"Gigantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... think the American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new, it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the enemy three thousand miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a net-work that immensely multiplies ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... every man to choose his own employment. At the same time, it is equally clear that it was only such an inroad as under the circumstances, was fully justifiable. It is true that all danger of French invasion had passed away with Trafalgar; but the kingdom was still engaged in a gigantic war, and the necessity of the case—always the supreme law—was so little denied by the Opposition, that their objections to the bill were directed entirely against the clause for limited enlistment, and not against that which abridged the subject's liberty, by compelling ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... big, to have written this with himself in mind; yet no reader of the scathing, searing arraignment called "Yama," will question that the great, the gigantic Kuprin has shown "the burdens and abominations" of prostitution, in "simple, fine, and deathlessly-caustic images"; has shown that "all the horror is in just this—that there is no horror..." For it is as a ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... careful, languished at Joinville, delicate and poor, under the frowns of twelve gigantic caryatides which held a ceiling on which Lebrun had painted the Titans struck by Jupiter. There, in the iron cot, placed at the foot of the large bed, she died one night of sadness and exhaustion, never having loved ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... commonly believed that in the earliest periods of the world's history the lives of the inhabitants were more youthful and perfect; that these primitive men had gigantic size, incredible strength, and most astonishing duration of life. It is to this tendency that we are indebted for the origin of many romantic tales. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to our forefather Adam the height of 900 yards ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... looked around, only to find that they were indeed surrounded by a field of tall stalks, every stalk bearing at its top a gigantic sunflower. And not only were ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... cannot exhibit greater decorum, Potts, we shall be obliged to put your head in a bag," says Sir Penthony, severely. "I consider 'awfully' quite the correct word. What with the ivy and the gigantic size of those paper roses, the room ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... on an early July evening is in Galloway but a modified twilight. But as the sun went down behind the pines he sent an angry gleam athwart the green braes. The level cloud-band into which he plunged drew itself upward to the zenith, and, like the eyelid of a gigantic eye, shut down as though God in his heaven were going to sleep, and the world was to be ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... ever heard or read of wild beasts and savages, torturings at the stake, roastings alive, and such-like horrible things. Suddenly the pattering noise increased with tenfold violence. It was followed by a fearful crash among the bushes, which was rapidly repeated, as if some gigantic animal were bounding towards us. In another moment an enormous rock came crashing through the shrubbery, followed by a cloud of dust and small stones, and flew close past the spot where we stood, carrying bushes and ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... erect, with his hamstrings in tension, and his arms folded on his gun barrel; on the other, the lion, a gigantic specimen, humped up in the straw, with blinking orbs and brutish mien, resting his huge muzzle and tawny full-bottomed wig on his forepaws. Both calm in ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... "To thee, gigantic genius, next I'll sound; The clarion string, and fill fame's vasty round; 'Tis Milton beams upon the wond'ring sight, Rob'd in the splendour of Apollo's light; As when from ocean bursting on ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... come (which I look upon as extremely uncertain, but I think if it comes at all it will be before the lapse of many years) when I am called upon to use any of those opportunities [the writer had just spoken of 'the great opportunities, the gigantic opportunities of good or evil to the Church which the course of events seems (humanly speaking) certain to open up'], it would be my duty to look to you for aid, under the promise to which I have referred, unless in the meantime you shall as deliberately and ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... Far be it from me to say that in more elemental times such things could not have been. The condition belongs to the geologic age—the great birth and growth of the world, when natural forces ran riot, when the struggle for existence was so savage that no vitality which was not founded in a gigantic form could have even a possibility of survival. That such a time existed, we have evidences in geology, but there only; we can never expect proofs such as this age demands. We can only imagine or surmise such things—or such conditions and ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... green moss, very soft to tread on. It was sprinkled here and there with light red, wax-like flowers such as he had never seen before. He was standing in an open space; beneath him there was a plain covered with what seemed to be gigantic mushrooms, much taller than a man. Above him rose a mass of vegetation, and over all this was a dense, heavy, streaming cloud faintly glimmering with a white, silvery light which ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... a giant skull.] The cave in question lies near Lanang, on the east coast of Samar, on the bank of a river, it is said. It is, as the traveler reports, celebrated in the locality "on account of its depressed gigantic crania, without sutures." The singular statement is made clear by means of a well-preserved example, which I lay before you. The entire cranium, including the face, is covered with a thick layer of sinter, which gives ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... into the work. It was the terrible cannonading of Malvern Hill with the fierce musketry of Gaines' Mills combined, that seemed fairly to shake the earth and skies. Never during the war had the two armies made such gigantic struggles for the destruction ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... earlier, when every man had been his own peace officer and the insurrection of the blacks a daily contingency. Its dark, weatherbeaten roof and sides were hoisted up above the jungly plain in a distracted way, like a gigantic ammunition-wagon stuck in the mud and abandoned by some retreating army. Around it was a dense growth of low water willows, with half a hundred sorts of thorny or fetid bushes, savage strangers alike to the "language ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... be denuded of troops, and yet, if Chalons were to be made good, every available man had to be hurried to Kellermann, and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified with the name of an ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... inflicted on the enemy merchant shipping, in the first place the English merchant marine, a total loss of 111 ships with a displacement of 234,239 tons. The figures may, perhaps, not seem especially large in comparison with the gigantic number of merchant ships flying the flag of the enemy. But in this method of warfare the percentage loss of ships of our opponent as compared with his total does not count, but rather the fact that through the regularity and inevitableness of the marine catastrophes ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... Pyramid, he lay down for his accustomed siesta in the shade cast by the Sphinx, the miraculous image of Khopri the most powerful, the god to whom all men in Memphis and the neighbouring towns raised adoring hands filled with offerings. The gigantic statue was at that time more than half buried, and its head alone was seen above the sand. As soon as the prince was asleep it spoke gently to him, as a father to his son: "Behold me, gaze on me, O my son Thutmosis, for I, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... respectable authority, that Walt Whitman is the new Socrates," he said laughingly. "I felt rather stunned at the moment but I've got over it now. Oh, this deliciously mad London! what a gigantic Colney Hatch it is for the crazed folk of the world to air their follies in! That any reasonable Englishmen with such names as Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, to keep the glory of their country warm, should ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... I have been led into these remarks,—namely, his sensitiveness on the subject of his Satire,—is one of those instances that show how easily his gigantic spirit could be, if not held down, at least entangled, by the small ties of society. The aggression of which he had been guilty was not only past, but, by many of those most injured, forgiven; and yet,—highly, it must be allowed, to the credit of his social feelings,—the idea of living familiarly ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... was propounded by those philosophers, turns out to be substantially correct. More than this, when biologists pursue their investigations into the vegetable world, they find that they can, in the same way, follow out the structure of the plant, from the most gigantic and complicated trees down through a similar series of gradations, until they arrive at specks of animated jelly, which they are puzzled to distinguish from those specks which they ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... see "Climbing Plants," Edition II., 1875, page 121.) You looked at them here and agreed. But now the plant is old, what I thought was a branch with two leaves and ending in a tendril looks like a gigantic leaf with two compound leaflets, and the terminal part converted into a tendril. For I see buds in the fork between supposed branch and main stem. Pray look carefully—you know I am profoundly ignorant—and save me ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... nor boys," were sufficiently explicit, yet in order to swell the returns, and to appease in some degree the fleet's insatiable greed for men, the gangs raked in recruits with a lack of discrimination that for the better part of a century made that fleet the most gigantic collection of human freaks and ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... that she was ill, he was so touched as to be quite overwhelmed with grief. He gained Euphemia frequent leaves of absence, and sent messages of condolence and bouquets,—huge bunches of flowers which made Dolly laugh even while they pleased her. There was always a bouquet, stiff in form and gigantic in ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... missed it. Before him, Voltaire and countless other critics of man-made theology missed it. The writings of these men do serve, however, to mow down the theological stubble in the world's field of thought. What is it, this gigantic truth which Jesus brought? I do not know. But he himself is reported to have said, 'If ye keep my commands, ye shall know of the doctrine.' And his chief command was, that we love God and our fellow-men. I have no doubt whatever that, when we follow this command, we ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and the air became dull and dark. Methought a cloud had come over the sun, but it was the season of summer; so I marvelled at this and lifting my head looked steadfastly at the sky, when I saw that the cloud was none other than an enormous bird, of gigantic girth and inordinately wide of wing which, as it flew through the air, veiled the sun and hid it from the island. At this sight my wonder redoubled and I remembered a story,—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... equality—the extirpation of one and the ruin of the other would be inevitable. This humanity, conceived in wrong and born in civil strife, would be baptized in a people's blood. It was, that our people might know, in time to guard against the mad onset, the full extent of this gigantic conspiracy and crusade against their institutions; and of necessity upon their lives with which they must sustain them; and their fortunes and prosperity, which exist only while these institutions exist, that I was induced to enter into a correspondence with you, who ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... before the black appeared. He was of monstrous bulk, and of a dreadful aspect, mounted on a large Tartar horse, and bore a heavy cimeter, that none but himself could wield. The prince seeing him, was amazed at his gigantic stature, directed his prayers to Heaven to assist him, then drew his own cimeter, and firmly awaited his approach. The monster, despising so inconsiderable an enemy, called to him to submit without fighting. Codadad by his conduct shewed that he was ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... A.D.W. collected his carpenters and bricklayers and bade them instruct their dusky labourers in the building of gigantic mess-huts, in size and shape not unlike a hangar, capable of providing meal accommodation for hundreds of men at a time; ration and store-huts for the numerous camps; brick enclosures for the kitchens; incinerators, and a thousand and one ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... on the Atlantic The gigantic Storm-wind of the equinox, Landward in his wrath he scourges The toiling surges, Laden with ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... man in New South Wales—a shepherd—who went raving mad when he learnt that the heavy black dust which spoilt his pasture was tin, and that he had waked and slept for years without discovering the gigantic fortune which was all about him. I will not go mad, if I can help it, but I do think it rather hard lines on me that I hadn't the simple genius to see ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... was to prophesy to the bones first; and his word, in a sense, brought about the effect which it foretold, since his ministry was the most potent means of rekindling dying hopes, and bringing the disjecta membra of the nation together again. The vivid and gigantic imagination of the prophet gives a picture of the rushing together of the bones, which has no superior in any literature. He hears a noise, and sees a 'shaking' (by which is meant the motion of the bones to each other, rather than an 'earthquake,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... destitute classes in their present miserable condition, we prepare for ourselves a gigantic and impossible task when the evil day of famine at last overtakes us. By facing the difficulty at the outset, and meeting it midway, we make our task much easier. Time is in our favour. True, the people are hungry, but they are not dying. ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... through the barred window when he was awoken by the entrance of a gigantic figure bearing food ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... called "George Washington," that individual nearly jumped out of his coat. The Major ordered him to measure ten paces, which, after first giving notice that he "didn't ripre-sent nobody," he proceeded to do, taking a dozen or more gigantic strides, and hastily retired again behind the safe bulwark of Jeff's back. As he stood there in his shrunken condition, he about as much resembled the pompous and arrogant duellist of a half-hour previous as a wet and bedraggled ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... cheerful, not pretty, not ugly; but the view from the top of the Kremlin on this panorama of green-roofed houses, gardens, churches, spires of the strangest possible form and color, mostly green, or red or bright blue, generally crowned at the top with a gigantic golden onion, and mostly five or more on one church,—there are certainly a thousand steeples!—anything more strangely beautiful than all this lit up by the slanting rays of the setting sun it is impossible to see. The weather has cleared up again, and I should stay ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... done before he could set out. Three men had emerged alive from the clash between the Hawk and the Kite: Carse himself, Friday, his gigantic negro companion in adventure, and a bearded half-caste called Sako, sole survivor of Judd's crew. Aided sullenly by this man, they first cleaned up the ravaged ranch, burying the bodies of the dead, repairing fences and generally bringing order out of confusion. Then, under Carse's instructions, ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... The house is gigantic, The courtyard is huge, There's a pond in it too; A watch-tower arises From over the house, With a gallery round it, A flagstaff ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... looked at one another in astonishment as they came out from the shadow of the narrow street of grey stone houses into the open square in the centre of the town. For there, opposite the market cross and under the spreading boughs of a gigantic yew-tree, they saw a young man standing on a bench, and preaching as they had never heard anyone preach before. Behind him rose the massive square tower, and the long row of clerestory windows that were, then as now, the glory ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... "Jama'a atrfah," lit.he drew in his extremities, it being contrary to "etiquette" in the presence of a superior not to cover hands and feet. In the wild Argentine Republic the savage Gaucho removes his gigantic spurs when coming into the presence of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... 'Lloyd's' has its offices—that Lloyd's, whose name is familiar as a household word in every country the sea touches, and who underwrite the maritime ventures of every commercial nation of the globe. Very marvellous has been the rapid development of this gigantic institution, from the small beginnings of a few persons meeting in a coffee-house, till now, when it may be said well-nigh to monopolise the maritime-assurance business of the world. Not even America has ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... sense of having awakened from it, of which the light, down in the vaults, had given, me the assurance. The immense thickness and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the massive towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions, frowning aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Marx was always an earnest seeker of facts and forces. He was laying the foundations of a scientific socialism and dissecting the anatomy of capitalism in pursuit of the laws of social evolution. The gigantic intellectual labors of Marx from 1850 to 1870 are to-day receiving due attention, and, while one after another of the later economists has been forced reluctantly to acknowledge his genius, few now will take issue with Professor Albion W. Small when he ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... behind the man, weird, gigantic shadows, born of the flickering candle flame, leaped and danced. In the crude light and shade his barbaric gorgeousness became doubly sinister, as he pushed the strange shaman headdress farther back ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... His squat figure and red face suddenly loomed into a gigantic indistinctness in the girl's eyes. She would have fallen to the deck had not the captain's strong hands clutched her by ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... every other wise dilapidated. There were none in a later fashion than thirty years since, except some figures that had been cut from tailors' show-bills. There were views of cities and edifices in Europe, of Napoleon's battles and Nelson's sea-fights, in the midst of which would be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand (the Hand of Destiny) pointing at the principal points of the conflict, while the old Dutchman explained. He gave a good deal of dramatic effect to his descriptions, but his accent and intonation cannot be written. He seemed to take interest and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... before the creature's gigantic and repulsive head which lay limp over a blood bathed stone, huge jaws partially open, and serrated rows of wicked, stiletto-sharp teeth gleaming yellowly in the flashlight's rays. The head in shape was bullet-like, ending in a blunt nose as big as a bushel basket ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... weeks previously. More than fifty Negroes and Indians had been engaged in subduing this ferocious animal, which was not killed until after a conflict of two days, in the course of which several negroes were dangerously wounded. This gigantic specimen measured, from the snout to the tip of the tail, eight feet three inches; the tail itself measuring two feet ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. He did not, like Murray, conduct the understanding through the painful subtlety ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of the Ziarat was more interesting than the outside. It was a very large whitewashed single room, with high vaulted ceiling, and in the centre rose from the floor to a height of three feet a gigantic tomb, six yards in length, with a gabled top. It measured one yard and a half across at the head, and one yard at its foot, and had two stone pillars some five feet high standing one at each extremity. To these two end pillars was tied a rope, from which hung numberless rags, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... their sorority colors in flowers and ribbons and their insignia cut from paste-board and covered with tissue paper of the desired color. A gigantic insignia would make a suitable wall decoration. Hang pennants of the colors everywhere, and if it is a musical sorority, work in the staff and notes in the decorations. These can be painted on cheap white muslin or paper and tacked about the walls. If one cares to learn a little ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... This gigantic monument was the most prominent object in sight, with the exception of the sacred temple, which Sah-luma presently pointed out,—a round, fortress-like piece of architecture ornamented with twelve gilded ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... countrymen, the concurrent testimony of the natives, who, after all, are better acquainted with the geography of their own country, is entitled to respect. It should also be remembered, that the Tchadda has not received its name, any more than its gigantic namesake, from Europeans, but from the natives themselves, who have never bestowed on it any other appellation. On a small island, near Attah, Lander erected a kind of mud fort, which would answer the purpose of a depot for British goods. This place has ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... first course served when another noise than that of music was heard. There rushes in at the hall-door a knight of gigantic stature—the greatest on earth—in measure high. He was clothed entirely in green, and rode upon a green foal (ll. 116-178). Fair wavy hair fell about the shoulders of the Green Knight, and a great beard like a bush hung upon ...
— Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight - An Alliterative Romance-Poem (c. 1360 A.D.) • Anonymous
... stood a gigantic triptych. More than life size, the central panel canopied the statue of a Mongol potentate; the two side wings, a pair of guards in bas-relief. All three wrought in chryselephantine gold and ivory; the gold with flowing pallid highlights. Damascened ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... ravine showed ghostly grey, then faintly pink. Through the dimness the boulders scattered about the stream stood up like mediaeval monsters, and for a few panic-stricken seconds Muriel took the twining roots of a rhododendron close at hand for the coils of a gigantic snake. Then as the ordinary light of day filtered down into the gloomy place she sighed again with relief, ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... gigantic Grebes from which they differ externally, chiefly in the full webbed foot instead of the individually webbed toes of the Grebe, and in the sharper, more pointed and spear-like bill. These birds are similar in their habits to the Grebes, except that their homes are generally more substantially ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater scale of the mediaeval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has given a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for they ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... previous astonishment was deepened into almost idiotic wonder when he heard a reply from what appeared to be a trombone of more gigantic power than his own. ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... ceremony took place in the presence of 2,000 Indians, who offered 1,200 presents at the common tomb, in testimony of their grief. The people belonging to five large villages deposited the bones of their dead in a gigantic shroud, composed of forty-eight robes, each robe being made of ten beaver skins. After being carefully wrapped in this shroud, they were placed between moss and bark. A wall of stones was built around this vast ossuary to preserve it from profanation. ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... in the very district which forms the scene of our action: it consisted in the destruction of a funeral procession, with all its attendants. The 'noontide hag,' called in Gaelic Glas-lich, a tall, emaciated, gigantic female figure, is supposed in particular to haunt the district of Knoidart. A goblin dressed in antique armor, and having one hand covered with blood, called, from that circumstance, Lham-dearg, or Red-hand, is a tenant of ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... him. He stood still listening and looking round. The breeze was oozing through the network of boughs as through a strainer; the trunks and larger branches stood against the light of the sky in the forms of writhing men, gigantic candelabra, pikes, halberds, lances, and whatever besides the fancy chose to make of them. Giving up the search, Melbury came back to the horses, and walked slowly homeward, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... was nothing in the advertising column, but in the body of the paper he found a paragraph to the effect that Mr. Samuelson, of Hull, had built a gigantic steam vessel in that port, and was going out to New Zealand in her on her trial trip, to sail that morning at high tide, 6.45 A.M., and it ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... canoe close by some favorable point of meadow for them to come out on, but listened in vain to hear one come rushing through the woods, and concluded that they had been hunted too much thereabouts. We saw many times what to our imaginations looked like a gigantic moose, with his horns peering from out the forest-edge; but we saw the forest only, and not its inhabitants, that night. So at last we turned about. There was now a little fog on the water, though it was a fine, clear night above. There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... nearer the gulf by sheer strength of muscle. Irwin, his jaw shattered and his shoulder torn, was not fighting to win, but to kill. He cared not whether he himself also went to death. He was obsessed by the old primeval lust to crush the life out of this lusty antagonist, and his whole gigantic force was concentrated to that end. He scarce knew that he was wounded, and he cared not at all. Backward and forward though the battle went, on the whole it moved ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... listening ear caught a sound above. Without hesitation, he wheeled and mounted the stairs with Benton close at his heels. Behind him the shop-clerk stood irresolute—taken aback, with a vague consciousness that he should have devised a way to stop this gigantic Infidel. Assuredly the master would be angry. Orders had been explicitly given to allow no one to climb those steps to-day ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... sank in silence deep. It was a night for thought not sleep— It was a night for song and love— The burning planets shone above— The Southern Cross was all ablaze— 'Tis long since it then met my gaze!— Above us, whisp'ring in the breeze, Were many strange, gigantic trees, And in their shadow, deep and dark, Slept many a pile of mould'ring bones; For tales of murder fell and stark, Are told by monumental stones Flung by the passer's hand, until The place grows to a little hill. Up through the ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... reign of King Henry V. Had they looked a little more closely they would have perceived that the bastions, with the formidable names of London and of Paris, were powerless to prevent either corn, cattle, pigs, or men-at-arms being brought into the city; and that these gigantic dolls were being mocked at by the dealers, who, with their beasts, passed by them daily. In short, they would have realised that the people of Orleans were for the moment better off than the English. But they had examined nothing for themselves. They were content to abide by public ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... all is prepared," said Demdike, coming close up the mule on which Paslew was mounted, and pointing to the gigantic gallows, looming above the abbey walls; "wilt them now accede to my request?" And then he added, significantly—"on the same ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... begin at two o'clock, and after cleaning out all the restaurants in town, put to their utmost to feed the ravening horde of locusts that had swarmed down upon them, the throngs set out for the stadium. That gigantic structure could hold forty thousand people and, long before the time for the game to begin, it was crowded to repletion. On one side were the stands for the Blues and directly facing them were those reserved for the "Maroons." The occupants yelled ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... speaking of the Trojan war, "though reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past, by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a legend, and nothing more. If we are asked if it be not a legend embodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of truth,—whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... places I visited, but I spent my last hours on the Moon in the presence of that gigantic chasm called Newton, where I was thrilled with feelings of sublimity as never before. Outstretched lay the immense opening, nearly one hundred and fifty miles long and about seventy miles broad. It was fearful to gaze into it, for my eye stretched downward mile after ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... Tonnison put it, like nothing so much as a gigantic well or pit going sheer down into ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... it? and are them there boys too?" asked Billy, looking round at the curious oval and conical cask-like things, of gigantic proportions, which lumbered the deck and filled the ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... are glimpses of dim blue mountains. As one gets farther to the south-east the hills are higher, and on either side there rise fantastic kopjes of granite. Their tops are cleft and riven by deep fissures, and huge detached blocks are strewn about at their base, or perched like gigantic tables upon the tops of pillars of rock, poised so finely that one fancies a blast of wind might overthrow them. These "perched blocks," however, have not, like the blocs perches of Western Europe, been left ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... built of heavy oak, and plated on the forward side with 21/2-inch iron, on the after with 11/2-inch. With guns, coal, and stores on board, the casemate deck came nearly down to the water, and the vessels drew from six to seven feet, the peculiar outline giving them no small resemblance to gigantic turtles wallowing slowly along in their native element. Below the water the form was that of a scow, the bottom being flat. Their burden was five hundred ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... a suddenness that was appalling, they seemed to be flung into the midst of a hurricane. The wind lashed the sea to fury, and the Mary Ellen spun around like some gigantic top. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... cavern, at the door of which stood the figure of a youth with hands outstretched in welcome. The moon paused before the door but did not enter. The youth slid to the ground and crouched with head on knee in an attitude of despair. A gigantic figure stood out in the light. Before him danced a circle of elves. The figure in the doorway leaned back and slept. Watching this strange panorama, I ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... The gigantic machinery employed in pumping our mines, working our mills and manufactures, and driving our steam-ships and locomotives, in like manner depends for its supply of power upon so slight an agency as little drops of water expanded by heat,—that ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... tart with the Turks, gratulatory to the Greeks, peevish with the Poles and gentle to the Germans. The German CHANCELLOR and Herr VON SIMONS were described as "two perfectly honest upright men, doing their best to cope with a gigantic task." Their country was making a real effort to meet the indemnity; it was not entirely responsible for the delay in trying the war-criminals, and even in the matter of disarmament was not altogether blameworthy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... a gigantic golden coated cat had moved stealthily out upon the snow, and was gliding toward ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... highest suggestions of beauty and grandeur. He afterward tells us that "he preferred the cold sky and the pines of the north to charming scenes in the midst of landscapes bathed in the glowing rays of the sun and azure light." The vague Ossianic figures that raised their gigantic heads in the fog-wreaths of clouded mountain-tops and lonely lochs had a peculiar fascination for him, and acted like wine on his imagination. The "Hebrides" overture was the fruit of this tour, one of the most powerful and characteristic of his minor compositions. ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... belonging to such countries, confiscated by Rome and given or rented to Italians; the tributes imposed on the vanquished, and the collection of them; the abundance of slaves,—all these then offered to the Romans and to the Italians so many occasions to grow rich quickly; just as the gigantic economic progress of the modern world offers similar opportunities to-day to all the peoples that, by geographical position, historical tradition, or vigorous culture and innate energy, know how to excel in industry, in agriculture, ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... figure haunted me. Finally I set myself the task of memorizing five hundred leaves. It was a gigantic undertaking, although my memory was rather above the average. I worked with unflagging assiduity for weeks and weeks. Nobody was to know of my purpose until it had been achieved. I worked so hard and was so ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... was employed to erect two pulpits in the choir of St. Maria del Fiore, and adorn them with historical figures in basso-relievo of bronze, together with varieties of other embellishments. About this period, the great block of marble, intended for the gigantic statue of Neptune, to be placed near the fountain on the Ducal Piazza, was brought up the River Arno, and thence by road to Florence. A competition took place between the model which I had made for the statue of Neptune ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... feet in front of the frightened pony lay coiled a gigantic rattlesnake, its ugly head and tail raised and its rattles singing ominously. Two more steps and the pony would have been ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... said sharply and distinctly, "... Saw it drop right out of the ceiling!" Farther down the hall, another group shifted aside enough to disclose it had been clustered about something which looked a little like the empty shell of a gigantic black beetle. ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... centuries, were popularly believed, in the latest period of the Western empire, to exist as so many charters of supremacy. Jupiter himself in Rome had put on a peculiar Roman physiognomy, which associated him with the destinies of the gigantic state. Above all, the solemn augury of the twelve vultures, so memorably passed downwards from the days of Romulus, through generations as yet uncertain of the event, and, therefore, chronologically incapable of participation in any fraud—an augury always explained as promising twelve centuries ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... saw with their own eyes the fate of large families, misgivings and care mingled with their love. They belonged to a singularly wise and provident people: in Holland reckless parents were as rare as disobedient children. So now when the huge loaf came in on a gigantic trencher, looking like a fortress in its moat, and, the tour of the table once made, seemed to have melted away, Elias and Catherine would look at one another and say, "Who is to find bread for them all when we ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a silvery vapour, far off, infinitely immaterial, reminding one a little of a lunar landscape, calling up visions of some half extinct planet peopled by shades. The dome of St. Peter's, shining with a peculiar metallic lustre in the blue atmosphere looked gigantic and so close that one might have thought to touch it. And the two youthful Heroes, sons of the Swan, radiant with beauty in the vast expanse of whiteness as in the apotheosis of their origin, seemed to be the immortal Genii of Rome guarding the slumbers ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... built, solidly massed, nearby. Presenting an unbroken, two-story facade, the long buildings were divided into tiny houses that had each two flat-faced windows upstairs, and a door and one window downstairs. The seven or eight long buildings might have been as many gigantic German toys, dotted with apertures by some accurate brush, and finished with several hundred flights of wooden steps and several hundred brick chimneys. Ugly when they first were built, they were ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... of Sebastopol took place on the 17th of October, in which the fleet took an active part; but the combined efforts of the artillery, afloat and ashore, failed to subdue the gigantic works which had arisen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... pleasant to know I have what you call the side that is safe. From my American wife I have many of your excellent speech figures. But now! The launch is big. Remain happy in Naples—happy as Vesuvio will let you—and watch his vast, his gigantic exhibition. If danger come, you all enter my launch and be saved. If no danger, you have a marvelous experience." The serious look glided from his face, and was replaced by a smile as ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... receding rapidly from me. I noticed the gradual expansion of the horizon as we emerged out of the forests into the plains. The great high buildings, whose towers overlooked the dense woodlands, and whose gigantic clusters formed large cities, diminished, together with the groves, until only little log cabins lay snugly in the bosom of the vast prairie. The cloud shadows which drifted about on the waving yellow of long-dried grasses thrilled me like ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... embrocation to his feet; and on a chair close by sat a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with his feet dangling. These three were the only occupants except the shadows. But the shadows were a company in themselves; the extent of the room exaggerated them to a gigantic size, and from the low position of the candle the light struck upwards and produced deformed foreshortenings. The mountebank's profile was enlarged upon the wall in caricature, and it was strange to see his nose shorten and lengthen as the flame was blown about by draughts. As for Madame Tentaillon, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been left there when he had made a sketch of a head two or three days previously. In a moment he was before the wall again. It was roughly plastered from the floor to the lower line of the frescoes. With a long, coarse brush he began to sketch a gigantic head of a woman. The oil paint lay well on the rough, dry surface. He worked in great strokes at the full length ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... incommunicable joys. To use Sartor's own words, applied to the poet before as, we may inscribe upon Wordsworth's grave, "Here lies a man who did what he intended;" while over Sartor's, disappointed ages may say, "Here lies a man whose intentions were noble, and his powers gigantic, but who from lack of proper correspondence between them did little or nothing, said much, but only told the world ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... inhabited by beasts of prey. And the daughter of Bhima, wailing bitterly, wandered hither and thither like a maniac, exclaiming, "Alas! Alas! Oh king!" And as she was wailing loudly like a female osprey, and grieving and indulging in piteous lamentations unceasingly, she came near a gigantic serpent. And that huge and hungry serpent thereupon suddenly seized Bhima's daughter, who had come near and was moving about within its range. And folded within serpent's coils and filled with grief, she still wept, not for herself but for Naishadha. And ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... noises made by hidden colossal things. The infantry tramplings, the heavy rumbling of the artillery, made the earth speak of gigantic preparation. Guns on distant heights thundered from time to time with sudden, nervous roar, as if unable to endure in silence a knowledge of hostile troops massing, other guns going to position. These sounds, near and remote, defined an immense ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... the bank and wept, there drew nigh to me a man in the habiliments of a fisher. He was bare-legged, of a weather-beaten countenance, and of stature approaching to the gigantic. 'What is the callant greeting for?' said he, as he stopped and surveyed me. 'Has onybody wrought ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... animal at her helm, that she was (like our universities) "satisfied with her own progress"; she added, being under intoxication, "that, if any danger existed, her scheme was to drown it in the bo-o-owl;" and two days afterward he saw her puffing and panting, and fiercely dragging a gigantic three-decker out into deep water, like an industrious ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... I suppose, is not uncommon. The man who believes as easily to-day as he did six months ago is a man on whom lessons are thrown away. We have lived in a world of gigantic whispers, and most of them have been false whispers. Even the magic word "Official" leaves one cold. It is not what I am "officially" told that interests me: it is what I am "officially" not told that I want to know in order ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds to the tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scores amid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. A sudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when the gigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathoms over head; but even at this great depth an enormous iceberg grates heavily against the bottom, crushing into fragments in its course, Cyprina, Modiola, Astarte, with many a hapless mollusc besides; and ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... not return on board till late in the evening, for we stayed a long time in the lagoon, examining the fields of coral and the gigantic shells of the chama, into which, if a man were to put his hand, he would not, as long as the animal lived, be able to withdraw it. Near the head of the lagoon I was much surprised to find a wide area, considerably more than a mile square, covered with a forest of delicately branching corals, which, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... missionary became the universal topic; The name of the martyred Smith, the general rallying cry. The superior interest excited by individual sufferings to any general misery inflicted upon masses of the people, or any evil, however gigantic, which operates over a large space, and in a course of time, has always been observed. The remark was peculiarly applicable in this instance. Although all reflecting men had, for many long years, been well aware ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson |
