt, Assyria or India. The critic who can find in the ruins at Gran Chimu and Pachacamac ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... the night in a ruined building of cyclopean dimensions, erected no doubt in the time of the Incas, either for the accommodation of travellers by whom the road was then frequented or for purposes of defence. But being both roofless, windowless, and ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... We ended the giro at the Villa d'Este, and breakfasted on the terrace; the rest of the party then retired to sleep and play at cards at the inn, and I started with Stupendous to see the remains of an ancient city, and some specimens of Cyclopean walls, about four or five miles off. The first place is called Ventidius Bassa's, because that gentleman had a villa there, built on the ruins of a little Cyclopean town, where there are still some walls standing. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... to pace before the ticket-office. Five minutes passed—the number of passengers did not increase; ten minutes; a distant shriek—the hoarse inquiry of the inspector—had the Herr's companions yet gekommt? the sudden glare of a Cyclopean eye in the darkness, the ongliding of the long-jointed and gleaming spotted serpent, the train—a hurried glance around the platform, one or two guttural orders, the slamming of doors, the remounting of black uniformed figures like caryatides along the marchepieds, a puff ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... improvements in the art seem to have been coeval with the substitution of the naked for the draped figure. Beauty, and ease, and grace, and power, were the result of the anatomical study of the human form. ARCHITECTURE has bequeathed to us, in the Pelasgic and Cyclopean remains, sufficient to indicate the massive strength it early acquired in parts of Greece. In the Homeric times, the intercourse with Asia had already given something of lightness to the elder forms. Columns are constantly introduced into the palaces of the chiefs, profuse metallic ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... waiting the moment of departure, he was the witness of an incident strangely connected with the fortunes of his house. A packing-case of cyclopean bulk was borne along the platform by some dozen of tottering porters, and ultimately, to the delight of a considerable crowd, hoisted on board the van. It is often the cheering task of the historian to direct attention to the designs ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Houssaye wrote: "Monsieur de Balzac—that haughty rebel who would fain have been a founder, that refined Rabelais who discovered a woman where Rabelais had discovered only a bottle—Monsieur de Balzac dreamed of the gigantic, yet without being an architect of Cyclopean times. Consequently, when he tried to build his temple of Solomon, he had neither marble nor gold enough to his hand. For his human comedy he often lacked actors, and had to resign himself frequently to making the understudies play. It is the fashion to-day to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... that each reviews in some measure the whole history of Irish civilisation as it concerned one particular place. But in a fuller sense the chapters are arranged so as to suggest a continuous idea of Irish life, from the prehistoric period illustrated by cyclopean monuments, down to the full development of purely Irish civilisation which is typified by the buildings at Cashel. Seats of ancient sovereignty like Tara, or of ancient art and learning like Clonmacnoise, ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... Canyon, faced Salt Lake City on his return from one of his notable geological explorations of the southwest, he laid his course by a temple of rock "lifting its opalescent shoulders against the eastern sky." His party first sighted it across seventy miles of a desert which "rose in a series of Cyclopean steps." When, climbing these, they had seen the West Temple of the Virgin revealed in the glory of vermilion body and shining white dome, and had gazed between the glowing Gates of Little Zion into the gorgeous valley within, these scenery-sated veterans of the Grand Canyon and the Painted ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... harsh, grating noise as of stone passing over stone; and though he could see nothing with his eyes, mentally he knew that one of the great time-bleached and weathered blocks of granite that helped to form the cyclopean face of the kopje wall had begun to turn as ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... the radiant valley darkened . . . Out of the sky, as if rising from worlds beyond the horizon, a cyclopean phantasm of clouds took form. Rising higher and higher toward the zenith, ominous and sinister, it gathered substance and spread across the glowing heavens like a film of smoke . . . It took upon itself the awful semblance of a mighty thing, half-beast, half-man. ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... nestlings within. These nests are equally secure from snakes or monkeys, as neither can descend the delicate boughs to which they are pendent—nor can, indeed, climb the smooth stems of the trees. Before me rose a perpendicular cliff, like a wall of cyclopean masonry, surmounted by trees and shrubs; all around hung from the wide-stretching boughs a rich tracery of sepos and creepers of all sorts; vast arums hung suspended in the air, and numberless gay-coloured ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... the descent of Avernus was not facile, the steps being steep and broken, and the roof so low. Young Mervyn had gone down the steps to see it duly placed; a murky, fiery light; came up, against which the descending figures looked black and cyclopean. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... across shallow drainages on the very summit of a hill. This summit was a bald conglomerate, about 150 feet above the valley. In one place we observed eight trincheras within 150 feet of each other, all built of large stones in the cyclopean style of masonry. The blocks were lava and hard felsite, measuring one and a half to three feet. As a rule, these trincheras had a lateral extent of thirty feet, and in the central part they were fifteen feet high. After all ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... of the almost inaccessible rocks, where the sons of Anak had built their Cyclopean fortresses, and which had been abodes of almost fabulous beauty and strength in the Herodian days, had been resorted to again by the crusaders, and had served as isolated strongholds whence to annoy the enemy. Frightfully lawless had, in too ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... austere, dark-walled, lombard-gothic churches and palaces showed forbidding, merciless almost, through the driving wet. Even in fair summer weather suspicion of ancient and implacable terror lurks in the shadow of those cyclopean gateways, and stalks over the unyielding, rock-hewn pavements of those solemn mediaeval streets. There was an incalculable element in Perugia which raised a certain anger in Helen. The place seemed to defy her and make light of her pretensions. As during the siege of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... rooted in crevices. From the plain the stamp sheds and the houses of the mine appeared dark and small, high up, like the nests of birds clustered on the ledges of a cliff. The zigzag paths resembled faint tracings scratched on the wall of a cyclopean blockhouse. To the two serenos of the mine on patrol duty, strolling, carbine in hand, and watchful eyes, in the shade of the trees lining the stream near the bridge, Don Pepe, descending the path from the upper plateau, appeared no bigger than ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... tacked, and returned. As again we pass the cathedral cliff on the north, and join the western side with this in one view, we are somewhat prepared by familiarity to mingle its majesty and beauty, and take from them a single impression. The long Cyclopean wall and vast Gothic roof of the side, including many an arched, rounded, and waving line, emphasized by straight lines of blue seam, are set off against the strange shining traceries of the facade; while the union of flower-like softness and eternal strength, the fretted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... hammered by the trade-wind billows into spouting, spuming white, the air, from sea to rain-cloud, spanned by a myriad leaping waterfalls, provocative, in day or night, of countless sun and lunar rainbows. Valleys, so called, but fissures rather, slit the cyclopean walls here and there, and led away into a lofty and madly vertical back country, most of it inaccessible to the foot of man and trod only by the ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... philosopher, who likened the world to a vast animal, is appearing each day as too real for poetry. The ocean lungs pulse a gigantic breath at every tide, her continental limbs vibrate with light and electricity, her Cyclopean fires burn within, and her atmosphere, ever giving, ever receiving, subserves the stupendous equilibrium, and betrays the universal motion. Motion is material life; from the molecular quiverings in the crystal diamond, to the light vibrations of a meridian ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... front, being a bar-room crowded with men drinking and smoking, and the space between it and the cars was a moving mass of loafers and passengers. On the tracks, engines, tolling heavy bells, were mightily moving, the glare from their cyclopean eyes dulling the light of a forest which was burning fitfully on a mountain side; and on open spaces great fires of pine logs were burning cheerily, with groups of men round them. A band was playing noisily, and the unholy sound of tom-toms was not far off. Mountains—the Sierras of many a fireside ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... been constructed for purposes of defence; and, to every one's intense delight, on passing through an opening in what proved to be a solid cyclopean wall, strengthened with tower-like edifices, there was a wide courtyard-like enclosure, quite beyond the reach of bullets, into which our horses were led, the walls themselves being of ample width to be manned, and with ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... great, rough stones, with ends projecting in places cyclopean-wise, which to an active man might give a foothold. The little garrison was at its posts, and picked the men off with carbines and revolvers, and in emergencies gave a brown chest the straight bayonet-thrust home. The tribesmen fought like fiends, scrambling up silently with long knives ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... that lonely laura, or lane of rude Cyclopean cells, under the perpetual shadow of the southern walls of crags, amid its grove of ancient date-trees. And a simple, happy, gentle life was that of the laura, all portioned out by rules and methods. Each man had food and raiment, shelter on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... wild-looking place, the little fishing town nestling on the cliff, with the grey granite rocks piled-up behind and spreading to east and west like cyclopean walls, built in regular layers by the giants of whom Josh Helston had told. The wonder was that in some north-east gale the little fleet of fishing vessels was not dashed to pieces by the huge breakers that came tearing in, to leap against the rocks and fall back with a sullen ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... dense colors in order to satisfy the general grossness of her male. It is not enough that she should be armed with strong hands, planted on large feet, and decorated in the German's favorite rococo manner of abounding breasts, to gratify his cyclopean aspirations. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... mind, there is something indescribably satisfactory in the intense solidity of those old stairs and floors—no spring in the planks, not a creak; you walk as over strata of stone. What clumsy grandeur! What Cyclopean carpenters! ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... fields, to the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls, —in the dust where men lie, dust also,—on the mounds that bury huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-heap,—still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature is ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... journeyed first from my native town to the city of Saragossa[3], and thence by way of the River Ebro to Tortosa. From there I went a journey of two days to the ancient city of Tarragona with its Cyclopean and Greek buildings[4]. The like thereof is not found among any of the buildings in the country of Sepharad. It is situated by the sea, and two days' journey from the city of Barcelona, where there is a holy congregation, including sages, wise and illustrious men, such as R. Shesheth[5], ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... great &c. adj.; run high, soar, tower, transcend; rise to a great height, carry to a great height; know no bounds; ascend, mount. enlarge &c. (increase) 35, (expand) 194. Adj. great; greater &c. 33; large, considerable, fair, above par; big, huge &c. (large in size) 192; Herculean, cyclopean; ample; abundant &c. (enough) 639 full, intense, strong, sound, passing, heavy, plenary, deep, high; signal, at its height, in the zenith. world-wide, widespread, far-famed, extensive; wholesale; many &c. 102. goodly, noble, precious, mighty; sad, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the feeling experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,—the erections of some old gigantic race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing it. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... to picture it to ourselves, not as it appears to the bees,—for we cannot tell in what magical, formidable fashion things may be reflected in the 6,000 or 7,000 facets of their lateral eyes and the triple cyclopean eye on their brow,—but as it would seem to us, were we of their stature. From the height of a dome more colossal than that of St. Peter's at Rome waxen walls descend to the ground, balanced in the void and the darkness; ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... days resembles the Southwark of to-day about as much as Vaugirard resembles Marseilles. It was a village—it is a city. Nevertheless, a considerable trade was carried on there. The long old Cyclopean wall by the Thames was studded with rings, to which ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Irish invaders, even if they came as travelling saints, were not always welcomed. The first and second vallum can be traced with their ditches, and there was doubtless an inner wall. The masonry is of different character from that cyclopean piling of boulders which was all the earlier men had known of building. Of such cyclopean style, though it is a small specimen, is the Chun cromlech, standing near. In the near neighbourhood are the ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... together rapidly, and soon those on the bridge heard the faint but increasing patter of a gasoline exhaust. Carrying the same speed as The Bedford Castle, the launch shortly came within hailing distance. The cyclopean eye of the ship's searchlight blazed up, and the next instant, out from the gloom leaped a little craft, on the deck of which a man stood waving a lantern. She held steadfastly to her course, and a voice floated up ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,—Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding new-comer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes a man human to live on these old humanized soils. He cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them. There is nothing like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... O'Rourke Bucket; Cyclopean Bucket; Steubner Bucket—Depositing in Bags—Depositing Through a Tremie; Charlestown Bridge; Arch Bridge Piers, France; Nussdorf Lock, Vienna—Grouting Submerged Stone; Tests of H. F. ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... roads were formed of polygonal blocks of immense thickness, having the interstices at the angles well filled with flints, and in some instances, as at Pompeii, with wedges of iron and granite; so that they resembled on a plane the vertical face of a Cyclopean or polygonal wall. Upon the roads themselves were imposed the stately and sonorous epithets of Consular and Praetorian; and had the records of the western Republic perished as completely as those of its commercial rival, the Appian Road would have handed down to the remotest ages one of the names ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... it must have had the civitas sine suffragio. In the Social War it rebelled from Rome, and its territory was added to that of Capua by Sulla. In the imperial period, however, we find it once more a municipium. Caiatia has remains of Cyclopean walls, and under the Piazza del Mercato is a large Roman cistern, which still provides a good water supply. The episcopal see was founded in A.D. 966. The place is frequently ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... are ruins of buildings that were occupied until the rule of the Incas was overthrown. Remains of the old structures are seen in various parts of the present town, some of them incorporated into new edifices built by the Spaniards. Cyclopean remains of walls of the Temple of the Sun now constitute a portion of the Convent of St. Domingo. In the days of the Incas, this temple stood "a circuit of more than four hundred paces," and was surrounded by a great wall built of cut stone. Remains of the old fortifications ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... drunk up the cold mist, and the moor basked in heat. We were in an empty world, save for a cottage now and then, and a Cyclopean wall of stones loosely piled one upon another. Yet this was the main road from Ashburton to Princetown! Apollo glided along a desolate white way between creamy and silver grasses artistically intermingled, and burning, golden ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... from the guards outside the prison," said Geoffrey, looking down at Sydney and the Duke, who were doing cyclopean work under the eye of the Warder. "Those two could never escape from the cells, nor climb ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... Beautrelet discovering the key to the great riddle that had loomed over more than twenty centuries! A key of supreme importance to whoever possessed it in the days of old, in those distant times when hordes of barbarians rode through and overran the old world! A magic key that opens the cyclopean cavern to whole tribes fleeing before the enemy! A mysterious key that guards the door of the most inviolable shelter! An enchanted key that ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... consolidation, possess advantages over those of hydraulic masonry apart from the necessity in the latter instance of constant supervision to prevent "scamping" by leaving chinks and spaces vacant, especially where large masses of stone or Cyclopean rubble ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... as likely as not split into two squalls which passed us harmlessly on either side while the tiny, innocent looking squall that appeared to carry no more than a hogshead of water and a pound of wind, would abruptly assume cyclopean proportions, deluging us with rain and overwhelming us with wind. Then there were treacherous squalls that went boldly astern and sneaked back upon us from a mile to leeward. Again, two squalls would tear along, one on each ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... cyclopean structure at Mundore (Tod's Rajasthan, vol. i. p. 727.), the cross appears as a sacred figure, together with the double triangle, another emblem of very wide distribution, occurring on ancient British coins (Camden's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... is applied to various structures of massive masonry found in different parts of Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. The origin of these works was a mystery to the earliest Hellenes, who ascribed them to a race of giants called Cyclops; hence the name Cyclopean ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... had played with dolmens and cyclopean boulders, and left their toys scattered in confusion. Stonehenge might have been copied from one of their strange structures; and they had given later races a rough idea of forts and cities. Giant children ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "H'm!—h'm!—'The Cyclopean Cyclopaedia.' Forty volumes in calf. Net price thirty-five pounds. A digest of human knowledge, past, present, and probable. With a brief appendix enumerating the things of which we are still ignorant, and of our future ignorance of which we are scientifically certain ... h'm! h'm!... not dear at ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... ordinary mountain range and lose it within its vast depths and ramifications. Multitudinous lofty mesas, buttes, and pinnacles began to appear, each a mighty mountain in itself, but more or less overwhelmed by the greater grandeur of the Cyclopean environment. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... "At the Cyclopean land I myself, with a few of my men, disembarked, and went up to seek the inhabitants and conciliate them with gifts of food and wine. The Cyclops were huge one-eyed giants who did not cultivate the land, had no government, and cared nought for the ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... or rather syntax, in the smallest degree: who would presume to do so with an individuality which, even amid startling clumsiness of style, displays those inherent intellectual powers that often did violence to language as well as to his fellow-men? Cyclopean masses of rock are here hurled with Cyclopean force; but hard and massive as they are, the man is not to be envied whose heart is not touched by these glowing fragments, flung apparently at random right and left, like meteors, by a mighty intellectual ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... ministry of the inglorious Calonne; between the despair and confusion of the close of the regency, and the despair and confusion of the last ten years of the monarchy. In 1727 we stand on the threshold of that far-resounding fiery workshop, where a hundred hands wrought the cunning implements and Cyclopean engines that were to serve in storming the hated citadels of superstition and injustice. In 1781 we emerge from these subterranean realms into the open air, to find ourselves surrounded by all the sounds and portents of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... adagios, even in some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi (perhaps his most original contributions), his art is rather more a refinement on another art than a fresh and vital expression. In him, education had produced the typical pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but nevertheless ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... understand the passage referring to this undertaking in Stevenson's biographical essay on his father where he has told how in the end "the sea proved too strong for men's arts, and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale hyper-Cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay." The Russels herein mentioned are the family of Sheriff Russel. The tombstone of Miss Sara Russel is to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the triumph of civilisation over barbarism? Is there nothing of the picturesque in the long thin lines of gleaming steel, thrown across the countless miles of desert sand and alkali plain, and in the mighty mass of metal with its glare of cyclopean eye and its banner of fire-illumined smoke, that bears the conquerors of stubborn nature from side to side of the great continent? Is there not an element of the picturesque in the struggles of the Western farmer? Can anything be finer in its way than a night view of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... in the summer fields, to the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,—in the dust where men lie, dust also,—on the mounds that bury huge cities, the Birs Nemroud and the Babel-heap,—still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the moon in such a manner that no hidden peril should surprise us. As we thus approached I suddenly perceived, crowning the very apex of the lofty peak near the termination of the cape, the ruins of what appeared to be an ancient watch tower. It was evidently composed of Cyclopean blocks larger than any that I had ever seen even among the ruins of Greece, Egypt ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... had the pain of seeing him suffer all the way, while "Blood of Jesus," "Souls of Purgatory," was the mildest beginning of an answer to the jeers of the postilions upon his paleness. We stopped at a miserable osteria, in whose cellar we found a magnificent remain of Cyclopean architecture,—as indeed in Italy one is paid at every step, for discomfort or danger, by some precious subject of thought. We proceeded very slowly, and reached just at night a solitary little inn, which marks the site of the ancient home of the Sabine virgins, snatched away to become the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... error, there can be little doubt, that intermingled with the human race there has at most periods of the world been a separate and Titanic race, such as the Anakim amongst the peoples of Palestine, the Cyclopean race diffused over the Mediterranean in the elder ages of Greece, and certain tribes amongst the Alps, known to Evelyn in his youth (about Cromwell's time) by an unpleasant travelling experience. These gigantic races, however, were no arguments for a degeneration ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... with its towers, its dimly-lit long stone corridors, cyclopean ivy-clad walls, narrow windows, and great panelled chambers, breathed an atmosphere of the long ago. So extensive was it that only one wing—that which looked far down the glen to the blue distant mountains—had been modernised; yet that, in itself, ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... most thickly, however, about the castle, which stands to-day on the summit of its citadel hill—the Oshiroyama—solid as when first built long centuries ago, a vast and sinister shape, all iron-grey, rising against the sky from a cyclopean foundation of stone. Fantastically grim the thing is, and grotesquely complex in detail; looking somewhat like a huge pagoda, of which the second, third, and fourth stories have been squeezed down and telescoped into one another by their own weight. Crested at its summit, like a feudal helmet, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... they had covered about fifteen miles of ground, and could now see the city clearly. It was a great town, surrounded by a Cyclopean wall of boulders, about which the river ran on every side, forming a natural moat. The buildings within the wall seemed to be arranged in streets, and to be build on a plan similar to that of the house in which they had slept two nights before, ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... fifty feet in length, twenty-five in width, and twelve in height. On either side there were openings into chambers or passage-ways. The roof was vaulted, and at the farther end of the apartment there was a stairway constructed of the same cyclopean stones as the rest of the edifice. All the stone-work here visible had the same ponderous character, and seemed formed to last for many centuries ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... that Machpelah is actually at this site, but the building is, of course, not Patriarchal in age. The enclosure is as old as the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem. It belongs to the age of Herod; we see the same cyclopean stones, with the same surface draftings as at Jerusalem. Why Herod built this edifice seems clear. Hebron was the centre of Idumean influence, and Herod was an Idumean. He had a family interest in the place, and hence sought to beautify it. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... might be driven, inside their spaces horse races might be run. As a few examples, there are Staigue, in Kerry; Dun Angus, in Aran, off Galway; Aileach, above the walls of Derry. Of the earliest churches, cyclopean in construction and primitive in character, built of stone, with thick sloping walls from foundation to ridge, Gallerus still remains, and the Skelligs, those wondrous sea-girt rocks, preserve both ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... towards a consideration of the vascular organism of a true literary style in which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifeless word with word. And wherein lies the progress of architecture from the stupidity of the pyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and the flight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organic relation? But the way of such thoughts might be intricate, and the sun rules me ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... and with a very large circumference. Further, its sides evidently once had been terraced, and it was on one of these broad terraces, half-way up and facing towards the rising sun, that the ruin-like remains were heaped. I examined them through my glasses. Undoubtedly it was a cyclopean ruin built of great blocks of coloured stone which seemed to have been shattered by earthquake or explosion. There were the pillars of a mighty gateway and ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... laborers half naked—and seeming as if fire themselves, from the reflection from their steaming bodies of the red glare of the furnaces—stood in groups, some drawing forth the bars of heated metal and holding them, while others wielding their cyclopean hammers made the anvils and the vast interior ring with the blows they gave. All around the outside of the shop and in separate places within stood the implements and machines of various kinds which were either made, or were ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... rears its ice-scarred head fully five thousand feet above the level floor of Yosemite Valley. In the name itself of this great rock lies an accurate and complete description. Nothing more nor less is it than a cyclopean, rounded dome, split in half as cleanly as an apple that is divided by a knife. It is, perhaps, quite needless to state that but one-half remains, hence its name, the other half having been carried away by ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... carpet on the ground; the lanes through which we went were long arcades of arching boughs; the walls were composed of large square blocks of dried mud, which, in that bright, dazzling light somewhat resembled Cyclopean architecture, and gave, I know not what, of simplicity and primitiveness ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... function of this gland was held by many physiologists, and it was only the introduction of modern high-power microscopy that reduced this also to a mere mechanism, and showed that it is apparently the remains of a Cyclopean eye once common ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... The public edifices had vanished into the depths of the darkness; not a lamp marked out their spires and towers. At times you might have imagined you were gazing on some gigantic festival, some illuminated cyclopean monument, with staircases, balusters, windows, pediments, and terraces —a veritable cosmos of stone, whose wondrous architecture was outlined by the gleaming lights of a myriad lamps. But there was always a speedy return of the feeling that new constellations were springing into being, and that ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... this coming king. He seems one who gathers fuel for a fire, but never sets the flame. His figures shift, and present no central character of manhood who grows and furnishes standard of comparison. Milton's genius was cast in a cyclopean mold, and needed distances remote as heaven and hell to give right perspective to his figures, and his supreme art concerns itself with ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... to take care of the scanty herds of cattle and horses which form now the whole wealth of the farm. In the first days of March we arrived at the gate of the farm-house. The Majordomo had received orders to put himself and his men at our disposal. The ruined farm-house lies at the foot of a cyclopean structure. From the veranda, rising majestically in bold relief against the sky, is to be seen the most interesting and best preserved monument of Ake, composed of three platforms superposed. They terminate ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... dense, the poverty is undisguised. All this northward-bearing tract, between Camden Town on the one hand and Islington on the other, is the valley of the shadow of vilest servitude. Its public monument is a cyclopean prison: save for the desert around the Great Northern Goods Depot, its only open ground is a malodorous cattle-market. In comparison, Lambeth is picturesque and venerable, St. Giles's is romantic, Hoxton is clean and suggestive of domesticity, Whitechapel ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... heads upon the gate; at Child's bank pausing to observe the dinnerless authors returning downcast at the rejection of brilliant but fruitless proposals; or stopping with Boswell, one hand upon a street post, to shake the night air with his Cyclopean laughter. Varied as the colours in a kaleidoscope are the figures that will meet us in these perambulations; mutable as an opal are the feelings they arouse. To the man of facts they furnish facts; to the man of imagination, quick-changing fancies; to the man of science, curious ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to have assisted at the final festival when, beneath cyclopean arches, in the sunlight of clustered candelabra, amid the glitter of gold and white teeth, among the fair sultanas that were strewn like flowers through the throne-room of the imperial court, Belshazzar ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... the national religion, such as no other equal spot of ground has ever borne. The Apostle's eyes, in turning to the right, would fall on the north-west side of the eminence, which was here and all round, covered and protected by a wall, parts of which were so ancient as to be of Cyclopean origin. The western side, which alone gave access to what, from its original destination, may be termed the fort, was, during the administration of Pericles, adorned with a splendid flight of steps, and the beautiful Propylaea, with its five entrances and two flanking temples, ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... wrought that it was impossible to detect the line of junction between the blocks; and the approaches to it were defended by three semicircular parapets, composed of such heavy masses of rock, that it bore resemblance to the kind of work known to architects as the Cyclopean. The fortress was raised to a height rare in Peruvian architecture; and from the summit of the tower the eye of the-spectator ranged over a magnificent prospect, in which the wild features of the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... can reach, a vast wilderness of snowy peaks and ranges, many of them with a rosy glow in the sunshine, tier upon tier, terrace above terrace, here in serried ranks, there in isolated grandeur, some just beyond the dividing canyons, others fifty, sixty, a hundred miles away, cyclopean, majestic, infinite. Far to the north, Long's Peak lifts his seamed and hoary pyramid, almost as high as the crest on which we are standing; in the west rise that famous triad of peaks, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, their fanelike towers, sketched against the sky, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire." We would point out these radiant avenues of return; but sometimes we feel in our hearts that we sound but cockney choices, as guides amid the ancient temples, the cyclopean crypts sanctified by the mysteries. To be intelligible we replace the opalescent shining by the terms of the anatomist, and we speak of the pineal gland and the pituitary body in the same breath with the Most High. Yet when the soul has the vision divine it knows not it has a body. Let it ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... photographer kept his eyes on his machine, which was rattling like a rapidly beaten drum, the cyclopean eye of the camera making impressions on a sensitised film-ribbon at the rate of forty a second, and every movement of the flying legs of the urging jockeys, even the puffs of dust that rose at the falling of each iron-shod hoof, was recorded for all ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... interior of the Pantheon. The gods are all gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to fill, and which the lingering ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... they came to that Cyclopean ladder of precipices, rising one above the other in narrow steps, and all inclined at a giddy pitch far steeper than any house roof. Yet for a long way down them the field glasses showed their surfaces wrinkled with shelves and projecting ledges and ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... which so completely embowered the parsonage, that only one ivy-crowned chimney was visible. Low in the sky, and just opposite the tall arched window behind the pulpit, the sun burned like a baleful Cyclopean eye, striking through a mass of ruby tinted glass that had been designed to represent a lion, and other symbols of the Redeemer, who soared away ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... murmured. 'We are at the base of the Fell. Loughrigg rises up like a cyclopean wall between ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... scarlet this eternal height Of sunless suns and reigning sin,— Flame-decked this plain of warring kings Where poisoned fumes and beacons burn! And thro' the hyoids, huge and red, Past portals black and guidons bright To onyx lees and opal sands, The Cyclopean vaults of dwale, And cavern'd shapes that Typhon bled, Greet each wand'ring spectre's sight; Where pixies dance on wind-blown strands, Lurke gyte incubi in a hall. Here, then, reigns gyving, batter'd ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... Chopin. We should be prepared to appreciate the great Artist in his enthusiastic rendering of the master-pieces of the man he loved; prepared to greet him when he electrifies us with his wonderful Cyclopean harmonies, written for his own Herculean grasp, sparkling with his own Promethean fire, which no meaner hand can ever hope to master! "Hear Liszt and die," has been said by some of his enthusiastic admirers—understand him and live, were the ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... by the bracken, lie about in wildest confusion; the remains of what seem to be Druidic circles can be traced here and there, and it is hard to persuade one's self that the ragged towers and picturesque piles of rock are not the work of Cyclopean architects. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... guides the principal rivers of Northern India, and were led by them to new homes in their beautiful and fertile valleys. It seems as if the great mountains in the north had afterwards closed for centuries their Cyclopean gates against new immigrations, while, at the same time, the waves of the Indian Ocean kept watch over the southern borders of the peninsula. None of the great conquerors of antiquity,—Sesostris, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... drivelling fool who keeps this orchard for us, and surrounds our palace as with an impregnable fortification. Believe me, notwithstanding your now antique appearance—except at very close quarters, and without close examination (I don't think you have quite as many crow's-feet round your cyclopean eye as myself), it is not possible to distinguish you from me—believe me, in spite of this, the circle of charming darlings, reflecting that you are the heir to the greatest crown in the universe, will discover that you are even more ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... part of the sixth, and the seventh sub-race they learnt to build great cities. These appear to have been of cyclopean architecture, corresponding with the gigantic bodies of the race. The first cities were built on that extended mountainous region of the continent which included, as will be seen in the first map, the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... the cliff to enclose the Kasbah[A] of the Oudayas, a troublesome tribe whom one of the Almohad Sultans, mistrusting their good faith, packed up one day, flocks, tents and camels, and carried across the bled to stow them into these stout walls under his imperial eye. Great crenellated ramparts, cyclopean, superb, follow the curve of the cliff. On the landward side they are interrupted by a gate-tower resting on one of the most nobly decorated of the horseshoe arches that break the mighty walls of Moroccan cities. Underneath the tower the ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... and elements strike you at first as instinctively conforming. This impression was doubtless after a little modified for me; there were levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there were walks and strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean wall, to the far end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, natural buttresses and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban spots (one would call them if the word had less detestable references) ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... material, and form to defy the "strong hours" which conquer all, it has bowed its head to their touch, and passed into the inevitable cycle of decay. "And this too shall pass away"—which the Eastern monarch engraved upon his signet ring—is carved upon these Cyclopean blocks. The stones of the Coliseum were once water; and they are now turning into dust. Such is ever the circle of nature. The solid is changing into the fluid, and the fluid into the solid; and that which is unseen is alone indestructible. He does ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... as is the subject of the architecture and the remarkable state of civilisation of the Aztecs, we must not dwell longer upon it, except to mention the cyclopean roads and bridges, constructed of huge blocks of stone, and carried on a continuous level, across valleys, which still remain. There are also, in various parts of the country, excavations, rock-hewn halls, and caverns, generally dome-shaped, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... behold "Bowels in bowels bury'd! greedy limbs "Fatten on limbs digested, and prolong'd "One's animation by another's death. "In vain the earth, benignant mother, gives "Her copious stores, if nought can thee delight, "Save with a savage tooth this living food "To chew, and Cyclopean feasts renew. "Can'st thou not cloy the appetite's keen rage, "Deprav'd desire! unless another die? "That early age, to which we give the name "Of golden, happy was in mellow fruits, "And plants, by earth produc'd; nor e'er ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... pearl outran The streams which bore it, like the arrowy cloud Of tempest, or the speedier thought of man, Which flieth forth and cannot make abode; Sometimes through forests, deep like night, we glode, 4760 Between the walls of mighty mountains crowned With Cyclopean piles, whose turrets proud, The homes of the departed, dimly frowned O'er the bright waves which girt their dark ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and, as in Nausicaa's time, the young man wishes to enter the dance with new-washed garments, white as snow, whose folds ripple around his body in harmony with his graceful movements. Many an echo of Phaeacia, in language, custom and costume, can be found in Greece at present, indicating, like the Cyclopean masonry, the solid and permanent substructure of Homer's poetry, still in place after more than 2500 years ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... my shoulder and made up my mind to start some other time on the cyclopean task I had then so ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... a cyclopean chimney, which devours a load of wood at a mouthful, and before which a ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... structures with as much astonishment as do we, and attributed them (of at least those in Argohs) to the Cyclopes, a mythical folk, conceived in this connection as masons of superhuman strength. Hence the adjective Cyclopian or Cyclopean, whose meaning varies unfortunately in modern usage, but which is best restricted to walls of the Tirynthian type; that is to say, walls built of large blocks not accurately fitted together, the interstices being filled with small stones. This style ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... livid, frog-like face, with his round, gleaming and fixed eyeballs, and his bold, maniacal stare and steady monotonous rage, common-sense rebels; no-one selects a homicidal maniac as a guide. At the mere sight of Danton, with his porter's vocabulary, his voice like an alarm bell of insurrection, his cyclopean features and air of an exterminator, humanity takes alarm; one does not surrender oneself to a political butcher without repugnance. The Revolution demands another interpreter, like itself captivatingly fitted out, and Robespierre fits the bill,[3181] with his irreproachable ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... above the town, the river passes through a rocky gorge formed by the rugged grey cliffs of Peyremale on the one bank and St. Julien on the other. The bare precipitous rocks rise up on either side like two cyclopean towers, flanking the gateway of the Cevennes. The gorge is so narrow at bottom that there is room only for the river running in its rocky bed below, and a roadway along either bank—that on the eastern ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... presented a precipitous front of dark volcanic rock to the lake. Their slopes were covered with grass and with natural copse-wood, intermixed with tall ilex trees, or umbrella pines; while on their summits were little villages surrounded with Cyclopean walls perched there not only for security, but also for the healthier air, just as we see at the present day all over Italy. On the summit of the Capitoline and Esquiline Hills were Sabine settlements, whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... and grassy pastures. Soon after leaving Na'oor he took us up a small hill, which was called Setcher, (probably Setker in town pronunciation,) where there were some ruins of no considerable amount, but the stones of cyclopean size. Query—Were these remains of the primeval ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... was pulled down to make room for another building. The gates constructed on the same system are entirely similar in Arpinum and in Mycenae. The tunnel which drains the Alban lake(18) presents the greatest resemblance to that of lake Copais. What are called Cyclopean ring-walls frequently occur in Italy, especially in Etruria, Umbria, Latium, and Sabina, and decidedly belong in point of design to the most ancient buildings of Italy, although the greater portion of those now extant were probably ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen |
