"Pygmean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thick the airy crowd Swarm'd and were straiten'd; till the signal giv'n, Behold a wonder! They but now who seem'd In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... harm, that might be in our power. This affair settled, a marvellous jollity entered into the whole tribe of us, manifesting itself characteristically in each individual. The old showman, sitting down to his barrel-organ, stirred up the souls of the pygmy people with one of the quickest tunes in the music-book; tailors, blacksmiths, gentlemen, and ladies, all seemed to share in the spirit of the occasion; and the Merry-Andrew played his part more facetiously than ever, nodding and winking particularly at ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... animals, there are many groups that have special attraction for children. For instance, among the "Birds we read about" are the flamingo, cassowary, condor, and quetzal; the eagle owl is contrasted with the pygmy owl, and the peacock, lyre bird, albatross, swan, and ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Great Britain is that we are such hero-worshippers by nature that we can only believe in one man at a time. We get hold of a Palmerston or a Gladstone, and set him on a pedestal, and think that everybody else is a pygmy. It may be that our idol is a tolerably good one—that is, not mischievously active. In that case he cannot do much harm. But when, as in the case of Gladstone, you have a national idol who is actively mischievous, it is impossible to exaggerate the evil which ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... submarine pilot would guess that the Panther had fled north, and he sent the tug spitting along a course that would lie between the cruiser and her enemy. The Panther was forced to repass the Vulcan in the new maneuver. The giant and pygmy were flying along at top speed, fairly abreast, ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole universe by his fiat! Can I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer, sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in heaven! Neither ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... monoplane drew nearer it was sighted and a combat followed such as never was seen before. Sub-Lieutenant R. A. J. Warneford, a young Canadian who had not reached twenty-one years of age, matched his pygmy machine against the great aerial dreadnought. The fight started at a height of 6,000 feet. Lieutenant Warneford released his first bomb when about 1,000 feet above the Zeppelin. He saw it strike the airbag and disappear, followed by a puff of smoke. Because of the sectional arrangement this did ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... trestle that spanned a deep, dry gash in the earth. In the green bottom huddled a cluster of pygmy cattle and mounted men; farther down were two white flakes of tents, like huge snowflakes left unmelted in the ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... the height of our knees. This was now a small circular room, under a lowering concave dome. A shot came from the group of Pygmy figures. I saw the small stab of flame, heard ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... as being eventually conquered by white men; no, the real grim desolation, where the ax cuts but leaves no blaze, where the pioneer disappears and few or none follow. The pioneer has always been a successful pugilist, but in this part of Burma fate, out of pure admiration for the pygmy's gameness, decided to call the battle a draw. It was not the wilderness of the desert, of the jungle; rather the tragic hopeless state of a settlement that neither progressed, retarded, nor ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... feathered things. The otters had not frightened him, because he still measured things by size, and Nekik was not half as big as Kazan. But the bear was a monster beside which Kazan would have stood a mere pygmy. He was big. If nature was taking this way of introducing Baree to the fact that there were more important creatures in the forests than dogs and wolves and owls and crayfish, she was driving the point home with a little more than necessary emphasis. For Wakayoo, ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... vessels, amongst them the Great Britain, crowd the docks; fleets of merchantmen are seen on the Mersey, sailing to and from the port; and in the busy streets, so minutely delineated that any particular house may be distinguished, numerous vehicles are seen, and hundreds, too, of pygmy men and women are observed walking in the public ways. In short; it is Liverpool in a glass case, and no mean ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... lust'st to use her in that kind For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener. Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear; Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it. None does offend, none.—I say none; I'll able 'em: Take that of me, my friend, who have the power To seal the accuser's lips. Get thee glass eyes; And, like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Recently a pygmy skeleton was discovered near Los Angeles which is claimed to be about twenty thousand years old, but we do not know whether this man knew how to build a fire or not. We do know, however, that the American camper was here on this continent when our Bible was yet an unfinished manuscript ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a desperate swain would have risked life ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... momentary instinct of fiercely struggling consciousness. The idols on the walls jeered at him. Those strangely clad warriors seemed to him now to be looking down upon his discomfiture with a satanic smile, mocking the pygmy who had dared to raise his hand against one so jealously guarded. Clang once more went the blacksmith's hammers, and ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rowboats creeping from shore to shore; knots of black barges following the lead of puffing tugs; sloops with languid motion tacking against the tide; white steamboats, like huge toy-houses, crowded with pygmy inhabitants, moving smoothly on their way to the great city, and disappearing suddenly as they turned into the narrows between Storm-King and the Fishkill Mountains. Down there was life, incessant, varied, restless, intricate, many-coloured—down there was history, the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... disaster and terror stricken San Francisco was absolutely under the control of General Funston, a few facts about his career will be appropriate here. Red-headed, red-blooded; a pygmy in stature, a giant in experience; true son of Romany in peace and of Erin in war—the capture of Aguinaldo in the wilds of North Luzon and his control of affairs in San Francisco fairly top off the adventurous career of Frederick ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... that runs from the middle of the brow to the most posterior point of the skull. In the so-called "long-headed" or dolichocephalic races, the proportion is seventy-five to one hundred, while in those forms that have more rounded or brachycephalic heads, like the Polynesian and the black pygmy, the relation is eighty-three to one hundred. The cranial capacity again varies considerably, from nine hundred cubic centimeters to twenty-two hundred cubic centimeters. Many striking variations are also found in the projection of the jaws. A line drawn from the lower end of the nose to the chin ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Nile or pygmy, is an animal of serene mind and steady habits. Their appetites work with clock- like regularity, and require no winding. I can not recall that any one of our five hippos was ever sick for a day, or missed a meal. When the idiosyncrasies of Gunda, our bad elephant, were at their ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... behaviour; so much so, that Skepsey civilly intervened; subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage and receive a lesson at the station they were nearing. Upon his promising faithfully, that it should be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this pygmy spark to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant war in due sincerity; and he as faithfully, all honour, promising not to let it bring about a breakage of the laws of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed. So they ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... moisture-laden heat upon a densely-packed, sweltering mass of turbulent men, many of them flushed with drink, all of them flushed with triumph, for the ill-armed, ill-disciplined militia of the seventies—a pygmy force as compared with the expert "Guardsmen" of to-day—has been scattered to the winds: the sturdy police have been swept from the streets and driven to the shelter of the stations. Mob law rules supreme. Dense clouds of smoke are rising from sacked and ruined ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... this picture I exaggerate nothing. How feeble is language to depict the stupendous barbarism! How small by its side the bloody games which degraded ancient Rome! How pygmy the one, how colossal the other! Would you know how the combat is conducted? Here is the briefest picture of the arena ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... crocodiles hauled out of water for slumber, and crept under the jungle-roof and spied upon the snow-white saucy cockatoos, the fierce ospreys, the heavy- flighted buzzards, the lories and kingfishers, and the absurdly garrulous little pygmy parrots. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... trip,' he said, 'with so many things to learn. Ethnologically I am certain Africans are of common stock. The negro is a negro wherever you find him. From Kaffir to Bushman and pygmy they are all Hamites. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... he had done, Wainamoinen wondered how to get rid of the oak, and implored his mother to send some one to help him. Immediately there rose from the sea a pygmy, armed in copper, whom Wainamoinen deemed incapable of coping with so large a tree, until the dwarf suddenly transformed himself into a giant of such proportions that four blows from his copper axe felled the oak, scattering its trunk to the east, its top to the west, its leaves to the south, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... fretwork of wood which appeared to be geometrically regular in design. The air was noisy with the cries of men, and a rhythmic thudding, through which came the rattle of winches and the hiss of steam. Over the whole vast structure swarmed an army of human ants, feeble pygmy figures that crept slowly here and there, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... one might conceive that the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any other capacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string between his lips, shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightingale. The occasional references to Lord Wolseley suggest an unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size, which Mr. Strachey can only just discern. This attitude of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse |
