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More "Puny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it a land of remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative. And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him. Here was life and here was love. He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world's desire. Barriers there were none. A man and woman, both ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch. First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question of any moment. Caesar was able to carry personal government to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground in a more general cause. When we see Caesar, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Powerless, with only their puny knives with which to give battle to the serpent, the boys stood petrified with terror. Even Ben, to whom his rescue and Frank's peril had been unfolded so swiftly that he was half-dazed, seemed unable to determine what ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... cried Saint Simon excitedly, following Denis's example, to spring to the King's feet. "I will go. It is work for a man grown, not for a puny boy." ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... he loved her! he loved her! he loved her! the thought went on hammering in her mind, for she knew of its great truth! He loved her and went away! And she, poor, puny weakling, was unable to hold him back; the tendrils which fastened his soul to hers were not so tenacious as those which made him cling to suffering humanity, over there in France, where men and women were in fear of death and torture, and looked ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... lest he should go off to the Splash and find Kate there; but presently he returned with an axe in his hand. Giving the lantern to his father, he proceeded to smash the skiff with the axe, his object being to prevent my going on board the Splash. I regarded it as a puny effort on his part, and was relieved to find they did not intend to visit her themselves. As soon as I was satisfied in regard to his purpose, I crept carefully up to the horse, unfastened him, and jumped ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... this very year, the humane John Howard had reported of the Irish Charter Schools, then half a century established, that they were "a disgrace to all society." Sir J. Fitzpatrick, the Inspector of Prisons, confirmed the general impression of Howard: he found the children in these schools "puny, filthy, ill clothed, without linen, indecent to look upon." A series of resolutions was introduced by Mr. Orde, as the basis of better legislation in the next session; but it is to be regretted that the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... mother gives birth to a child. It would be foolish to assume that this child comes into the world with a normal standard of resistance; but it is certain he is not tubercular and doomed at the moment of his birth. He may be what is ordinarily termed a weak, puny, sickly infant, but the germ of disease is not implanted in his constitution. If he is taken from his mother, taken away from the tubercular environment, and brought up under the best hygienic and sanitary surroundings, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... in sufficient quantity, so far as many members of the animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other species. Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the carboniferous era. So there are races of men today, amongst others the pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... spent, my life shrunken up within me, my energy burned out, a puny, spiritless remnant of the strong woman who lay down upon that couch, I lay despondent, vacant of all interest in the world hitherto so exciting to me. I had not seen Monsieur since this apparent commencement of recovery. A great, good-natured ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Experience is directly opposed to this shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought about the greatest set-back which the Life of Reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... concert on Monday night was a very stylish jam. He is a small, puny-built man, with gold rings in his ears, and a face of genteel ugliness, but touchingly lugubrious in its expression. With his violin at his shoulder, he has the air of a husband undergoing the nocturnal penance of walking the room with 'the ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... up the mountain streams, but when we passed that way we could see from the very summit of the hill—above which the pointed Pic de Laruns reared its crest—a mass of foam issuing from between two rocks, no puny meandering streamlet, but a strong torrent, which, as it dashed from rock to rock, gathered strength and velocity till it rushed amid a cloud of spray into the ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... form a judgment, from what he then [910]gained, of what he was possessed before. The cities Hala, Habor, Haran in Mesopotamia, with Carchemish upon the Euphrates, were his first conquests: to these he added the puny states Ina, Iva, and Sepharvaim upon the same river. He then proceeded to Hamath, Damascus, and other cities of Syria; and at last came to Samaria. The line of conquest points out the route, which he took; and shews that there were in Mesopotamia numberless little states, independent ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... Then plunged he in the flashing tide. 860 Bold o'er the flood his head he bore, And stoutly steered him from the shore; And Allan strained his anxious eye, Far mid the lake his form to spy, Darkening across each puny wave, 865 To which the moon her silver gave, Fast as the cormorant could skim, The swimmer plied each active limb; Then landing in the moonlight dell, Loud shouted of his weal to tell. 870 The Minstrel heard the far halloo, And ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... simmering on the hot desert, that she had promised to steal out into the grounds the minute darkness fell—he would be waiting. A hundred times in the long afternoon, Nan looked into the cloudless western sky and with puny eager hands would have pushed the lagging orb on its course that she might sooner give herself into the arms where she felt her place so sure, her honor so safe, her helplessness ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... being only the descendant of some of those puny heroes who boiled their own kettles before the walls of Troy, I shall write to her from a Grecian, rather than a Roman canton: when I shall find myself, for example, among her Phocaean relations ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in importance is far beyond the puny functions of comedy and tragedy. The grotesque farce of vaudeville and the tawdry show which only appeals to sentiment at highest and often to ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... as happy as we are. But those poor puny children! I am sorry for them, and when I think of my daughter, Yvonne, and that healthy young animal, Lindy, your adopted daughter, I feel ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... the new prison law a man could be paroled the day after he was sentenced, though he were in for ninety-nine years. That was the law, and it was just, for no court is infallible and injustice must be rectified somewhere. After the poor man and his poor lawyer had matched their puny wits against those of a fighting District Attorney then mercy must intervene in the name of society and equalize the sentence. For the District Attorney is hired by the county to send every man to prison, ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... their satin doublets, and the swords and lances of festive combat in that court had been of the bluntest foil ever since the father of these princes had died beneath Montgomery's spear. And when the King and his brothers, one of them a puny crooked boy, were the champions, the battle must needs be the merest show, though there were lookers-on who thought that, judging by appearances, the assailants ought to have the best chance of victory, both ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... district, the Miuesovs. How it came to pass that an heiress, who was also a beauty, and moreover one of those vigorous, intelligent girls, so common in this generation, but sometimes also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless, puny weakling, as we all called him, I won't attempt to explain. I knew a young lady of the last "romantic" generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and studied the case as closely as possible for more than an hour. There was but one peculiarity or symptom upon which to base a prescription. It was this: It would lie a few moments apparently asleep, then it would give a start and begin to scream with all its puny power. This would last one or two minutes, when it would as suddenly fall asleep again. This, they assured me, was the way it had performed all through its illness, except when opiated. 'Pains come and go suddenly.' That was all I ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... came reaction, doubt. After all, humanity was a puny production of the Ages. Men and women were like the struggling animalculae that her father had so often shewn the boys, in a drop of magnified ditch-water; yet not quite like those microscopic insects, for the stupendous processes of life ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... repeated Mrs. Joyce; 'I daresay you don't want; but beggars can't be choosers, you know. If you'd been a nice, smart, strong girl, I might have kept you instead of Betsey Ann; but a little puny thing like you wouldn't be worth her salt. No, no, miss; your fine days are over; to the house you'll ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. "That is well enough for men like you," he would say, "silpnas, puny ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets are born; souls slowly evolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endless diversity and specialization, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... of joining in the responses and the singing, I feel that I am fertilizing my spirit for the truth that is proclaimed. As a citizen I have certain rights, but when I come to think of my privileges my rights seem puny in comparison. Then, too, my rights are such cold things, but my privileges are full of sunshine and of joy. My rights seem mathematical, while my ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... in a voice as defiant and heroic in its tone, as was the language itself; and, at the moment of saying this, with the pistols at his very breast, he quickly raised his arms, and dashed them from the puny hands of his assassins, the weapons flying in opposite directions. Now came the struggle. All hands was now rushed upon the brave fellow, and, after beating him for some time, they succeeded in overpowering and tying him. Henry put me to shame; he ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... may seem strange if I say that the artillery fire in the Mamund Valley did very little execution. It is nevertheless a fact. The Mamunds are a puny tribe, but they build their houses in the rocks; and against sharpshooters in broken ground, guns can do little. Through field-glasses it was possible to see the enemy dodging behind their rocks, whenever the puffs of smoke from the guns told them ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... shout, sunk also, leaving but few of the Andirondacks survivors of their attack. Nearly the whole had perished from the assaults of beings against whom human weapons were useless—who laughed at the puny resistance of mortals, and feared their battle less than the carcajou fears the mouse, or the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... States did then surrender, all fugitives escaped into their limits. Hamilton and Sedgwick from the North, and Madison from the South, made that report—men, the loftiness of whose purpose and genius might put to shame the puny efforts now made to disturb that which lies at the very foundation of the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... barriers and coming so close to her with His request. These two, the prejudices of race and the contempt for woman, two of the crying evils of the old world, were overpassed by our Lord as if He never saw them. They were too high for men's puny limbs; they made no obstacle to the march of His divine compassion. And therein lies a symbol, if you like, but none the less a prophecy that will be fulfilled, of the universal adaptation and destination ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... good could come out of evil, but had deemed the supposition a monstrous and a deadly fallacy, to be combated, to be struck down to the dust. Even now he was chiefly conscious of a mental weakness in himself which had caused him to act as he had acted. He saw himself as one of those puny creatures whose so-called kind hearts lead them into follies, into crimes. Like many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniacke was disposed to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... inferior in size and no less sparingly equipped, greatly surpasses the Grasshopper in nocturnal rhapsodies. I speak of the pale and slender Italian Cricket (Oecanthus pellucens, Scop.), who is so puny that you dare not take him up for fear of crushing him. He makes music everywhere among the rosemary-bushes, while the Glow-worms light up their blue lamps to complete the revels. The delicate instrumentalist consists chiefly ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... puny child; a weak little child. A puny stomach; a weak stomach. Puny, or puisne judge; the last ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... or intellectually. But as the puny youth can by systematic exercise broaden his frame and develop his muscles into at least a semblance of the athlete, and can then through his healthier appetite and his faster rate of repair maintain himself ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... Dan prayed, his skepticism falling away from him like a discarded garment in this valley of the shadow, which sifts out hearts and tries souls, until we all, grown-up or children, realize our weakness, and, finding that our own puny strength is as a reed shaken in the wind, creep back humbly to the God we have vainly dreamed we could ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... "This puny infant," went on Melvin, "can tell the most wonderful stories you ever heard, and tell them with such an innocent air that sometimes you almost believe him. He's got Baron Munchausen skinned a mile. He was telling me one to-day about a rabbit, and I sat watching him, expecting ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... taken his father's seat in Parliament, and has of course joined Young England. He is the only man in the country who believes in the De Mogynses, and sighs for the days when a De Mogyns led the van of battle. He has written a little volume of spoony puny poems. He wears a lock of the hair of Laud, the Confessor and Martyr, and fainted when he kissed the Pope's toe at Rome. He sleeps in white kid-gloves, and commits dangerous ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... despondent at night. Then, after refreshing sleep, the spirit of hope reawakened. He felt very certain now that he was going to get in; and still with morning light he hailed the victory; while, after a heavy day, he doubted of its fruits and mistrusted himself. His powers seemed puny contrasted with the gigantic difficulties that the machine set up between a private member and any effective or independent ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... has been whetting his knife for my throat for the last year. Why, this is what he wants; this is why he brought the prisoner here! Would you have me walk into his trap? Would you have me sacrifice my men, this garrison, why, this country even, to save the life of one puny Englishman, who is probably himself a spy?" He stopped a moment. "Why, man, you sicken me!" he cried, and he slashed at me with his sword as if ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... a circular, my representative made a point of applying to him for permission, as he indeed was bound to do by the simplest rules of courtesy. Mr. Smalley replied at once, willingly granting the favour, as I can prove by the note still in my possession; and presently, frightened by the puny yelping of a few critical curs at home, he has the effrontery to ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... not be set up at random. The number of bishops and by consequence the size of dioceses must be carefully considered. The puny bishoprics of Meath, for example, could form no part of a ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... he would whet the appetites of his victims as only he knew how, but I did not know that it was his day of reckoning for other "conspirators" equally as grasping as those with whom I had measured my puny sword. ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... feeding are beginning to discriminate, they say. These vaunted committees cannot but be a failure except in those things which immediately concern the welfare of the committees themselves. The feeble authority of headquarters, now that puny diplomacy has been so busy, has become more feeble than it was in the first days, and, like the Chinese Government, we, too, shall soon fall to pieces by an ungumming process. Native children are now dying rapidly, and two weeks more will see a veritable ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... oozed anew from his side, then pleaded with me to help him find the picture—to look under him and all about on the ground. Long I mused upon this, but at last my pipe was out, and I awoke from that troubled spot where God's little creatures had clashed in their puny rage—awoke to know that this was my day to wander in another world—the dream world of children, where everything is true that ought to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... is not particularly interesting, though to an untravelled beholder, it has points of attraction. He may probably be struck with the vast extent of some of the structures when compared with the puny buildings of our own country and times; and the space occupied by the palaces will but remind him of the mistaken magnificence of Buckingham, or the gloomy grandeur of St. James's. Again, the plastered and fancifully coloured fronts of the dwelling-houses, their gay draperies, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... poor, and their seven children incommoded them greatly, because not one of them was able to earn his bread. That which gave them yet more uneasiness was that the youngest was of a very puny constitution, and scarce ever spoke a word, which made them take that for stupidity which was a sign of good sense. He was very little, and when born no bigger than one's thumb, which made him ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... revenge. He was well pleased at an opportunity to measure his hardihood against a worthy opponent. He had found that his courage exceeded his strength, as it always should, for how could we face the gods and demons of existence if our puny arms were not backed up by our invincible eyes? and he displayed his contentment at the issue as one does a banner emblazoned with merits. Mrs. Makebelieve understood also that the big man's action was merely his energetic surrender, as of one who, instead of tendering his sword ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... thing this puny creature could never forgive was that any of his friends should pass him in the race. There was one whom GRUBLET—the older of the two—had at one time honoured with his patronage and approval. No sooner, however, had the younger gained ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... ruin of whatever is fair and good in this little globe. Pass hence to pluck the sun out of his place, and roll the volume of desolation through the starry world. What hast thou done unto Him? It is the puny menace of a worm against Him whose frown is perdition. "He that sitteth in the ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... all its beauties of scenery, is said to be unhealthy in the rainy season, when the showers and thunder-storms are both frequent and heavy: its natives are a puny race, and its European inhabitants look pale and sickly; so that, I suppose, it deserves the doubtful reputation generally given to it. During my last ramble in the vicinity of Anjer, I observed some natives at work in a plantation of young plants which, at first ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... good resemblances that I think I should have known him untold, he has by no means the look to be expected from Bonaparte, but rather that of a profoundly studious and contemplative man, who "o'er books consumes" not only the "midnight oil" but his own daily strength, "and wastes the puny body to decay" by abstruse speculation and theoretic plans or rather visions, ingenious but not practicable. But the look of the commander who heads his own army, who fights his own battles, who conquers every difficulty by personal ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... must here state that the scene related, innocent as it was, and, as one would naturally imagine, of puny consequence, if any, did no less a thing than, subsequently, to precipitate the Protestant Countess de Saldar into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... very amusing in the manner of the strapping seaman as he sat down beside the puny little boy, with a bashful expression on his handsome face, as if he were about ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two thousand miles of boiling Yukon flood. At such times he felt impelled to—express his own unconquerable essence; and with strong drink, wild music, and Batard, he indulged in vast orgies, wherein he pitted his puny strength in the face of things, and challenged all that was, and had been, and was yet ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... us. Three of the brethren are Egyptians, and two are natives of Damascus. The rest are, like myself, descendants of a race supposed to have perished from off the face of the earth, yet still powerful to a degree undreamed of by the men of this puny age." ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the den on that second morning and spoke invitingly to his beloved mother of heroes. The great bitch rose slowly and with gentle care, and Finn, with the other sucklings, rolled helplessly on his back, sleepily cheeping a puny remonstrance, though he had no idea what he wanted. Then, in his ridiculously masterful way, Finn grovellingly burrowed under the other puppies, that he might have the benefit of all their warmth, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... classes,—a tribe whose virtues are well-nigh vices, whose defects are never kindly, but whose habits and manners, dull and insipid though they be, are not without a certain originality. Something pinched and puny about Elisabeth Saillard was painful to the eye. Her figure, scarcely over four feet in height, was so thin that the waist measured less than twenty inches. Her small features, which clustered close about the nose, gave ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... romance, mystery and crime, for the possession of which, since history began, men have been ready to give up their lives. Confident of their success, they had risked all on a turn of the wheel, and Fortune, mocking their puny efforts, had first ruined and then degraded them, afterward sending them back home ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... the state of affairs in Acadia was a peculiar one. By the Treaty of Utrecht it was a British province, and the nominal sovereignty resided at Annapolis, in the keeping of the miserable little fort and the puny garrison, which as late as 1743 consisted of but five companies, counting, when the ranks were full, thirty-one men each.[206] More troops were often asked for, and once or twice were promised; but they were never sent. "This has been hitherto ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... in immensity, would cease to feel! Whilst living, ah, how few were known to fame! One in a million has not left a name,— A single token, on life's shifting scene, To tell to other years that such has been. Yet man, unaided by a hope sublime, Thinks that his puny arm can cope with time; That his vast genius can reverse the doom, And shed a deathless light upon his tomb; That distant ages shall his worth admire, And young hearts kindle at the sacred fire Of him whose fame no envious clouds o'ercast, Yet ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... but the prisoners! There were forty-eight—grey-haired men and puny boys—all ragged, and stalking with slippered feet from end to end with listless eyes. Some, all eagerness; some, crushed and motionless; some, scared and stupid; now singing, now swearing, now rushing about playing at some mad game; now hushed or whispering, as the loud voice ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... he, "did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen—something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.' ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... Caesar was such a man, and the great Napoleon, and I, Rene Bossuet, am the third. All men fear me, and because of my great skill and prodigious strength, all men hate me. They refuse to work beside me lest their puny efforts will appear as the work of children. I am the undisputed king of the rivers. ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... peace. If there be one interest which must have behind it a well-organized, coherent national government, able to protect it and to enforce its rights in foreign lands, it is the shipping interest. But American ships, after the Treaty of Paris, hailed from thirteen independent but puny States. They had behind them the shadow of a confederacy, but no substance. The flags they carried were not only not respected in foreign countries—they were not known. Moreover, the States were jealous of each other, possessing no true community ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... summer season, when no rain falls to lay the dust or irrigate the earth, the streams, which, during the winter, are like mountain torrents, and sweep every thing opposed to them towards the ocean, become puny little rivulets, and as the summer advances, disappear altogether from sight, and nothing but deep gulches mark the spot where but a few months before a large body of ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... told of defeat, but of how glorious a defeat! The escape from Elba, the landing in France and the march to Paris, conquering, where he passed, by the sheer magnetism of his personality! His spirit bounded as he read of this and of the frightened exit of that puny usurper before the mere rumour of his approach. Then that audacious staking of all on a throw of the dice—Waterloo and a deathless ignominy. He heard the sob-choked voices of the Old Guard as ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... boy furnished a striking contrast. He was pale and puny; his eyes gleamed with a phosphorescent brilliancy; and his hair was of a faded flaxen tint. One little circumstance attracted both detectives' attention. If the mother was attired in an old, thin, faded calico dress, the child was warmly clad in ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... a great imagination, a great passion, a great intellect; these are the master qualities, and yet we are compelled to see here—if we would not wilfully be blind or blindfold—a poet, yes, a true poet, with a perfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a poet with no more than the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirm soul, a poet with small ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... sentimental camel—he allows them to maintain a park on the cliffs above him, where the merest white-skinned, counter-jumping pigmy may come of a Sunday for his glass of pop and a careless squint at the toiling Titan. Puny Philistines eating peanuts and watching Samson at his Gaza stunt! I like it not. Rather would I see the Muse Clio pealing potatoes or Persephone busy with a banana cart! Encleadus wriggling under a mountain is well enough; but Enceladus composedly ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... awkwardly. He has a mild face, meek and unhappy, and while he tries to catch the remains of intestines in the corners, he mutters a string of "Oh's!" like sighs. His eyes are masked by blue glasses; his breathing is noisy. The top of his head is of puny dimensions, and the huge thickness of his neck has a conical shape. To see him thus pricking and unhanging from the air strips of viscera and rags of flesh, you could take him for a butcher at ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... him a vision of a stately old house in the north country, the home of the Trevellians, and in the family vault the present owner, a white haired man of seventy-five was lying, and by his side his puny eldest son, and also stalwart Harry, who looked as if a broad-ax could not kill him, and he, Jack Trevellian now the bachelor with only 500 pounds a year, and most extravagant tastes, was there as Sir Jack, and with him this little Welsh maiden, who was bending over ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... disastrously defeated! It is only the beginning of the end. We shall hear soon of far worse. The Czar is gathering together all his strength; what can the puny forces of the allies do against him? They will be outnumbered thousands to one—annihilated before they can escape ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... he couldn't have fell in. You know he would have had to gone in of his own accord. I'll let you know my father wa'n't the man to do anything like that, Jake Noyes!" The boy actually shook his puny fist in the man's face. "Say it again, if ye dare!" ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... wish to have the grand means, and our nerves ought in some measure to accommodate themselves to painful impressions, if, by way of requital, our mind is thereby elevated and strengthened. The constant reference to a petty and puny race must cripple the boldness of the poet. Fortunately for his art, Shakspeare lived in an age extremely susceptible of noble and tender impressions, but which had yet inherited enough of the firmness of a vigorous olden time, not ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... brother and herself, a cook, a coachman, a nurse, and her brother's little son Albert. The child, with a fine instinct, had put out his puny arms to Rena at first sight, and she had clasped the little man to her bosom with a motherly caress. She had always loved weak creatures. Kittens and puppies had ever found a welcome and a meal at Rena's hands, only to be chased away by Mis' Molly, who had had a wider experience. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... but only one, A puny and decrepid son; But day and night, Though fretful oft, and weak, and small, A loving child, he was her all— The ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... short and simple, like the annals of the poor," he replied. "From England in infancy, on a ranch in northern Alberta for ten years, a puny little wretch I was, terribly bothered with asthma, then"—the boy hesitated a moment—"my mother died, father moved to Edmonton, lived there for five years, thence to Wapiti, away northwest of Edmonton, our present home, prepared ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... I've got a mother, and if ever there was a woman on the face of this earth that deserves the love of a son, that woman is my mother. Sister," he added, turning to one of those who sat on a bench near him with a thin, puny, curly-haired boy wrapped up in her ragged shawl, "the best prayer that I could offer up for you—and I do offer it—is, that the little chap in your arms may grow up to bless his mother as heartily as I bless mine, but that can never be, so long as you love ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... had martyrdom, and will have. His church is never established; the world does not follow him; only of Wisdom is he known, and of her children, who are children of light. He never speaks by their mouths who say "Shalt not." He knows that "shalt not" is illegitimate, puny, trying always to usurp the throne of the true ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... headlong phrensy of a fiend, Front the keen arrows of Love's sunken sun, For that, with nearer vision it discerns What in the distance like ripe roses seemed Crimsoning with odorous beauty the gray rocks Are the red lights of wreckers! Just as well The obstinate traveler might in pride oppose His puny shoulder to the icy slip Of the blind avalanche, and hope for life; Or Beauty press her forehead in the grave, And think to rise as from the bridal bed. But let the soul resolve its course shall be Onward and upward, and the walls of pain May build themselves about it as they will, Yet leave it ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... the doomed traveller. He could find nothing. He thought to call out, to burst his lungs in a series of shouts on the chance of being heard in the chaos of the storm. But he realised the uselessness of it all, and abandoned the impulse. No puny human voice could hope to make impression on the din of the elemental battle being fought out on the plain. No. His only service must be to stand there beating life into his numbing hands, ready to act on the instant ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... unpromising. At birth he was puny and diminutive in a remarkable degree. Weems, in his peculiar fashion, writes, "I have it from good authority, that this great soldier, at his birth, was not larger than a New England lobster, and ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the 21st December, 1829. She is described as having been a very spritely and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance, and life was held by the feeblest tenure; but when a year and a half old ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... like a seer from old Chaldea. Assur of Nineveh, Marduk of Babylon, Baal of Tyre, Ammon of Memphis—all have bent the knee to Mazda the Glorious, to Mithra the Fiend-Smiting, and shall the weak daevas, the puny gods of Greece, save their land, when greater than they bow down in ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... had Angouleme at his fingers' ends; he saw all the difficulties at a glance, and resolved to sweep them out of the way by a bold stroke that only a Tartuffe's brain could invent. The puny lawyer was not a little amused to find his fellow-conspirator keeping his word with him; not a word did Petit-Claud utter; he respected the musings of his companion, and they walked the whole way from the paper-mill to the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... to the wonderful thought that the creature can claim an individual relation to Him, and in some profound sense a possession there. The tiny mica flake claims kindred with the Alpine peak from which it fell. The poor, puny hand, that can grasp so little of the material and temporal, can grasp all of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... eyelids were lifted. She turned her head slowly, and looked steadily at him. He held his breath. A cart rumbled along the cobble-stones outside; the puny wail of a child sounded across the stillness; a handful of rose leaves from a vase at the foot of the altar dropped on the hem of Madame Arnault's dress. It might have been the gaze of an angel in a world where there is no marrying nor giving in marriage, so pure was it, so passionless, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... give them strong constitutions. Am I and my brother the worse for it?" said Sylvie. "You'll make Pierrette a peakling"; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a puny and suffering ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... makes the astonishing discovery, that on the whole, women average a little smaller than men, and society seems to accept the idea that therefore, the smaller they are, the more womanly. But before we decide upon this puny condition as the necessary state of woman, let us look at some of the facts on the other side, and see what are the possibilities of physical strength and health compatible with womanhood. In the University of ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Fritz. "The study of the infinite makes all our puny efforts at probing into the mysteries of nature and analysing the motives of nature's God appear mean and contemptible, ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... much freighting that summer that the combined outfits of Jerkline Jo Modock and Al Drummond were taxed to capacity. The new settlers made constant demands upon them, and, though their wants were puny in comparison with those of the camps, Jo accommodated them whenever she could. Water had been struck at the surprisingly shallow depth of forty-five feet in some places, and many pumping plants were transported over the mountains. ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... Jim through set teeth. He swung his spear up, ready to shoot it at the horny breastplate of the nearest monster with all his puny strength. "We're going ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... Behold this puny fellow, this meek and humble chap! No doubt he'd show up yellow if he got in a scrap. His face is pale and sickly, he's weak of arm and knee; if trouble came he'd quickly shin up the nearest tree. No hale man ever loves him; he stirs the sportsman's wrath; the whole world ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... the eyes of the saint's own peculiar worshipper. I may compare her to what I please, great or small—to a sapphire set in tin, to an angel with draggled feathers; for far beyond all comparison is that temple of the holy ghost in the desert—a woman in wretchedness and rags. She carried her puny baby rolled hard in the corner of her scrap of black shawl. To the youths a sea of trouble looked out of those wild eyes. As she drew near them, she hesitated, half-stopped, and put out a hand from under the shawl—stretched out no arm, held out only a hand ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... said the scientist at last. "For then I should find it necessary to remove you. You might stand in my way, and though you would be but a puny obstacle, you still would be an obstacle. For example, consider Ellen Estabrook, your fiancee. I can find no use for her ... and she knows as much about me as you do. Therefore, at my convenience, ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... husband and wife about the twins, had its origin mainly with the mother, but sprang from the generosity of her nature: the twin she favoured was sickly from infancy. A woman such as Mrs. Wylder might have been expected to shrink from the puny, suffering creature, and give her affection and approbation to the other, as did her husband; but it was just here that the true in her, the pure womanly, came to the surface and then to the front: the child had an appealing look, which, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... M. Leandre was storming passionately. "Never! I swear it!" And he shook his puny fist at the blue vault of heaven—Ajax defying Jupiter. "Ah, but here comes our subtle friend..." (Andre-Louis did not catch the name, M. Leandre having at that moment turned to face the gap in the hedge.) "He will ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Victor Lamont?" cried the woman, shrilly. "Ten to one it's some girl whose puny, pretty face has fascinated you, and you're in love ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... the sons stepped heavily forward, and, without any apparent effort, he buried his axe to the eye, in the soft body of a cotton-wood tree. He stood, a moment, regarding the effect of the blow, with that sort of contempt with which a giant might be supposed to contemplate the puny resistance of a dwarf, and then flourishing the implement above his head, with the grace and dexterity with which a master of the art of offence would wield his nobler though less useful weapon, he quickly severed the trunk of the tree, bringing its tall top crashing to the earth in submission ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... they came under the fire of the forts at a time when, the larger vessels having passed, they were no longer covered or supported by their fire, and when day was about to break. The Itasca, commanded by the gallant Caldwell, who had so nobly broken through the obstructions, opposing only her puny battery to the concentrated wrath of the forts, was knocked about by them at will, received a shot through her boiler and drifted down the river out of action. The Winona likewise encountered almost alone, or perhaps in company with ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... was in favor of the plan, and a firm ally to the lovers. He had grown extremely Western in his ideas, and was persuaded in his mind that "this old East," as he termed it, with its puny possibilities, did not amount to much, and that as soon as he was old enough to shape his own destinies, he should return to the only section of the country worthy the attention of a young man of parts. Meanwhile, he was perfectly well again, and willing to comply with his father's desire ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... Text.... The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter and returns for more; the other bites like a viper.... When I think on one with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that "girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle;" when the other crosses my imagination, I remember ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the Merrimac, looking like a giant in comparison with this dwarfish antagonist. As she approached, the little craft glided swiftly in front of her grounded consort, like a new David offering battle to a modern Goliath. As if in disdain of this puny antagonist, the Merrimac began an attack on the Minnesota. But when the two eleven-inch guns of the Monitor opened fire, hurling solid balls of one hundred and sixty-eight pounds' weight against the iron sides of her great opponent, it became at once evident that a new move had opened in the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... mummies, drying up with slow starving and age; young girls, incurably sick, who ought to have been in the hospital; sturdy men, with the gallows in their eyes, and a whining lie in their mouths; young boys, hollow-eyed and decrepit; and puny mothers, holding up puny babes in the glare of the sun, formed the main features ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... crags, that mountain tower, Which charmed my fancy's wakening hour. Though no broad river swept along, To claim, perchance, heroic song; Though sighed no groves in summer gale, To prompt of love a softer tale; Though scarce a puny streamlet's speed Claimed homage from a shepherd's reed; Yet was poetic impulse given, By the green hill and clear blue heaven. It was a barren scene, and wild, Where naked cliffs were rudely piled; But ever and anon between Lay velvet ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... of silver, and the worth of the metal alone is estimated at 80,000 florins. The church itself is not spacious, but is built in the noble Gothic style; the lesser altars, however, with their innumerable gilded wooden figures, look by contrast extremely puny. In the chapel are many sarcophagi, on which repose bishops and knights hewn in stone, but so much damaged, that many are without hands and feet, while some lack heads. To the right, at the entrance of the church, is the celebrated chapel of St. Wenceslaus, with its ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... leaves the road, and the pilgrim has either to proceed on horseback or on foot. We had to go on foot, and a very long and tiring walk it proved to be. Besides Dr. S. and his factotum, Lazo, we took another man with us, a wretched puny individual, but seemingly possessed of more endurance than any of us. He led us by a short cut over rocks, and up slippery breakneck walls of cliffs, over which our guide skipped nimbly, and having reached the top seemingly hours before us, sat down ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... and strong, like most of his fellow-citizens, but puny and very lame. His small size and bad health had not lessened his courage, however, and he was always ready to plan a new campaign or to lead his ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... Quentina, as, a little later, she led the way down-stairs and out of doors. "There! aren't my nasturtiums beautiful?" she exulted, with the air of a fond mother displaying her first-born. She was pointing to a bed of straggling, puny plants, beautifully free from weeds, and showing here and ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... something pernicious and dread! Something far away from a puny and pious life! Something unproved! something in a trance! Something escaped from ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... present specimen is weak in its details, and the form and proportions of its balustrade are starved and lanky. The capitals of the columns want the gracefulness of the Corinthian, and the volutes are but puny illustrations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... adequate idea of Mr. James Smith's superiority to the rest of the world in the points in which he is superior. He is beyond a doubt the ablest head at unreasoning, and the greatest hand at writing it, of all who have tried in our day to attach their names to an error. Common cyclometers sink into puny orthodoxy ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... risk of life and limb to try it; but all who still viewed the hounds, catching Bertie's shout of warning, worked their horses up for it, and charged toward it as hotly as troops charge a square. Forest King was over like a bird; the winner of the Grand Military was not to be daunted by all the puny streams of the Shires; the artistic riding of the Countess landed Vivandiere, with a beautiful clear spring, after him by a couple of lengths: the Seraph's handsome white hunter, brought up at a headlong gallop with characteristic careless dash and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... over the yard for a few seconds, beating our hands upon the sail, until we started the blood into our fingers' ends, and at the next moment our hands were in a burning heat. My companion on the yard was a lad (the boy, George Somerby), who came out in the ship a weak, puny boy, from one of the Boston schools,— "no larger than a spritsail-sheet knot,'' nor "heavier than a paper of lamp-black,'' and "not strong enough to haul a shad off a gridiron,'' but who was now "as long as a spare topmast, strong enough to knock ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... centuries, before it saw, as it might be yesterday, this town of Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence which seemed to promise for the human pygmies a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in the event, we have not been able even to equal. And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and derisory, since here it is laid low, after having subsisted barely four negligible thousands ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Fairies exchanged babies with human beings, judging from the stories already given, was their desire to obtain healthy well-formed children in the place of their own puny ill-shaped offspring, but this is hardly a satisfactory explanation of such conduct. A mother's love is ever depicted as being so intense that deformity on the part of her child rather increases than diminishes her affection ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... that the cathedral happened not to be on the route between Alexandra Grove and her principal customers. Suddenly, out of Victoria Street, they came up against the vast form of the Byzantine cathedral. It was hemmed in by puny six-story blocks of flats, as ancient cathedrals also are hemmed in by the dwellings of townsfolk. But here, instead of the houses having gathered about the cathedral, the cathedral had excavated a place for itself amid the houses. Tier above tier the expensively curtained windows of dark ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... post-wartime inflation came upon this country specialized thievery marched abreast with legitimate enterprise; with it as with the other, rewards became tremendously larger; small turnovers were regarded as puny and contemptible, and operators thought in terms of pyramiding thousands of dollars where before they had been glad to strive for speculative returns of hundreds. By now Chappy Marr had won his way to the forefront of his kind. The same intelligence invoked, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... laugh. Till her red lips with guile O'erflow. And she shall curse him loud. With subtlest wile Safe won, then shall she ever be mine own. Soul-bound to me in hate, more terrible than death In hate, that long outlasts Love's puny breath— O cunning craft, that with the self-same blow Forever wins my love, and ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... but one who has tenacity, ability to hold on, and nine times out ten the abler man of the two—mentally—goes home wearied and defeated, and the other man wins the case. Who are the men prominent in the pulpit? Are they weak, puny men, or men of physique? Who are the leaders in the Churches? They are not leaders on account of their intellectual brilliancy, but by their wholeness as men. They find sympathy with the people because they are good specimens ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... sank. She herself was no beauty; her round, fair face and honest blue eyes were pleasant to look at, and she had beautiful hair, but that was all; yet she could not help seeing that she was a very vision of loveliness beside the sallow, puny, almost deformed aspect of her poor little neighbour. She coloured deep with angry sympathy, but Lobelia only smiled, ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... or reason, or think. All he knew was that some time, when he was away and while no one was there to befriend, Ike Bray his enemy had climbed up the butte and jumped the Old Juan claim. And all the time he was dallying in New York and playing his puny string at Navajoa the Old Juan claim and the mighty Tecolote had been left unguarded until they ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... will find how far this foolish method hastens the work of nature and ruins the character. This is one of the chief causes of physical degeneration in our towns. The young people, prematurely exhausted, remain small, puny, and misshapen, they grow old instead of growing up, like a vine forced to bear fruit in spring, which fades and dies ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Buckingham, not content with having debauched the countess of Shrewsbury and publishing her shame, took all opportunities of provoking the earl to single combat, hoping he should have an easy conquest, his lordship being a puny little creature, quiet, inoffensive, and every way unfit for such personal contests. He ridiculed him on all occasions; and at last declared in public company, that there was no glory in cuckolding Shrewsbury, who had not spirit to resent the injury. This was an insult which ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... more or less discharge from the vulva. This is especially true if the fetal membranes are retained. In such cases, the discharge has a very disagreeable odor. In most cases the foetus is dead. When born alive, it is weak and puny, and usually dies or is destroyed within a few days. When the attendant fails to give the animal the necessary attention, or is careless in his manipulation of the parts, inflammation of the womb, caused by the decomposition of the retained membranes, ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... Thor grew very angry. "What! dress me like a girl!" he roared. "I should never hear the last of it! The Asir will mock me, and call me 'maiden'! The giants, and even the puny dwarfs, will have a lasting jest upon me! I will not go! I will fight! I will die, if need be! But dressed as a ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... pursuits fill her mind; budding childhood has become blooming womanhood. Now, if ever, must be laid the foundation of physical vigor and of a healthy body. Girls should realize the significance of this fact. Do not get the idea that men admire a weakly, puny, delicate, small-waisted, languid, doll-like creature, a libel on true womanhood. Girls admire men with broad chests, square shoulders, erect form, keen bright eyes, hard muscles and undoubted vigor. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... old soul, seemed sorry to have her go, but she had her own peculiar way of expressing it, namely, by getting crosser every day. She did not approve of so much "larnin'" for girls, especially when Beth was "goin' to be married to that puny Mayfair." Aunt Prudence always said her "say," as she expressed it, but she meant ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... as Saint-Prosper rode down the street, were assembled a number of lease-holders of both sexes and all ages, from the puny babe in arms to the decrepit crone and hoary grand-sire, listening to the flowing tongue of a rustic speech-maker. This forum of the people was shaded by a sextette of well-grown elms. The platform of the local Demosthenes stood in a corner near ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... This diminutive stature of mankind, if we pursue the metaphor, was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies; when the fierce giants of the north broke in, and mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... though it seemed to him the brute must hear the tumultuous throbbing of his heart and rush forth. Puny as was his strength, he meant that, if he did so, he would steady himself on his one support, and grasping the other with both hands, strike the dog with might and main. It is doubtful whether the blow would have stunned the dog, for the little fellow's confidence ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch's anathemas in ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into the fighting section of humanity, a puny creature whom one blow from a man's huge fist could annihilate, absolutely fearless, and insolent with the insolence which only those dare show who know that retribution cannot follow—what can be done with her? She is afraid of nothing, and to be controlled by no ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... might fancy that they never spoke of anything with simplicity. The English are more rarely given to a similar failing. The cause of this may be pointed out without much difficulty. In democratic communities each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object, namely himself. If he ever raises his looks higher, he then perceives nothing but the immense form of society at large, or the still more imposing aspect of mankind. His ideas are all either extremely ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the glancing helm answered him: "Aias of the seed of Zeus, son of Telamon, chieftain of the host, tempt not thou me like some puny boy or woman that knoweth not deeds of battle. But I well know wars and slaughterings. To right know I, to left know I the wielding of my tough targe; therein I deem is stalwart soldiership. And I know how to charge ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... bar. He seemed to be as strong as he was dexterous, and in a little boy with a reverence for those who were strong, he naturally aroused positive enthusiasm. This was even augmented next day, when a big, malicious boy, who had scoffed at Adam for being puny, was, in a trice, so well thrashed by Sofus that he lost both his breath ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... unfamiliar and hitherto almost detested line of investigation now attracted me. Abstruse mathematical problems which had defied solution for centuries began to appear easy. To defy the State and its puny representatives had become mere child's play. So I forthwith decided to overcome no less a force than ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... air, Soft and agreeable come never there. Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a town, His pond an ocean, his parterre a down: Who but must laugh, the master when he sees, A puny insect, shivering at a breeze! Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! The whole a labour'd quarry above ground; 110 Two Cupids squirt before: a lake behind Improves the keenness of the northern wind. His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... tech 'er! Garn! Garn!" she cried and poised, tense, vicious, ready to pit her puny strength against his might if he should rise, vanquish Vanderlyn and try, again, to ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... healthful and necessary subordination of wife to husband, and that unity of relationship which is required by a true and a real Christian marriage. You will have substituted a system of contention and difference warring against the laws of nature herself, and attempting by these new fangled, petty, puny, and most contemptible contrivances, organized in defiance of the best lessons of human experience, to confuse, impede, and disarrange the palpable will of the Creator of the world. I can see in this proposition for female ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... advantage of so puny a rival, Wotan refuses to take the forfeited head, and departs, after telling the Nibelung that the sword can only be restored to its pristine glory by the hand of a man who knows no fear, and that the same man will ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... little mountain stream, undefiled for years by the silt of industry. The peak of the cross, lifting a needle point high above them, as if keeping watch over the Blue Mountains, the far-distant Idaho hills, the near-by forests of Oregon, and the puny, man-made structures at its feet, appeared to have a lofty disdain of them and the burrowings into its mammoth sides, as if all ravagers were mere parasites, mad to uncover its secrets of gold, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... be! But you are too well skilled in the philosophy of consolation to need my humble tribute of advice; in pain and in sickness, and in all manner of disappointments, I trust you have that within you which shall speak peace to your mind. Make it, I entreat you, one of your puny comforts, that I feel for you, and share all your griefs with you. I feel as if I were troubling you about little things; now I am going to resume the subject of our last two letters, but it may divert us both from unpleasanter feelings to make such matters, in a manner, of importance. Without ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... walked along. "My father was a journeyman engraver, who lived in a very riotous neighbourhood in the outskirts of London. Wishing to give me something of an education, he sent me to a day-school, two or three streets distant from where we lived, and there, being rather a puny boy, I suffered much persecution from my school-fellows, who were a very blackguard set. One day, as I was running home, with one of my tormentors pursuing me, old Sergeant Broughton, the retired fighting-man, seized me by the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the boathook wavered, aimed first at the nonapus, then at the fishman. To the editor, both were alien—but he couldn't decide which one was more dangerous. For a long moment, neither of them advanced, and he wondered if they could really be frightened of his puny weapon. ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... A diurnal is a puny chronicle, scarce pin-feathered with the wings of time. It is a history in sippets: the English Iliads in a nutshell: the apocryphal Parliament's book of Maccabees in single sheets. It would tire a Welshman to reckon ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Steele; the former of whom has composed a classical and sportive Latin poem on this very subject. But Quadrio might well rest satisfied that the nation which could boast of its Fantoccini, surpassed, and must ever surpass the puny efforts of a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... illnesses than all the children put together; there is nothing Robin can't take: whooping-cough,—why, he nearly whooped himself to death; measles and scarlet fever,—why, he was as nearly gone as possible, the doctor said. He has always been puny and weakly from a baby. But there's Bell, now, makes more of a fuss over Rob than over the others; if there is anything that will keep him away from the Man and Plough, it is Rob asking him to take him ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... had been for over a year affianced to another—a rich man's only child—a woman older than he, whose shriveled, jaundiced face, weak, scrawny body, and puny, sickly soul, would have been repulsive even to him, had not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Voyage of the Discovery." There are incidents in this book which one can never forget. The episode of those twenty-odd men lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one a day from cold and hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our puny tragedies of romance. And the gallant starving leader giving lectures on abstract science in an attempt to take the thoughts of the dying men away from their sufferings—what a picture! It is bad to suffer from cold and bad to suffer from hunger, and bad to live in the dark; but that men could do ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... watched with deep anxiety over her little Maria. The child was pale, and puny, yet very affectionate and intelligent. Whenever her mamma said, "Where is dear papa gone?" the little creature started up, and pointed to the sea. She could not speak plainly, for she was only ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... nuclei from which radiated those long lines of light which stretch to-day across a continent and strike the Pacific ocean. This is a simile borrowed from astronomy. To adopt the language of the naturalist, those three little colonies were the puny germs which bore within themselves a vital force vastly more potent and wonderful than that which dwells in the heart of the gourd seed, and the acorn whose nascent swelling energies will lift huge boulders and split the living rock asunder: vastly more potent because it ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... smith retorted gruffly, as a puny atomy of a man with a stick and lanthorn was pushed with difficulty to the front. 'But so being you are here, supposing you put Joe Hincks a foot or two back, and let ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... first looks at the numberless volumes of a library, and says, "All these are mine;" the other points to a single volume (perhaps it may be an immortal one) and says, "My name is written on the back of it." This is a puny and groveling ambition, beneath the lofty amplitude of Mr. Coleridge's mind. No, he revolves in his wayward soul, or utters to the passing wind, or discourses to his own shadow, things mightier and more various!—Let us draw the curtain, and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... too. It was no empty phrase. Rather something in touch with Life's great scheme of compensations, which she manipulates in her own great way, beyond the comprehension of puny humans. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... 1759, there was born at the pretty little village of Hayes, in Middlesex, a puny babe, who in after years was to be one of the greatest statesmen of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked—goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Associate with thee the whole mass of infernal power. Begin with the ruin of whatever is fair and good in this little globe. Pass hence to pluck the sun out of his place, and roll the volume of desolation through the starry world. What hast thou done unto Him? It is the puny menace of a worm against Him whose frown is perdition. "He that sitteth ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... not at all pleased with the idea of having his powerful enemy in the boat with him, "such a puny young fellow can be of no use to me, and if I go as far out to sea as I generally do, and stay as long, you will catch a cold that will be the death ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... by doings such as this that men do learn each other's worth: so shall the bonds betwixt us strengthen day by day, and join us in accord and brotherhood that shall outlast this puny life. So now let us begone and ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... of most men in its comprehensiveness and exactitude. These few haphazard notes refer to the exercise of rare independence. They cannot be otherwise than trivial and dull, but they at least fulfil the purpose to which I was pledged. They reveal my puny efforts to be none other than myself. So tranquil, so uniform are our days, that but for the diary—the civilised substitute for the notched stick—count of them might be lost. And this extorts yet ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... detonation kept up, and a hail of bullet-like stones poured downward from the skies. Rarely has a more terrible Sunday been seen. It was as if the demons of earth and air were let loose and were seeking to destroy man and his puny works. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... tearing up the ground, and sending splinters flying from the tree with blows from his tusks; such threatening movements on his part effectually deterring his foes in their advance. Sticks and stones, large and weighty, are hurled at him from all sides. What does he care for such puny projectiles? Even a well-aimed tomahawk, that strikes him full and fairly, fails to hurt or penetrate his armour of bristles and tough hide. Like Achilles, his weak place is in his heels—his rear, and that is well ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Square, now flooded with the pure sunlight of early morning, and all the kinks and quirks and hobgoblins which the rush and irritation of yesterday had generated seemed to have vanished, and I could not suppress a smile at the thought of the night before, when this battle—this puny, insignificant battle for a few dirty dollars—had almost raised feelings I now knew too well should only be aroused by real battles, battles in which noble principles were involved, and I felt better able to fight what I had ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the prospect seemed to me, who had never seen a considerable body of water, to be like a great inland sea. Flora was appalled at our distance from the land, and Sim shouted, "Hookie!" Our raft, which had seemed so large on the stream where it had been built, now loomed puny and insignificant. Great steamboats, three times as large as any I had ever seen, and looming up far above the water, dashed by us. Huge flat-boats floated lazily down the river, and the scene became more lively and exciting as we advanced. A ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... seven square glepkeps! Of the number of its inhabitants I can only say that they are as the sands of the desert. They wear clothing—of a hideous kind, 'tis true—speak an apparently copious though harsh language, and seem to have a certain limited intelligence. They are puny in stature, the tallest of them being hardly ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... which he must portray if his picture were to be complete; he must have it to lead the story up to that tragic, pitifully eloquent scene which had come out clear and photographically perfect,—the scene of the old cow's struggle against the storm and of her final surrender, too weak to match her puny strength against the furies of wind and snow and cold. That scene would live long in the minds of those who saw it; that scene alone would lift his picture above the dead level of mediocrity. But he must have ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... '"Why, you snivelling, wry-faced, puny villain," gasped old Lobbs, paralysed by the atrocious confession; "what do you mean by that? Say this to my face! ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the overthrow of Walpole; was the friend of Pope and Swift, and the author of "Letters" bearing upon politics and literature. "Bolingbroke," says Prof. Saintsbury, "is a rhetorician pure and simple, but the subjects of his rhetoric were not the great and perennial subjects, but puny ephemeral forms of them—the partisan and personal politics of his day, the singularly shallow form of infidelity called Deism and the like; and his time deprived him of many, if not most, of the rhetorician's most telling weapons. The ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... picking my way I paused to gaze at the distant purple peaks and watch the sun set in that lonely land as if I was witnessing it for the first time. As my eyes roamed over the stupendous distance and unnamed mountains I felt my own puny insignificance, as who has not when confronted ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... tie to. They need to be taught, if you please, what is the "gang" spirit among boys. They need to learn that their young bodies are to be used, instead of decorated. Until they learn that, we shall have sickly mothers and puny babies. No single movement for the improvement of American people as a race, no advance of science or sanitation, can compare in importance with the necessity for building up morally, spiritually and ...
— Why I Believe in Scouting for Girls • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... made their incapacity plain. The execution of the King had filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the ruder and more robust party who had forced that startling act of vengeance upon them. Puny social disgusts prevented them from co-operating with Danton or with Robespierre. Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or more hateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in futile recriminations about the September massacres or the alleged peculations of municipal officers, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... at last. Instead of arguing, "Ma" looked at him as witheringly as she could and replied; "I speak with men and people worthy of me, and not with a puny bush-boy such as you have shown by your ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... colleague-pastor of the Old South Church with John Bacon in 1771. He found it a most trying position. He was of an amiable and gentle disposition, and the poem on "Boston Ministers" asserted that he "most friends with sisters made." Another Boston rhymester called him "puny John from Northampton, a meek-mouth moderate man." When the gates of Boston were closed in 1775, after the battle of Lexington, he returned to Northampton, and died there of consumption, December 20, 1775. A full account of his life is ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... Bax! Saint Cuthbert aid me now! O Bax, see how to sweat thou'st made me now! Thy speed abate! O sweet Saint Dominic! Why pliest thou thy puny shanks so quick; O day! O Bax! O hot, sulphurous day, My flesh betwixt ye melteth fast away. Come, sit ye, Bax, in shade of yon sweet tree, And, sitting ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... children; and other, yet worse and nameless atrocities, fill up the terrible picture, of impotent justice and triumphant guilt. But the guilt is not all Spanish and Portuguese. The English Government can enforce its demands on the puny cabinets of Madrid and Lisbon, scarce conscious of a substantive existence, in all that concerns our petty interests: wherever justice and mercy to mankind demand our interference, there our voice sinks within us, and no sound is uttered. That any ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... he was small, thin, puny, and rather round-shouldered. No one knew exactly how old he was; he could not be more than forty, but he looked more than fifty. He had a little wrinkled face, with a pink complexion, and kind pale blue eyes, like faded forget-me-nots. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... unhappy experiments, to find our way at last into peace, wisdom, the changeless and boundless consciousness, or into the hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our senses foretell, or that which our intelligence demands? Or are both senses and intelligence illusions, puny implements, vain weapons of a brief hour that were never intended to probe or contend with the universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it and to deem impossible that which we do not understand, ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... fearful way for the voyager. It was not a regular roll or swell, but short, quick, chopping waves, tumbling about in all directions, that whirled him round and round, rolled him over and over, rendered his puny sail utterly useless and blinded him with foam and spray. It was a strangely fascinating spectacle to watch him in his hand to hand struggle with the ocean. The waves seemed to become living things animated by a terrible hatred for the strange being battling with them. Sometimes they seemed ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... had spread and almost before they knew it the town seemed doomed. Arches of flame, myriads of falling sparks, hundreds of fleeing half-clad men, women and children, the hissing of the engines in their puny attempts to fight the monster, and ever and anon the dull roar of the falling walls, made a scene, as grand and weird as it was desolate and awful. In less than two hours time fifty-two squares had been laid waste, leaving a trail of smoldering black ashes. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... lungs could fill with audible prayer. Oaken benches were arranged in the transept, on one of which I seated myself, and joined, as well as I knew how, in the sacred business that was going forward. But when it came to the sermon, the voice of the preacher was puny, and so were his thoughts, and both seemed impertinent at such a time and place, where he and all of us were bodily included within a sublime act of religion which could be seen above and around us and felt beneath ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Charms, and whatever hath once given Satisfaction will always do it: In all which they have manifestly the Advantage of us, who are so much govern'd by sickly and changeable Appetites, that we can with the greatest Coldness behold the stupendous Displays of Omnipotence, and be in Transports at the puny Essays of humane Skill; throw aside Speculations of the sublimest Nature and vastest Importance into some obscure Corner of the Mind, to make Room for new Notions of no Consequence at all; are even tired of Health, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... you not become one with us? I dare to prophesy like a seer from old Chaldea. Assur of Nineveh, Marduk of Babylon, Baal of Tyre, Ammon of Memphis—all have bent the knee to Mazda the Glorious, to Mithra the Fiend-Smiting, and shall the weak daevas, the puny gods of Greece, save their land, when greater than they ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... obliged than he is willing to acknowledge; there is a tincture of malice in his commendations: for where I own I am taught, I confess my want of knowledge. A judge upon the bench may, out of good nature, or, at least, interest, encourage the pleadings of a puny counsellor, but he does not willingly commend his brother-serjeant at the bar, especially when he controls his law, and exposes that ignorance which is made sacred by his place. I gave the unknown author his due commendation, I must confess; ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... of the centre of the landscape—majestically beautiful—imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even now, when the towns are thrice their ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Lamont?" cried the woman, shrilly. "Ten to one it's some girl whose puny, pretty face has fascinated you, and you're ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... I do hate all cold conceptions, as I do the puny ideas which engender them; and am generally so struck with the great works of nature, that for my own part, if I could help it, I never would make a comparison less than a mountain at least. All that can ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... that my heart for some seconds ceased to beat, and I am sure that Joe shared my dismay, for he tightened the grip of his great strong hand upon my puny one until I could have sworn it was crushed to a pulp. At the bridge head were two gentlemen, who had to all appearance been engaged in chatting, for one still sat on the parapet, while the other stood within a foot or two of him. They were not talking now, but gazing at the ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... symmetry and power, and there is cunning to devise and the strong right arm to execute. But if it be thin and poor, and its circulation feeble and uncertain, the will flags, the mind is weak and vacillating, the muscles grow puny, and the man becomes an unresisting prey to disease and circumstance. If it escape through a wound, strength ebbs with it, until at length life itself flows out with the unchecked crimson stream. Thus, then, by acting upon the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... in terms justifying the vulgar use of the derivative word Sophomorical, defied his competitors, in the name of his associates, to enter the lists. He was matched by an equal in stature, from that part of the circle formed by the new-comers. Beginning with these puny athletes, as one and another was prostrated on either side, the contest advanced through the intermediate gradations of strength and skill, with increasing excitement of the parties and spectators, until it reached its ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... seven years old; so puny—only a few pounds weight—owing to her being starved and beaten by a drunken stepfather. Now, a year in a happy home, going to school regularly, is companion to an only child, and lacks no earthly ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to the simple and the infinite to the finite. He accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal. His turn for metaphysical analysis is closely associated with a deep ethical insight: and many of his verses form sayings of so high a class that we trust ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... birthplace of Shakespeare. Of English poets it may be said generally they are either born in London or remote country places. The large provincial towns know them not. Indeed, nothing is more pathetic than the way in which these dim, destitute places hug the memory of any puny whipster of a poet who may have been born within their statutory boundaries. This has its advantages, for it keeps alive in certain localities fames that would otherwise have utterly perished. Parnassus has forgotten ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... only the descendant of some of those puny heroes who boiled their own kettles before the walls of Troy, I shall write to her from a Grecian, rather than a Roman canton: when I shall find myself, for example, among her Phocaean ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... was nearly too strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely physical being. I came down among the pale sand-heaps slowly toward that queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my puny body I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaming hate, a sword of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... of the deeds of the early days, when the world was young, and the dwarf-folk and the giants had a name and a place upon earth. And one night, as they thus sat, the master talked of Odin the All-Father, and of the gods who dwell with him in Asgard, and of the puny men-folk whom they protect and befriend, until his words grew full of bitterness, and his soul of a fierce longing for something he dared not name. And the lad's heart was stirred with a strange uneasiness, ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... only their puny knives with which to give battle to the serpent, the boys stood petrified with terror. Even Ben, to whom his rescue and Frank's peril had been unfolded so swiftly that he was half-dazed, seemed unable to determine ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... simple, like the annals of the poor," he replied. "From England in infancy, on a ranch in northern Alberta for ten years, a puny little wretch I was, terribly bothered with asthma, then"—the boy hesitated a moment—"my mother died, father moved to Edmonton, lived there for five years, thence to Wapiti, away northwest of Edmonton, our present home, prepared for college ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... absurd. She knew herself to be incapable of it. She was bound to crumple under the strain, bound to be humbled to the dust long ere the faintest hope of outmatching her mother's iron will had begun to dawn in her soul. The very thought made her feel puny and contemptible. If she resisted to the very uttermost of her strength, yet would she be crushed in the end, and that end would be more horribly painful than she dared to contemplate. All her childhood it had been the same. She had been conquered ere she had ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... hands upon the sail, until we started the blood into our fingers' ends, and at the next moment our hands were in a burning heat. My companion on the yard was a lad (the boy, George Somerby), who came out in the ship a weak, puny boy, from one of the Boston schools,— "no larger than a spritsail-sheet knot,'' nor "heavier than a paper of lamp-black,'' and "not strong enough to haul a shad off a gridiron,'' but who was now "as long as a spare topmast, strong enough to knock down an ox, and hearty enough ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Lamb's, &c. &c. exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in common-place epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics, (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them) puny pathos, &c. &c. the instances were almost all taken from ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... situation of our metropolis. If the Seine, like the Thames, presented the advantage of braving the moderate winds, and of conveying, by regular tides, the productions of the four quarters of the globe to the quays which skirt its banks, what an acquisition would it not be to their puny commerce! What a gratification to their pride to see ships discharging their rich cargoes at the foot of the Pont de la Concorde! The project of the canal of Languedoc must, at first, have apparently presented greater obstacles; yet, by talents and perseverance, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... is despatched without complaint or hindrance in a tolerably short interview once a week, or once a month, or once a quarter, between the Secretary of State and the Agent-General. If that is all, we can only say that seldom has so puny a mouse come forth from so ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... reefs. Through the blanketing fog they could discern, on the north, island after island, ghostlike through the mist, rocky, towering, majestic, with a thunder of surf among the caves, a dim outline of mountains above, like Loki, Spirit of Evil, smiling stonily at the dark forces closing round these puny men. All along Kadiak, the roily waters told of reefs. The air was heavy with fogs thick to the touch; and violent winds constantly threatened a sudden shift that might drive the vessel on the rocks. At midnight on August 1, they suddenly ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Moreover the numbers were, seven hundred and fifty to one hundred. But, the Spaniards, still quite disconcerted by the events of the preceding night, seemed under a spell. Otherwise it would have been an easy matter for the great galeasse to annihilate such puny antagonists in a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... preliminary trip only, and, having thus found the way, goes back through that hundred miles of peril yet again, and brings away his wife and child? As Hawthorne's artist flung his hopeless pencil into Niagara, so all one's puny literary art seems utterly merged and swept away in the magnificent flood of untaught eloquence with which some such nameless man will pour out his tale. Two things seem worth recording, and no third: the passionate emotions of the humblest negro, as they burst into language at such a time,—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... all in wonder not unmingled with awe. What a place it was for man to live and wage his puny battles! Yet the fever of all of it, rising in her veins, made her eager already to partake of the dream, the excitement that made mere gold-slaves of the men who had come here compelling this forbidding place to ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the new teeth. Don't either of you need 'em, and it would be selfish of me to spend on something they couldn't anybody borrow from me. Amandy, dig a little deeper around that shoot, I don't want no puny vine ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... prejudice has banished from our school-rooms the name of love, and presented to their youthful inmates fragments instead of books, cramped and puny publications instead of the works of master-spirits, lest the mind should be contaminated by any allusion to that passion contained in them. The wisdom of such a proceeding is much upon a par with that which devoted the feet to stocks and the shoulders ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... [b] The puny orators are said to be in an infirmary, like sickly men, who were nothing but skin and bone. These, says Cicero, were admirers of the Attic manner; but it were to be wished that they had the wholesome blood, not merely the bones, of their favourite declaimers. Attico genere dicendi se gaudere ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... like you and I never will but for all that I'm going to make a decent, upstanding infant of you. You are going to get as fat as a self-respecting child should be, for one thing. I am not going to have people saying 'what a puny little thing that baby of Rilla Blythe's is' as old Mrs. Drew said at the senior Red Cross yesterday. If I can't love you I mean to be proud of you ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the inferior half, I might have defrauded him of the whole. And what if I had? Would that have been a case for putting heaven and earth in commotion, for deep designs of chain and cross and Caucasus, dispatchings of eagles, rendings of livers? These things tell a sad tale, do they not, of the puny soul, the little mind, the touchy temper of the aggrieved party? How would he take the loss of a whole ox, who storms to such purpose over a few pounds of meat? How much more reasonable is the conduct of mortals, though one would have expected them to be more irritable than Gods! ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and as the boats left the shore, beneath the same cold and stormy sky that had led them forth, and feebly breasted the hissing waves which seemed to sneer at their puny efforts, the eighteen men who remained on shore drew ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... France" records that they were again shown to Charles IX. at Troyes, and Montaigne's questions to them in 1563 will be remembered. They replied that what astonished them most was (Essais I. xxx.) to see so many strong men armed and bearded (meaning the Swiss guard probably) obeying a puny little person like the King. They were also fairly puzzled at seeing men gorged with plenty and living in ostentation on one side of the road, and starveling ruffians begging their bread in the gutter on the other without attempting to take the rich ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... of the principal parts and characters, which a judicious critic will observe, though I point not to it in this preface. And there may be also some secret beauties in the decorum of parts, and uniformity of design, which my puny judges will not easily find out: let them consider in the last scene of the fourth act, whether I have not preserved the rule of decency, in giving all the advantage to the royal character, and in making Dorax first submit. Perhaps too they may have thought, that it was through indigence ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... my advertisement (see Dispatch), but retire yourself in the country (I should think I would—Monteagle), where you may abide in safety; for though there be no appearance of any punae; (what the deuce does this mean? Puny's little—Monteagle), yet they will receive a terrible blow-up (By punae he means members of Parliament, and he is another Guy!—Monteagle); yet they shall not see who hurts them, though the place shall be purified ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... An-to-ni-o was a puny lad, and not strong enough to work. He did not care to play with the other boys of the town. But he liked to go with his grandfather to the stone-yard. While the old man was busy, cutting and trimming the great blocks of stone, the lad would play ...
— Fifty Famous Stories Retold • James Baldwin
... their throats they lie Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr Who still am free, unto no querulous care A fool, and in no temple worshiper! I, that have bared me to your quiver's fire, Lifted my face into its puny rain, Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain! (Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave, Punish me, surely, with the ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... pleasure, that you have carried out the intention you hinted to me when I last had the pleasure of seeing you at Kingston. Your admirable letter must have had a good effect. I see that some little popguns were let off at you on the occasion, but they are too puny to excite anything but ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... jewels, veils, silks, furs, embroideries and figured stuffs, wherewith to enhance the comeliness of Melicent. It seemed an all-engulfing madness with this despot daily to aggravate his fierce desire of her, to nurture his obsession, so that he might glory in the consciousness of treading down no puny adversary. ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... to carry out the comparison properly, it is far more exact to liken the timid to these degenerate flowers, which are indebted to the shade in which they hide for their puny ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... a time To wage our wars, to fan our fates, To take our fill of armored crime, To troop our banner, storm the gates. Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red, Blind in our puny reign of power, Do we forget how soon is sped ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... who had scoffed at him when he first appeared, a puny boy, at Chatham, found themselves gradually trusting more and more to his advice, and his uncle, who had at first predicted that three months' service would send Horatio back to shore, was now the first to predict that England would have good cause to be proud ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... his power as one might hold an insect, played with her shrinking woman's nature, and trampled it under his feet, coldly and quietly! She was in his way, and he had put her aside. How the fine subtile spirit had risen up out of its agony of shame, and scorned him! How it had flashed from the puny frame standing there in the muddy road despised and jeered at, and calmly judged him! He might go from her as he would, toss her off like a worn-out plaything, but he could not blind her: let him put on what face he would to the world, whether they called him a master among men, or a miser, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... he shouted. "I tell you I am a god, the one god, supreme above all. Do you think to match your puny will against my own? I tell you Lucille is mine. And for ever, Dent. Whenever we two have reached old age, all that will be necessary for us to do will be to turn this screw a hair's breadth back into the past, and we are both ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... incessantly: As fast as we can set them up, events Roll down the narrow alleys of our lives, Rumbling like distant thunder as they speed, Till crash! our king-intent is down, and in His fall share all his puny retinue! She an adulteress! My Hester, whom I cherished as my soul! How I loved her! Forgotten, like the meat of yesterday, Let it pass! Henceforth, for me there's nothing on this side Of Hell, but study of revenge on him Who wrought her shame. ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... of the good creature to drown sorrow, does not promise redundancy of health and vigour to those suckled by them—on the contrary, children thus unnaturally thrown from the arms of a parent into those of a nurse, are, almost without exception, weak and puny; of irrascible tempers and vicious inclinations.—Nor does the attention of the ladies expire with the infancy of their children—they still are unwearied in instructing them as they increase in years, and assiduously endeavour to inculcate principles ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... the man I'll make 'mongst the big men of the world! I'm the only one on airth as kin be as big as that, hain't I? Yeou hain't amountin' ter nuthin', air ye? Why shouldn't ye take my place afore the law? Hain't hit Natur's way fer the puny ter ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... handicap; Circumstance he had met and thought to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end Custom was laughing in his face. Beside those intangible antagonists which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and swaggering and cheap. But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was an entity—a thing upon which one might hurl oneself and ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... believed, could be controlled as well by absent treatment as by present. Unhappily, Katharine had reckoned without taking into account either Brenton's wilful allegiance to the old-fashioned notions of disease, or the nurse's abject allegiance to the father of her puny charge. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... primeval forests of Manyuema! The reflection of the dazzling light of civilisation was cast on him while Livingstone was thus listening in wonder to one of the most exciting pages of history ever repeated. How the puny deeds of barbarism paled before these! Who could tell under what new phases of uneasy life Europe was labouring even then, while we, two of her lonely children, rehearsed the tale of her late woes and glories? More worthily, perhaps, had the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... which is perhaps, only surpassed by Manchester's, and it looked its blackest on a day at the end of March in the following year, as the afternoon express from London roared into the Lime Street Station. The rain was coming down; it was small rain, and it descended with a sort of puny determination; it was sad rain without any dash, any boldness; it had affinities with the mists which sweep over stretches of moorland, but its power of saturation was remarkable. It soaked Liverpool. It issued out of blackness ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a wan track cut across the open fields. Its course is marked afar by lines of puny trees, sooty as snuffed candles; by telegraph posts and their long spider-webs; by bushes or by fences, which are like the skeletons of bushes. There are a few houses. Up yonder a strip of sky still shows palely yellow above the meager suburb where creeps ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... sought to kill himself. Melisande had been wounded,—"a tiny little wound that would not kill a pigeon;" yet her life is despaired of; and on her death-bed she has been delivered of a child—"a puny little girl such as a beggar might be ashamed to own—a little waxen thing that came before its time, that can be kept alive only by being wrapped in wool." The room is very silent. "It seems to me that we keep too still in her room," says ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... mother it seemed that this must be only a new phase of her insanity, but to the Roffs there remained no doubt that in her they beheld an actual reincarnation of the girl whom they had buried twelve years before—that is to say, when Lurancy herself was a puny, wailing infant. Eagerly they seconded her entreaties to be allowed to return with them; and, Mrs. Vennum being completely prostrated by this unexpected development, it was soon decided that the little girl should for the time being take up her ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... Gluck, "lay aside my 'Orpheus' for one of Hasse's puny operas? Never! My opera is almost complete. It needs but one last aria to stand out before the world in all its fulness of perfection, and shall I suffer it to be laid aside to give place to one of his tooting, jingling performances? No, no. My 'Orpheus' ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... kind heart sank. She herself was no beauty; her round, fair face and honest blue eyes were pleasant to look at, and she had beautiful hair, but that was all; yet she could not help seeing that she was a very vision of loveliness beside the sallow, puny, almost deformed aspect of her poor little neighbour. She coloured deep with angry sympathy, but Lobelia only smiled, a ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... well formed and hardy. Early marriages were unknown among them, and it was rare for a female of puny stature and delicate constitution to be honored with a husband. They were not obliged by art in forming their bodies, for Nature acted her part bountifully to them, and among them there are but ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... to his ambition. It required a knowledge that the causes of military success and political advance lie deeper than statistics can reach—that they have their roots in the moral nature of man, in the grandeur of his ideas and the energy of his character—in order to comprehend the fact, that the puny power upon her right flank was the enemy which Persia had most to fear, the foe who would gradually sap her strength, and finally deal her the blow ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... shoulder higher than the right, and a worn, ashen face with lifeless eyes. To Pierre he looked like some old clerk of seventy, half stupefied by fifty years of office work, dulled and bent by incessantly leaning over his writing desk ever since his youth. And indeed that was Sarno's story. The puny child of a petty middle-class family, he had been educated at the Seminario Romano. Then later he had for ten years professed Canon Law at that same seminary, afterwards becoming one of the secretaries of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Finally, five and twenty ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... accusations? Why should He? you perhaps exclaim. His character, you say, cannot be affected in the estimation of the good by anything which the enemies of all righteousness can urge against it. His throne can no more be shaken by the puny attacks of men or devils than the everlasting mountains can be disturbed by the storm-blasts which howl around them. What more, then, is needed, than to shut up the wicked in a prison-house, through whose adamantine walls the accusing ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... blunder - And for the best all things are being done." Who set the stars on their eternal courses Has fashioned this strange earth by some sure plan. Bow low, bow low to those majestic forces, Nor dare to doubt their wisdom, puny man. ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... been a cork, leaving him to flourish his paddle in the air, like the weather-wheel of a steam-boat in a sea-way. The new-comer was strong and broad-shouldered, with long muscular arms, and a chest like Hercules; but his legs and thighs were, for his bulk, remarkably puny and misshapen. A thick fell of black wool, in close tufts, as if his face had been stuck full of cloves, covered his chin and upper-lip; and his hair, if hair it could be called, was twisted into a hundred short plaits, that bristled out, and gave his head, when he took his hat off, the appearance ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... Stelis (Stelis nasuta, LATR.) is a parasite of the Mason-bee of the Walls. When the Chalicodoma has finished building her dome of cells upon her pebble, the parasite appears, makes a long inspection of the outside of the home and proposes, puny as she is, to introduce her eggs into this cement fortress. Everything is most carefully closed: a layer of rough plaster, at least two-fifths of an inch thick, entirely covers the central accumulation of cells, which are each of them sealed with a thick mortar ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... these, though inferior in size and no less sparingly equipped, greatly surpasses the Grasshopper in nocturnal rhapsodies. I speak of the pale and slender Italian Cricket (Oecanthus pellucens, Scop.), who is so puny that you dare not take him up for fear of crushing him. He makes music everywhere among the rosemary-bushes, while the Glow-worms light up their blue lamps to complete the revels. The delicate instrumentalist consists chiefly of a pair of large wings, thin and gleaming as strips of mica. Thanks to ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... on his back, but would be off again before he had time almost to turn his head. Had he chosen, I am sure he could have caught one or two of the most daring, and would soon with his powerful jaws have made an end of them; but he disdained to take offence at their puny efforts to annoy him, and continued to treat them ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... word, I see no reason against it! That's how I should deal with a man who talked about me in this way, and none the less if he were a puny creature quite unable to protect himself. In that furious scene before we got Tom away I felt most terribly tempted to beat her. There's a great deal to be said for woman-beating. I am quite sure that many a labouring man who pommels his wife is doing exactly the right thing; no other measure would ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... death to any other that might approach. They were at a deadlock, yet each feared to make the first overtures for peace. There was, in actuality, no longer even an English or a German nation. It was an orgy of homicide, in which the best of mankind were wantonly destroyed, leaving only the puny, the feeble-minded, the deformed, and the ineffectual to perpetuate ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... people were whisked from city to city at the unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. At the present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant of the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler and Levassor of the eighties of the last century) can do better ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... whatever course it shall happen to take. The good-natured man is commonly the darling of the petty wits, with whom they exercise themselves in the rudiments of raillery; for he never takes advantage of failings, nor disconcerts a puny satirist with unexpected sarcasms; but while the glass continues to circulate, contentedly bears the expense of an uninterrupted laughter, and retires rejoicing at ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... are great and small, they roam the vast wilderness of the stars, and soar the very empyrean of thought and action, and they fear and crouch and kneel; and in their quaking fears and driveling doubts seem like puny things crawling on the ground; they are saints and sinners; sometimes emissaries of light and love, and yet again harbingers of ill, and sometimes the very Nemesis of hate; but in the composite elements of their human thinking, throbbing energies of heart and mind, they ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... of his puny body Wolfgar flung Georg backward—safely away from the deadly violet beam. And then, without warning, without a cry which would endanger us, the little Mars man sprang headlong, into and through ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... accident in early days left behind it an abiding weakness whose traces were seen in the furrows which seamed his long pale face, in the feebleness of his health, and the nervous tremor which shook his puny frame. The "pigmy body" was "fretted to decay" by the "fiery soul" within it. But pain and weakness brought with them no sourness of spirit. Ashley was attacked more unscrupulously than any statesman save Walpole; but Burnet, who did not love him, owns that he was ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... and sending the white spray high up the face of the cliff, to be scattered like chaff before the breeze. And the old rock that has stood the storms of ages, looks down at its beaten and broken enemy, swirling, seething, and snarling at its feet, and fairly laughs at its puny efforts. ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... had passed and the summer had come round again, the grafting had done its work: she was really a Rosa Indica, and timidly put forth the first blossom in her new estate. It was a small, rather puny yellowish thing, not to be compared to her own natural red clusters, but she thought ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... ant-eaters, there are at least four distinct species; but they are scattered sparingly, and are seldom found on the low flooded lands. Four or five species of armadillo inhabit the valley. These little nocturnal burrowing edentates are the puny representatives of the gigantic Glyptodon of Pleistocene times, and the sloths are the dwindling shadows of the lordly Megatherium. There are two species of three-toed sloths—one inhabiting the swampy lowlands, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... last, incontinently, because she had felt her resolution weakening each moment she and Garth remained together—because, with him beside her, the love against which she had been fighting for twelve long months had wakened into fierce life again, beating down her puny efforts to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... he meant well," he condescended. "Measured by our standard he must needs seem puny—as, indeed, what king of them all, Christian or Pagan, would not?" His manner so far had been in agreement with his supple companion, but suddenly a change came over his temper, and he turned on Hildebrand a frown so coldly menacing ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Whilst living, ah, how few were known to fame! One in a million has not left a name,— A single token, on life's shifting scene, To tell to other years that such has been. Yet man, unaided by a hope sublime, Thinks that his puny arm can cope with time; That his vast genius can reverse the doom, And shed a deathless light upon his tomb; That distant ages shall his worth admire, And young hearts kindle at the sacred fire Of him whose fame no ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... millennium was just around the corner. Those were the pre-war days of dramatic strikes. But even when most under the spell of the new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers, with their puny babies and their broods of under-fed children, made us stop and think of a neglected factor in the march toward our earthly paradise. It was well enough to ask the poor men workers to carry on the battle against economic injustice. But what results could be expected when they were forced ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... that our puny minds could grasp this great truth, that the Father and the Son so love us that They desire to come and abide with us. Not to tarry for a night, but to come and abide ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... world for him existed as a contrapuntal net-work of lines, silhouettes, contours, or heavy dark masses. When a sailor he sketched. Meryon tells of the drawing of a little fungus he found in Akaroa. "Distorted in form and pinched and puny from its birth, I could not but pity it; it seemed to me so entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not deny it a place in my souvenirs ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... a long string, awoke her special pity; the plaintive look in the eye of the cur was an object of peculiar sympathy. A filthy woman, reeling drunk and bareheaded across the street, almost under the feet of the horses, her discolored breast hanging bare, and a puny infant crying feebly in her arms, was another occasion for solicitude. A tiny mite that might have been a dirty boy, coiled up in a ball on a doorstep like a starved cat, was an object of all but irresistible attraction. But she dare not stop for an instant; ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... presume my course to block? Off, off! or, puny Thing! I'll hurl thee headlong with the rock To which thy fibres cling." The Flood was tyrannous and strong; [A] 15 The patient Briar suffered long, Nor did he utter groan or sigh, Hoping the danger would be past; But, seeing no ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the wrists. Thus I held her at arm's length, and my fingers tightened until I saw the flesh grow white beneath them. The intensity of my rage beat hers down and made it a puny thing. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... realized the burden of pecuniary care that his father was carrying, and himself volunteered the wish that his uncle would take him to sea. However it happened, the suggestion staggered Suckling, who well knew the lad's puny frame and fragile constitution. "What has poor little Horatio done," cried he, "that he, being so weak, should be sent to rough it at sea? But let him come, and if a cannon-ball takes off his head, he will at least be provided for." Under such gloomy foreboding began the most ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... were very handsome, but baby bear was a little puny fellow, whose coat couldn't keep out much cold, as it was short and shaggy, and of a dirty brown color. The three older brothers were very unkind to baby bear, but the fourth one always took baby's part, and was always ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... movement can be contrived in a mere dialogue such as 'Paradise Regained '; it lacks the grandiose mise-en-scene and the shifting splendours of the greater epic; the stupendous figure of the rebellious archangel, the true hero of 'Paradise Lost,' is here dwarfed into a puny, malignant sophist; nor is the final issue in the later poem even for a moment in doubt—a serious defect from an artistic point of view. Jortin holds its peculiar excellence to be 'artful sophistry, false reasoning, set off in the most specious manner, and refuted by the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Duke William was King Edward's kinsman. Harold was the head of the most powerful noble house, next to the royal blood, in England; and personally, he was the bravest and most popular chieftain in the land. King Edward was childless, and the nearest collateral heir was a puny unpromising boy. England had suffered too severely during royal minorities, to make the accession of Edgar Atheling desirable; and long before King Edward's death, Earl Harold was the destined king of the nation's choice, though the favour ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... pitch. I'll never see him get a big game to pitch in. Oh, but this blow to-day has hurt Dick Prescott worse than a blow over the head with an iron stake could. I've wiped him up and put him down again. I've made him feel sick and ashamed of his puny little inshoot! Prescott, you're mine to do as I please with on this year's nine—-if you can make ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... bear had been for a number of years a feature at Hartranft's. As a puny infant, barely able to crawl, Solomon, as he was solemnly dubbed, was brought in off the Teton Mountains, and as milk was scarcer than money at the horse-ranch, he was aristocratically fed on ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... attractive, for she did not feel like sleep. It would be fine to sit out in the open, watch the moon and the stars, the mysterious banks gliding swiftly by, and new vistas always widening out ahead. But not with this puny, sandy little "river character," not with anybody that night. "No," replied she. "I think I'll go ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... life, its busy hum rising to the height where I stood; and 200 feet below, the beautiful cemetery, where its dead await the morning of the resurrection. Yet, while contrasting the trees and atmosphere here with the comparatively stunted, puny foliage of England, and the chilly skies of a northern clime, I thought with Cowper respecting my own dear, but far ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... on through the mists, Luke's doubts increased and he began to lose his respect for the man's intellect and for the cunning which had enabled him to outwit the neutralizing energies used by the guards. After all, he was a weak and puny specimen. They all were, the smart guys who held the people of two worlds in their power by exercising the knowledge they had learned from books. And this one had failed even in that; whatever he might have been, he had run afoul of the law himself and was already a doomed man. Tricks! This ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... inhumanities of the world it wages eternal war, without vengeance, without violence, but by softening the hearts of men and inducing a better spirit. Apparitions of a day, here for an hour and tomorrow gone, what is our puny warfare against evil and ignorance compared with the warfare which this venerable Order has been waging against them for ages, and will continue to wage after we have ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... their blind and unkind mother, Nature, had driven away before her this surplus, as unmoved as if they had been superabundant men. On the scorching funnels and ironwork of the ship they died away; the deck was strewn with their puny forms, only yesterday so full of life, songs, and love. Now, poor little black dots, Sylvestre and the others picked them up, spreading out their delicate blue wings, with a look of pity, and swept them ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... you will find how far this foolish method hastens the work of nature and ruins the character. This is one of the chief causes of physical degeneration in our towns. The young people, prematurely exhausted, remain small, puny, and misshapen, they grow old instead of growing up, like a vine forced to bear fruit in spring, which fades and ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... presently he returned with an axe in his hand. Giving the lantern to his father, he proceeded to smash the skiff with the axe, his object being to prevent my going on board the Splash. I regarded it as a puny effort on his part, and was relieved to find they did not intend to visit her themselves. As soon as I was satisfied in regard to his purpose, I crept carefully up to the horse, unfastened him, and jumped into the chaise. The animal was full of spirit, ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... from the Icelandic verb skraekja, identical with the English screech. A crowd of excited Indians might most appropriately be termed Screechers.[223] This derivation, however, is not correct. The word skraeling survives in modern Norwegian, and means a feeble or puny or insignificant person. Dr. Storm's suggestion is in all probability correct, that the name "Skraelings," as applied to the natives of America, had no ethnological significance, but simply meant "inferior people;" it gave concise expression ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... the earth is undoubtedly more profound and more harmonious than the transformation wrought by other animals. Why should not humanity succeed in changing nature to the extent of making it pacific? Why should not humanity, miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life? Why indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder? We may expect a great deal from ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... foolish to assume that this child comes into the world with a normal standard of resistance; but it is certain he is not tubercular and doomed at the moment of his birth. He may be what is ordinarily termed a weak, puny, sickly infant, but the germ of disease is not implanted in his constitution. If he is taken from his mother, taken away from the tubercular environment, and brought up under the best hygienic and sanitary surroundings, it is possible for him to become a ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... to bear him slowly, carefully, back to shelter, reaching the caves without further molestation before darkness set in, had served to convince the young commander that he could count on reasonable security for the night. Unless they know their prey to be puny and well-nigh defenceless, Apaches make no assault in the darkness, and so, with the coming of the dawn, he had about him fit for service a squad of seven troopers, most of them seasoned mountain fighters. His main anxiety now was for Wing, whose wound was severe, the bullet having ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... infant consideration—was naturally one which more directly concerned myself. I soon discovered that, while I was sent to an ordinary charity school of the country, in threadbare breeches, made of the meanest material—their own son—a gentle and good, but puny boy, whom their indulgence injured, and, perhaps, finally destroyed—was despatched to a fashionable institution which taught all sorts of ologies—dressed in such choice broadcloth and costly habiliments, as to make him an ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... being in the little house on the elephant's back in her best picture-book! True, little one! To be in the arms of love, be they ever so weak, is better than to ride the grandest horse in all the stables of God—and God would have you know it! Never mind your pale little face and your puny nose! While your heart is ready to die for love-sake, you are blessed among women! Only remember that to die of disappointment is not to die either ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... culminate in the conclusion; they do not complicate the thought, or puzzle us, they only heighten expectation]. In such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior. At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies. In some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants. In Christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... But we puny mortals are all puppets in the hands of Fate. Even as the train was bearing Desmond, thus rebellious, Londonwards, Destiny was already pulling the strings which was to force the "quitter" back into the path he had forsaken. For ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... the state, and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch. First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question of any moment. Caesar was able to carry personal government to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground in a more general cause. When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus, and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity which transcends ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the puny colonies in his mighty arms and dash them against the high rock of the sea. He will dash them in pieces 'like a potter's vessel.' What are we to ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... prismatical structure occur detached in the chalk. It were curious to let the imagination run over the fact that the hosts of these uncommended gems died ages before the advent of man. The best of modern prizes may be puny in comparison with those which caused distress to the giant molluscs of the age when the Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, and Pterodactylus were the aristocrats of the animal world. Such gems have gone for ever, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... fruit of the womb, amidst the corpses of their husbands and their children; and other, yet worse and nameless atrocities, fill up the terrible picture, of impotent justice and triumphant guilt. But the guilt is not all Spanish and Portuguese. The English Government can enforce its demands on the puny cabinets of Madrid and Lisbon, scarce conscious of a substantive existence, in all that concerns our petty interests: wherever justice and mercy to mankind demand our interference, there our voice sinks within us, and no sound is uttered. That any ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... years in a neighbouring country. Had she not been wholly unarmed for the contest, however she might have been forced from her untenable posts, and compelled to disembarrass herself from her load of incumbrances, she never could have been driven altogether out of the field by her puny assailants, with all their cavils, and gibes, and sarcasms; for in these consisted the main strength of their petty artillery. Let us beware, lest we also suffer from a like cause; nor let it be our crime and our reproach, that in schools, perhaps even in Colleges, Christianity ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... race. Of course, not being able to make ourselves, it needed a God to make us; but that making were a small thing indeed, if he left us so unfinished that we could come to nothing right;—if he left us so that we could think or do or be nothing right;—if our souls were created so puny, for instance, that there was not room in them to love as they could not help loving, without ceasing to love where they were bound by every obligation to love right heartily, and more and more deeply! But had I not been growing ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... the sailing vessel, with her far-flung white wings and rows of puny guns, has given way to the steel-clad battleship with her fewer but enormously larger cannons, capable of flinging huge masses of iron many miles through the air and with a precision of aim that seems incredible ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... sufficiently wild to please the most exacting, even to-day; for its isolated buttes, rocky bluffs, lightning-splintered gorges, foaming torrents, fantastically formed bowlders, and towering mountains brook no change at the hands of puny man, and are as firm as the rock itself. Under a sky that nowhere else seems to be of such an intensely cerulean hue, the charm ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... hurried words. He was looking at Ruth, and longing to loose his hold on the bough, long enough to wave the assurance that his voice could not carry across the roaring waters. And this was the instant that Nature chose to mock the pitting of his puny powers against her resistless forces. A fierce wave tore away the roots that the tree bound to the bank, and hurled it into the flood. It swung round and turned partly over, burying the bough that they clung to, deep under the ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... belonging to the writing desk found open on her table, and its frail and dainty character proved indisputably, that it was employed by the girl herself, and that against manifest enemies; no man being likely to snatch up any such puny weapon for the purpose either of offence or defence. That these enemies were two and were both men, was insisted upon by Mrs. Daniels who overheard their ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... the wives of several English governors of Ceylon to seek to improve the position of the women of the Rodiya caste, especially of the young girls. Some benefit is claimed as a result of the efforts of the English women—but the majesty and power of Great Britain are puny institutions compared with the force of caste among native races. To keep down the Rodiya population a certain Kandyan king, it is stated on good authority, used to have a goodly number of them shot ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... hunchback! was looking at the soldiers yesterday, but with an air as though he were thinking, "I can never be a soldier!" He is good, and he studies; but he is so puny and wan, and he breathes with difficulty. He always wears a long apron of shining black cloth. His mother is a little blond woman who dresses in black, and always comes to get him at the end of school, so that he may ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... young man did not require either condolences or revenge. He was well pleased at an opportunity to measure his hardihood against a worthy opponent. He had found that his courage exceeded his strength, as it always should, for how could we face the gods and demons of existence if our puny arms were not backed up by our invincible eyes? and he displayed his contentment at the issue as one does a banner emblazoned with merits. Mrs. Makebelieve understood also that the big man's action was ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... Rome dies, so it was said, then time would be accomplished. The last Pope had died. Their basilica with its mighty dome was a desert where scorpions and snakes abounded. The fifth Buddha would appear, not the second Christos. Suddenly I saw before me in a puny boat a beautiful beardless youth. He was attired in some symbolical garments and upon his head a triple tiara. I could not believe my aged eyes. He sat upright. His attitude was hieratic. His eyes were lifted heavenwards. He ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... post of observation, and, by standing on tiptoe, he succeeded in distinguishing a puny little boy, some three or four years old, and clad in rags, who was playing with the remnants of a toy-horse. The sight of this child increased Chupin's indignation. "So there's a child?" he growled. "The rascal not only deserts his wife, but he leaves his child to starve! We ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... the double allowance which my master was privately instructed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in boys. Once detected, I was the constant butt of their arrows,—the mark against which every puny leveller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very Graduses and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny pedants. Ventri natus—Ventri deditus,—Vesana gula,—Escarum gurges,—Dapibus indulgens,—Non dans fraena gulae,-Sectans lautae fercula mensae, resounded wheresoever ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets are born; souls slowly evolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endless diversity and specialization, myriads of creatures rise out of the furnace of life. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... level is broken by the columnar silhouette of the light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, above which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort, whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsolete cannon-shot, now thickly covered with incrustation of oyster shells.... Around all the gray ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... area, and, in terms justifying the vulgar use of the derivative word Sophomorical, defied his competitors, in the name of his associates, to enter the lists. He was matched by an equal in stature, from that part of the circle formed by the new-comers. Beginning with these puny athletes, as one and another was prostrated on either side, the contest advanced through the intermediate gradations of strength and skill, with increasing excitement of the parties and spectators, until it reached its summit by the struggle of the champion or coryphaeus in reserve on each of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... you ever know, as I know in verity, of the greatness and reality and terror of the thing that I would tell plain to all; for we, with our puny span of recorded life must have great histories to tell, but the few bare details we know concerning years that are but a few thousands in all; and I must set out to you in the short pages of this my life there, a sufficiency ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... because I've got a mother, and if ever there was a woman on the face of this earth that deserves the love of a son, that woman is my mother. Sister," he added, turning to one of those who sat on a bench near him with a thin, puny, curly-haired boy wrapped up in her ragged shawl, "the best prayer that I could offer up for you—and I do offer it—is, that the little chap in your arms may grow up to bless his mother as heartily as I bless mine, but that can never be, so long as you love ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... a pathway through a pasture-lot, comprising some ten acres, poor land, covered with puny bushes, and a few gnarled trees, producing cider-apples. It belonged to an old bachelor farmer, who lived in solitary fashion, doing his own cooking, and in general taking care of himself. He was reputed to have money concealed about his premises, which ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... guide, after looking-on with something almost supercilious in his face at this, to him, puny style of hunting, and contentment with such small game as birds, springbok, and the like, announced that the next day they would be entering upon what ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... is a wan track cut across the open fields. Its course is marked afar by lines of puny trees, sooty as snuffed candles; by telegraph posts and their long spider-webs; by bushes or by fences, which are like the skeletons of bushes. There are a few houses. Up yonder a strip of sky still shows palely yellow above the meager ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... continuity, and the endless projection of past into present, and of present into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a false dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the sporting squires of ...
— Burke • John Morley
... and viceroy over all the land he reached and that for his revenue there should be given one-tenth of the entire produce of the countries. Such a far reaching demand as this could not have been acceded to only by a doubting sovereign, and he would probably have been beheaded with his puny crew of one hundred and twenty men if he had reached Asia and attempted to carry out such a wholesale scheme ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... delayed. Those to whom the labour of ruining the outward structure had been confided were less successful than their neighbours who had pillaged its contents. The ponderous stones of the pillars, the massive surfaces of the walls, resisted the most vigorous of their puny efforts, and forced them to remain contented with mutilating that which they could not destroy—with tearing off roofs, defacing marbles, and demolishing capitals. The rest of the buildings remained uninjured, and grander even now in the wildness of ruin than ever it had been in the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... girl even more than the angry snarl, and with a loud cry she tried to spring past him, but his arms closed about her and he laughed a hard, brutal laugh of contempt for her puny struggles. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... had been to ignore the man, but he had to take his hand for a moment; whereupon old John began to tell George that he was looking well, though there had been a time, during his fourth month, when he was so puny that nobody thought he would live. The great-nephew, in a fury of blushes, dropped old John's hand with some vigour, and seized that of the next person in the line. "Member you v'ry well ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... female, who were clothed like men and women, and performed a country dance, in the reign of Tiberius. In later times, horses have been taught to dance. In the carousals of Louis XIII. there were dances of horses; and in the 13th century, some rode a horse upon a rope. All this eclipses the puny modern feats of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... bear many a gibe for his publicly expressed hopes of peace. Mason denounced his letter to Virginia gentlemen as a "puny, pusillanimous attempt to hoodwink" the people of Virginia. But Douglas replied with an earnest reiteration of his expectations. Yet all depended, he admitted, on the action of Virginia and the border States. ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... said Black Panther, 'our tribes, if we just whistle them up, will far outnumber your puny forces; so resistance is useless. Return, therefore, to your own land, O brother, and smoke pipes of peace in your wampums with your squaws and your medicine-men, and dress yourselves in the gayest wigwams, and eat happily of ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... pepper, snuff, or 'bacca smoke, And Russia-calf they make a joke. Yet, why should sons of science These puny rankling reptiles dread? 'Tis but to let their books be read, And bid the ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... records that they were again shown to Charles IX. at Troyes, and Montaigne's questions to them in 1563 will be remembered. They replied that what astonished them most was (Essais I. xxx.) to see so many strong men armed and bearded (meaning the Swiss guard probably) obeying a puny little person like the King. They were also fairly puzzled at seeing men gorged with plenty and living in ostentation on one side of the road, and starveling ruffians begging their bread in the gutter on the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... crops turned out dretful well, and he jest laid up money by the handfuls as you may say. And one day we wuz talkin' about what extreme good luck we'd had for the past year, and we also talked considerable about Tirzah Ann and little Delight, and how they wuz both pimpin' and puny. The older children away to school wuz doin' first rate both in health and studies, but Tirzah Ann's health wuz such that Whitfield had to keep a girl and pay doctor's bills, and ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... so puny—only a few pounds weight—owing to her being starved and beaten by a drunken stepfather. Now, a year in a happy home, going to school regularly, is companion to an only child, and lacks no earthly comfort. The poor mother was ill-used in the dens where ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... though then but twelve years old, realized the burden of pecuniary care that his father was carrying, and himself volunteered the wish that his uncle would take him to sea. However it happened, the suggestion staggered Suckling, who well knew the lad's puny frame and fragile constitution. "What has poor little Horatio done," cried he, "that he, being so weak, should be sent to rough it at sea? But let him come, and if a cannon-ball takes off his head, he will at least be provided for." Under such gloomy foreboding began the most dazzling career ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... said, as he clucked to the white horse. "I was at Dodge City—that wickedest town of the plains—when news came of the capture of your village. At once I started, for I knew that my duty lay here, here with your poor people, who will not realise how foolish and puny is their warfare. I did not come alone," he added, casting a look behind; "a white man accompanied me—a man so full of evil and blasphemy that I quake for the safety of his miserable soul. He has walked most of the distance, ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... gay flutter, and returns for more; the other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle; when the other crosses my imagination, I remember ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... were amongst the least of his qualifications for his high station. More preeminently than all was his heroic and almost chivalric devotion to the judicial office; his stern and unflinching love of justice, as distinguished from "the puny technicalities of an obscure walk;" his superiority to the favors of the great or to the clamors of the many, and his unquestioned spotless integrity. During a portion of his lengthened judicial career Lord Mansfield held a seat in the Cabinet, but nobody thought of questioning ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... during our flying visit, by a form of influenza which settled upon the town of Basseterre; but we, who had only lately come from England, and were familiar with the revolting lengths to which this malady will go in cold climes, reassured them, and laughed their puny tropical species to scorn. Finally, of St. Kitts, I would say: From information received in the first case, and from personal experience in the second, that there you shall find sugar culture in most approved and advanced perfection, and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... cushion? Can it be a cabbage? It is, it is that deeply injured flower, Which boys do flout us with;—but yet I love thee, Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout. Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright As these, thy puny brethren; and thy breath Sweetened the fragrance of her spicy air; But now thou seemest like a bankrupt beau, Stripped of his gaudy hues and essences, And growing ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... hand, the assembled gods did not refuse their consent. They had scarcely signified their approbation, however, when Thor, who had been absent, suddenly appeared, and casting a glance of contempt upon the puny lover, declared he would have to prove that his knowledge atoned for his small stature, before he ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... thou mighty thund'rer, thou, Tho' puny be our forms to thine, These forms possess, yea, even now, A spark, ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... lives in furtherance of his own ambition; but, he is a "conqueror," bless you! A hero, to whom men bow the knee and cry, "Ave, Caesar!"—Your puny villain, on the other hand, who only cuts one unfortunate throat, ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... effort. He wrinkled his comical face and pursed up his lips, starting three or four times, and shaking his head at his failures. The others were watching him much as they would a catherine-wheel that refused to ignite. At last he brought forth a puny little sound. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... on the sea-front, a lady and gentleman were advancing with hesitating steps, as though unfamiliar with the place. The brother was a puny little man, with a sallow complexion. He was wearing a motoring-cap. The sister too was short, but rather stout, and was wrapped in a large cloak. She struck them as a woman of a certain age, but still good-looking under the thin veil ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... precision by exercise in these unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, as with our Pundit's famous countryman Mr. Jaberjee, though they use the purest language, they can instantly express every shade of thought with grace and completeness without resorting to slang:—that ready cloak wherewith puny minds strive to cover their ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... was no sign of the blacks, Mick allowed them to take their watches alone. This experience did more than any other to impress them with Central Australia: its silence, its absolute loneliness, its vastness and the puny insignificance of man, who dared to pit ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... tell you I am a god, the one god, supreme above all. Do you think to match your puny will against my own? I tell you Lucille is mine. And for ever, Dent. Whenever we two have reached old age, all that will be necessary for us to do will be to turn this screw a hair's breadth back into ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... never even noticed the campanile before, and the reason was that the cathedral happened not to be on the route between Alexandra Grove and her principal customers. Suddenly, out of Victoria Street, they came up against the vast form of the Byzantine cathedral. It was hemmed in by puny six-story blocks of flats, as ancient cathedrals also are hemmed in by the dwellings of townsfolk. But here, instead of the houses having gathered about the cathedral, the cathedral had excavated a place for itself amid the houses. Tier above tier the expensively curtained windows of dark drawing-rooms ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... ever away To the bosom of God's great ocean. Don't set your force 'gainst the river's course, And think to alter its motion. Don't waste a curse on the universe, Remember, it lived before you; Don't butt at the storm with your puny form, But bend and let ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... no skeptic's puny hands, While near the school the church-spire stands, Nor fears the bigot's blinded rule, While near the church-spire ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... plane was overtaken. Focusing the attractor upon the enormous metallic beak of the karlon, Seaton threw on the power and the beast halted in midair as it was jerked backward and upward. As it saw the puny size of the attacking Skylark, it opened its cavernous mouth in a horrible roar and rushed at full speed. Seaton, unwilling to have the repellers stripped from the vessel, turned on the current actuating them. The karlon was hurled backward to the point of equilibrium of ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... not suppose it, I was a very pretty little girl, this nose of mine being then much more shapely than the little buttons which grow to fair proportions. On the other hand, the little Belamours were puny and sickly; indeed, as you know, this young Sir Amyas, who was not then born, is the only one of the whole family who has been reared. Then we had been carefully bred, could chatter French, recite poetry, make our bow and curtsey, bridle, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of centaur or of gnome; The gorgon and the labyrinthodon; The clumsy mammoth and the dinosaur; Or all gigantic and unwieldy shapes Which earth has seen in the mysterious past, Would seem in more accord and harmony With such surroundings than the puny form ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; the waves are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... the wind's Nor-West by West, Man and beast are rarely blessed. Sometimes I like mutton best, Often I like veal. A poet (not a puny 'un) Who raves about the Union, And hymns the States Communion, Takes none the less ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... it. Besides, I can't stand it from—you. Only—from Kate. I know what you're thinking. You're bound to think that way. You were born with a man's body—a big, strong man's body. I was born weak and puny. I was born all wrong. I don't say it in excuse. I merely state a fact. Look at me beside you, both children of the same parents. I'm like a woman, I can't even grow the hair of a man on my face. My mother reveled in what she regarded as the artistic beauty of my features, my hands"—he held out ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... or the huge towers holding possession of the centre of the landscape—majestically beautiful—imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... grow thin and weak, instead of giving the plumpness to the figure, designed by Nature. The delicate and feeble appearance of many American women, is chiefly owing to the little use they make of their muscles. Many a pale, puny, shad-shaped girl, would have become a plump, rosy, well-formed person, if half the exercise, afforded to her brothers in the open air, had been secured to her, during childhood ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... the gymnastic endeavour. Standing on tiptoe, he clutched the rim of the chimney-pot, and strove to raise himself. The hold was firm enough, but his arms were far too puny to perform such work, even when death would be the penalty of failure. Too long he had lived on insufficient food and sat over the debilitating desk. He swung this way and that, trying to throw one of his knees as high as the top of the brickwork, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... I were planning nothing. What was there to plan? We were under observation. A Martian paralyzing ray—or an electronic beam, far more deadly than our own puny weapons—would have struck us the instant we tried to leave ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... His avowal of Himself to the rude soldiers who had come to seize Him, and which struck them to the ground in terror and impotence. One flash comes forth to tell of the sleeping lightning that He will not use, and then having revealed the might that could have delivered Him from their puny arms, He returns to His attitude of self-surrender for our sakes, with those wonderful words which tell how He gave up Himself that we might be free, 'If ye seek Me, let these go their way.' The scene is a parable of the whole work of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Salandra, entitle these Ministers to the lasting gratitude of their country. For it should be borne in mind that they had against them not only the Senate, the Chamber, a section of the Press, the "cream" of the aristocracy, the puny sons and daughters of the leaders of the Risorgimento, but also, strange to say, the majority of Italian diplomatists in the capitals of the Great Powers, one of whom actually fell ill at the thought that Italy was about to fight ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... a full pit. Unused to crowds, the parson quakes for fear, And wonders how the devil he durst come there; Wanting three talents needful for the place— Some beard, some learning, and some little grace. Nor is the puny Poet void of care; For authors, such as our new authors are, Have not much learning, nor much wit to spare: And as for grace, to tell the truth, there's scarce one 10 But has as little as the very Parson: Both say, they preach and write for your instruction: But 'tis for a third day, and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... sixty in March, 1181, just three months after the restoration of Kyoto to metropolitan rank. Since August of the preceding year, the Minamoto had shown signs of troublesome activity, but as yet it seemed hardly possible that their puny onsets should shake, still less pull down, the imposing edifice of power raised by the Taira during twenty years of unprecedented success. Nevertheless, Kiyomori, impatient of all reverses, bitterly upbraided his sons and his officers for incompetence, and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... subject-matter. Little movement can be contrived in a mere dialogue such as 'Paradise Regained '; it lacks the grandiose mise-en-scene and the shifting splendours of the greater epic; the stupendous figure of the rebellious archangel, the true hero of 'Paradise Lost,' is here dwarfed into a puny, malignant sophist; nor is the final issue in the later poem even for a moment in doubt—a serious defect from an artistic point of view. Jortin holds its peculiar excellence to be 'artful sophistry, false reasoning, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of the inhabitants of that State could never much increase. For as all our actions imitate nature, and it is neither natural nor possible that a puny stem should carry a great branch, so a small republic cannot assume control over cities or countries stronger than herself; or, doing so, will resemble the tree whose boughs being greater than its trunk, are supported with difficulty, and snapped by every gust of wind. As it proved ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... stature, meagre, mean-visaged, muddy-complexioned, and altogether a man of no account—quite insignificant in the eyes of all who looked upon him. If there were one opinion, in which the few who had taken the trouble to think of the puny, somewhat shambling stranger from Burgundy at all, coincided, it was that he was inoffensive, but quite incapable of any important business. He seemed well educated, claimed to be of respectable parentage, and had considerable facility of speech when any person could be found who thought it worth ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... never again would she cast as much as a second thought on him and tear his silly postcard into a dozen pieces. And if ever after he dared to presume she could give him one look of measured scorn that would make him shrivel up on the spot. Miss puny little Edy's countenance fell to no slight extent and Gerty could see by her looking as black as thunder that she was simply in a towering rage though she hid it, the little kinnatt, because that shaft had struck home for her petty jealousy ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Who hath His way in the whirlwind and the storm; Who holdeth the sea in the hollow of His hand. And this feeling was in nowise lessened—nay, it was rather intensified—by the thrill of exultation I experienced at the reflection that man, puny as is his strength compared with the mighty forces of Nature, has been endowed by his Creator with an intellect capable of devising and framing a structure so subtly moulded and so strongly put together, that it is able to face and triumphantly survive such a mad fury of wind and sea ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... had discovered my motive for being in her house and, by leading me from it, had undertaken to supply Hannah with an opportunity for escape, I was about to hasten back to the charge I had so incautiously left, when a strange sound heard at my left arrested me. It came from the banks of the puny stream which ran under the bridge, and was like the creaking of an ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... purty good world this is; For all its follies and shows and lies, Its rainy weather, and cheeks likewise, And age, hard hearing, and rheumatiz; We're not a faultin' the Lord's own plan; All things jest At their best, It's a puny good ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... commander, Geordie Graham had pushed on again northeastward down the right bank of the Fork. Waiting until the party was fairly out of sight over the far-distant "divide," and watching meantime the movements of the still remaining Indians in the timber, Captain Garrett finally put his puny command in march for the Mini Chaduza, bringing the wagon and the now semi-restored charioteer along. Five of Gunnison's pack-mules, sent on with the troop, had so lightened the wagon of its load that the lately abused horses, given a good feed of oats and a swallow ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... circular, my representative made a point of applying to him for permission, as he indeed was bound to do by the simplest rules of courtesy. Mr. Smalley replied at once, willingly granting the favour, as I can prove by the note still in my possession; and presently, frightened by the puny yelping of a few critical curs at home, he has the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... and, above all, his burning patriotism, soon brought him to the front as the leader of the national party; and he now strove with all his might to prevent his land falling to the position of a mere satrapy of the liberators. Better the puny autocracy of Prince Alexander than the very real despotism of the nominees of the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... "bright-harped" Tennyson shall sing; Macaulay chant a more than Roman lay; And Bulwer Lytton, Lytton Bulwer erst, Unseen amidst a metaphysic fog, Howl melancholy homage to the moon; For you once more Montgomery shall rave In all his rapt rabidity of rhyme; Nankeened Cockaigne shall pipe his puny note, And our ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... doubters, with a puny joy, Accept amusement for their little while And feed upon some nourishing employ But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile— Protesting that one man can no more move the mass For good or ill Than could the ancients kindle the sun By tying ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... Yes; and their necks rise from their shoulders like ivory towers. Any costume will look beautiful on such women. But how are poor, puny, ill-made women to dress in such fashions? They could not wear those dresses without exhibiting all those personal defects which our present fashion conceals. It's all very fine for perfectly beautiful women to have such fashions; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... no harm," exclaimed Mr. Lenox eagerly. "I love the child as if she were my own. Georgy has always represented her as delicate and puny." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... life was invaded by interest in a living, breathing figure. At church, I used to look around with a feeling of coldness and disdain, which, though I now well understand its causes, seems to my wiser mind as odious as it was unnatural. The puny child sought everywhere for the Roman or Shakspeare figures, and she was met by the shrewd, honest eye, the homely decency, or the smartness of a New England village on Sunday. There was beauty, but I could not see it then; it was not of the kind I longed for. In ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... tree, and flapped hurriedly away. A kingbird gave chase, and disappeared for some moments in the gulf between the great wings of the eagle, and I imagined him seated upon his back delivering his puny blows upon the royal bird. I interrupted two or three minks fishing and hunting alongshore. They would dart under the bank when they saw me, then presently thrust out their sharp, weasel-like noses, to see if the danger ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... 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 whilst woods are green, He shall find hearers, who in a slack time Of puny bards and pessimistic rhyme, Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice. His "yawp barbaric" was a human voice; The singer was a man. America Is poorer by a stalwart soul today, And may feel pride that she hath given birth To this stout laureate of old ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... fell, and regaining his feet rushed madly and blindly about in vain hope of finding the lost trail and escaping the doom that seemed closing in upon him. The snow clouds were like dense walls, and he, like a child, in puny effort wildly trying to batter them down ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... lost thereby. Yea, 'Adam!' I will laugh. Till her red lips with guile O'erflow. And she shall curse him loud. With subtlest wile Safe won, then shall she ever be mine own. Soul-bound to me in hate, more terrible than death In hate, that long outlasts Love's puny breath— O cunning craft, that with the self-same blow Forever wins my ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... How puny were the efforts of the five thousand air cruisers! Marvels of engineering and mechanical skill, these vessels were. Deadly as were the weapons they carried—weapons so terrible that war on earth was considered impossible since their development—they ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... the next day the terrible detonation kept up, and a hail of bullet-like stones poured downward from the skies. Rarely has a more terrible Sunday been seen. It was as if the demons of earth and air were let loose and were seeking to destroy man and his puny works. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Waterloo Bridge? I doubt it. Imagine turning from that sublime sweep of greys and sombre gilts, that perfect arrangement of blank masses and sweeping lines, to the mottled pink of a cheek lately virgin, the puny curve of a modish eyebrow, the hideous ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... him to think no more of it, as it was the sort of spirit that he liked to see a young man display. There was little time for conversation, however, for the Huascar, as though in revenge for the damage inflicted by her puny enemy, again discharged her whole broadside—or at least so much of it as was still capable of being fired; and the marksmanship was so excellent that every missile again struck the Covadonga, while at the same moment the Union again started firing ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... he meant it, too. It was no empty phrase. Rather something in touch with Life's great scheme of compensations, which she manipulates in her own great way, beyond the comprehension of puny humans. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... hunger of men whose liberalism came from their being made liberally. Large and capacious souls of mighty yearnings are they. They stand in contrast with the puny critics who assert that the Bible fails to feed them, because they ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... living, ah, how few were known to fame! One in a million has not left a name,— A single token, on life's shifting scene, To tell to other years that such has been. Yet man, unaided by a hope sublime, Thinks that his puny arm can cope with time; That his vast genius can reverse the doom, And shed a deathless light upon his tomb; That distant ages shall his worth admire, And young hearts kindle at the sacred fire Of him whose fame ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... of a strange breed!" a snarling voice barked from the wall, in the Callistonian language. "Our deductions were accurate, as usual—it is to the humans of Planet Three, whose bodies are a trifle less puny than those of the humanity of the satellites, that we owe our recent reverses. However, those reverses were merely temporary—humanity, no matter what its breed, shall very shortly disappear from the satellites. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... giant in comparison with this dwarfish antagonist. As she approached, the little craft glided swiftly in front of her grounded consort, like a new David offering battle to a modern Goliath. As if in disdain of this puny antagonist, the Merrimac began an attack on the Minnesota. But when the two eleven-inch guns of the Monitor opened fire, hurling solid balls of one hundred and sixty-eight pounds' weight against the iron sides of her great opponent, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... football. That struck a responsive chord and Mr. Brady harked back to his school and college days when he, too, had fondled the pigskin. "I wasn't much of a player, though," he acknowledged. "I was sort of tall and puny-looking and not very strong. Still, I did get into my school team in my senior year and played on my freshman team in college. The next year I had to give it up, though. I'd like to come over some day and see you fellows play. I've ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... could not have torn her heart to shreds and then stood bland, unaware of what he had done, had he loved her. Her young spirit, unversed in irony, drank in the bitter draught of disillusion. They had never loved each other; or, worse, far worse, they had loved and love was this puny thing that a blow could kill. His love for her ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the help of a boy, was shoving his boat into the water. The furled sail trembled aloft on the mast. Jaime did not accept the invitation. "Many thanks, Tio Ventolera!" The old fisherman insisted in his puny voice, which, wafted in on the wind, sounded like the plaintive crying of a child. The afternoon was fine; the wind had changed; they would catch fish in abundance near the Vedra. Febrer shrugged his shoulders. No, no, many ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Soft and agreeable come never there. Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a town, His pond an ocean, his parterre a down: Who but must laugh, the master when he sees, A puny insect, shivering at a breeze! Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around! The whole a labour'd quarry above ground; 110 Two Cupids squirt before: a lake behind Improves the keenness of the northern ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... Whether Ann is good-looking or not depends upon your taste; also and perhaps chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius she is an enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness are suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the race to its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from which it fell. She ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
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