"Bigness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The gale then ceasing they turned back, and were seventy days in getting to the aforesaid Cape Diab. The ship having touched on the coast to supply its wants, the mariners beheld there the egg of a certain bird called Chrocho, which egg was as big as a butt.[3] And the bigness of the bird is such that between the extremities of the wings is said to be 60 paces. They say too that it carries away an elephant or any other great animal with the greatest ease, and does great ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... shall convey him through the air; and this perhaps might be made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with food for their viaticum, and commodities for traffic." "It is not," lucidly continues the Bishop, "the bigness of any thing in this kind, that can hinder its motion, if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. We see a great ship swims as well as a small cork; and an eagle flies in the air, as well as a little gnat. This engine may be contrived from the same principles by which ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... same species and it pleased my whim to symbolise them as a mastodon and a rogue elephant. Morrison, the dreaded agent and operator, was unquestionably the finer creature. He moved more precisely and with a sense of wieldy power. His phrases cut where Vogelstein's merely smote. His bigness had something genial about it. He looked the amateur, and indeed does not the rogue elephant trample down villages chiefly for the joy of the affray? One felt that something more than Morrison's preposterous winnings had ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... crystal water joined the muddy Colorado. The Canyon no longer overhung the river suffocatingly, but opened widely, showing behind the fissured white granite peaks, crimson and snow capped and appalling in their bigness. ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... in all the world. The firelight and candlelight did not reach so far as the walls, but left them in soft darkness. So Eric had the feeling that the room was really much too large to be inside of a tree. But in spite of its bigness, it was very cozy. The fireplace was in the middle of the floor, just a great hollowed ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... of Barbary, where never any Englishman (or scarce any Christian) had ever traded before, where they showed their commodities and offered them to be vended. The Moors came down in multitudes, much taken with the beauty of their ship, for they had never seen any of that bigness or burthen before, but when they had taken a serious view of their commodities as hatchets, knives and looking-glasses, fish-hooks, &c. but especially their cloth and kersies of several sizes and colours, they brought them gold in abundance for it was more plentiful ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... difference; bigness is nothing to a good boxer," said Flossie with an air of superior knowledge. "Mr. Butterwick says he doesn't mind taking on the biggest man in England, if he's not a boxer. And he knows that Mr. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp—a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter. And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last. Something in the attitude of the manikins—faces they have none, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which there was a statue [of stone] like a man, and within it a man upon whom was a breastplate of gold set with jewels; upon this breastplate was a sword of inestimable price, and at his head a carbuncle of the bigness of an egg, shining like the light of the day; and upon him were characters writ with a pen,[251] which no man understood"[252]—a description stating, down to the so-called "statue," mummy-case, or cartonage, and the hieroglyphics upon the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... that it was a large island in the Western Ocean, situated before or opposite to the Straits of Gades; and that out of this island there was an easy passage into some others which lay near a large continent, exceeding in bigness all Europe and Asia. So far Plato may have told the truth, and from this passage it is conjectured that the existence of the continent of America was known to the ancients. But he goes on, immediately after, to draw upon his imagination, ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... wherein making the doubling to be ten years at first, and within 1,200 years at last, we take a discretionary liberty, but justifiable by observations and the Scriptures for the rest, which table we leave to be corrected by historians who know the bigness of ancient cities, armies, and colonies in the respective ages of the world, in the meantime affirming that without such difference in the measures and periods for doubling (the extremes whereof we have demonstrated to be real and true) it is impossible to solve ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... sharply, and hard. "What do you know of what the North will be? You know it only as it has been—as it is, perhaps. But, of its future you know nothing. I tell you the North will change! It is a hard land—cruel—elemental—raw! But it is big! And, when it awakens, its very bigness, the virile force and strength of it, will turn against its savagery, its cruelty, its brutishness; and above all other lands it will stand for the protection of the weak and for the right of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... without doubt the country was what she had termed it—an unfeatured wilderness. Her first sensation upon getting a view of the country had been one of deep disappointment. There was plenty of it, she had decided,—enough to make one shrink from its very bigness; yet because it was different from the land she had been accustomed to she felt that somehow it was inferior. Her father had assured her of its beauty, and she had come prepared to fall in love with it, but within the last half hour—when ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... in some moods it seems supremely incredible that we should be of such worth in the scale of Creation as that the Lord of all things should, in a deeper sense than the Psalmist knew, have dwelt with us and be with us still. But bigness is not greatness, and there is nothing incredible in the belief that men, lower than the angels, and needing God more because of their sin, do receive His visitations in an altogether special sense, and that, passing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as he followed Trimmer's sprawling figure, so much like a bloated spider's in its bigness of circumference and its attenuation of limbs, that suddenly he shuddered and turned away as when one finds oneself about to step upon ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... fellow—slightly bowed already though he had given his age as twenty-five, for the earth begins her work early in a man's frame, and has power over the green tree as well as the dry. But this stoop did not conceal his height and strength and breadth, and somehow his bigness, combined with his simplicity, his slow thought and slow tongue, appealed to Joanna, stirred something within her that was almost tender. She handed him ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... of the House of Ptah of Babylonia—'such a silliness—those troubles and frets; it was not the while-worth that we should ever have sorrowed, because the scheme of time and creation is suchly big; had we grasped but its bigness, and the littleness of our span, should we have felt griefs? Nay, nay—nit,' like the street-youths say—would say the lady and gentleman now so passionless as to have philosophers become. And you, it should mean to you much. Humans are funniest when they ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... not many things in religion that are beyond the grasp and comprehension of even the greatest minds, to say nothing of the undeveloped mind of the child. It means, rather, that where we fail to grasp or understand it is because of the bigness of the problem, or because of its unknowableness, and not because its solution violates the ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish tetter, like sulphur or the rancid ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... he spat upon me through the grille and chuckled. Now, glancing about, I espied a stone hard by about the bigness of a man's head and, laying by my staff, I wrenched the stone from where it lay and, raising it aloft, hove it with all my strength; whereon the gate crashed open so suddenly as to catch the fellow a buffet that laid him sprawling on his back, and as he strove to rise ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... education of the deaf—a work that was undertaken in Europe only after the middle of the eighteenth century—we are persuaded that it speaks no less for the regard for and devotion to education implanted in the breasts of the American people, than for the bigness and benevolence of their hearts. The credit remains just as deep, even though it has ever been the mission and spirit of America to bring education to the door of every one of its children, and though what it has done for the deaf is but a part ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... of which is given in the Annals of Natural History, 2nd series, vol. iii. p. 260. The author thus describes it: "He beareth Sable a Dodo or Dronte proper. By the name of Dronte. This exotic bird doth equal a swan in bigness," &c. &c. Now I wish to ask, where did this family of Dronte reside? Is anything known concerning them? How did they come by these arms? and are any members of the family ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... it with all my strength in a certain fashion. Even after the lapse of many years the stone swung round, showing a little opening, through which a man might scarcely creep. As it swung, a mighty bat, white in colour as though with unreckoned age, and such as I had never seen before for bigness, for his measure was the measure of a hawk, flew forth and for a moment hovered over Cleopatra, then sailed slowly up and up in circles, till at last he was lost in the bright light ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... a plain, by the which ran most pleasant rivers on every side of the same, having besides within the compass of a circuit of seven miles, seven small seas: he saw also therein many fair places, and goodly buildings, the duke's palace, and the mighty strong castle, which is in a manner half the bigness of the town. Moreover, it liked him well to see the hospital of St. Mary, with divers other things: he did there nothing worthy of memory, but he departed back again towards Bologna, and from thence to Florence, where he ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... way of combining by means of their six sides; for if the atoms possessed no distinction of parts (and hence filled no space), a group of even a thousand atoms would not differ in extension from a single atom, and the different kinds of extension—minuteness, shortness, bigness, length, &c.—would never emerge. If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the atoms also have distinct sides, they have parts and are made up of those parts, and those parts again are made up of their parts, and so on in infinitum.— But, the Vaiseshika may object, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are told they have [41] done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to put ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... fullness of the firmament, the myriad of suns and planets, the brilliancy of the constellations, and the overpowering revelation of the infinite above. In less fervent latitudes one can never feel the bigness of the vault on high, nor sense the intimacy one had here with the worlds that spin in the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... our selves, they invited us to the Pallace [58]of their Prince or chief Ruler, some two miles distant off from the place where we landed; which we found to be about the bigness of one of our ordinary village houses, it was supported with rough unhewn pieces of Timber, and covered very artificially with boughs, so that it would keep out the greatest showers of Rain, the sides thereof were adorned with several forts of Flowers, which the fragrant fields there ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... Such as will be taught to speak. Such as are beautiful for Colour. A strange Bird. Water-Fowls resembling Ducks and Swans. Peacocks. The King keeps Fowl. Their Fish, How they catch them in Ponds, And how in Rivers. Fish kept and fed for the King's Pleasure. Serpents. The Pimberah of a prodigious bigness. The Polonga. The Noya. The Fable of the Noya ana Polonga. The Carowala. Gerendo. Hickanella. Democulo, a great Spider. Kobbera-guson, a Creature like an Aligator. Tolla-guion. The people eat Rats. Precoius Stones, Minerals, and other Commodities. The People discouraged from Industry ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... years, I know as Hankey cannot know, how much of his strength lies in his personal touch and presence:—spread his powers too wide he loses that touch. Felt the better for my talk with Hankey. He can grasp the bigness of what we are up against and can yet keep his head and see that the game is worth the candle and that it is in our hands the moment we make up our minds to pay ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... a voice. But he seemed never to seek to do so. He was without ambition; and, though curiously careful sometimes about preserving his own dignity, and beyond question sensitive by temperament, he showed marked respect, and even humility, to the worldly-successful. Despite his bigness and simplicity there was something small about him which came out in odd trifling details. Thus it was characteristic of Big James to ask Edwin to be waiting for him at the back gates in Woodisun Bank when he might just ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... germ spirit as the very beginning of national consciousness in Canada, one begins to understand the grim, rough, dogged determination that became part of the race. Canada was never intoxicated with that madness for Bigness that seemed to sweep over the modern world. What cared she whether her population stood still or not, whether she developed fast or slow, provided she kept the Faith and preserved her national integrity? Flimsy culture had no place in her schools or her social life. A solid basis of ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... for the Cause that was first in both our hearts, and in the happiness of being her friend. Later I shall describe in more detail the suffrage campaigns and the National and International councils in which we took part; now it is of her I wish to write—of her bigness, her many-sidedness, her humor, her courage, her quickness, her sympathy, her understanding, her force, her supreme common-sense, her selflessness; in short, of the rare beauty of her nature as ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... such things find plenty of fault with St. Paul's; and even I could see that its bigness was a little prosy, that it suggested the historic rather than the poetic muse; yet, for all that, I could never look at it without a profound emotion. Viewed coolly and critically, it might seem like a vast specimen of Episcopalianism in architecture. Miltonic in its grandeur and proportions, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... some thirty feet more. If we allow St. Gregory and the covered part of the Chapter House area, as we should, it equalled in area or slightly exceeded alike its successor and Cologne and Florence, and was surpassed only by the new St. Peter's, Milan, and Seville. "See the bigness," said Bishop Corbet of Norwich, "and your eye never yet ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... starved, and triumphed grovelled, down, yet grasped at glory, Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? "Done things" just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders? (You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... in its conception and strikes many great live topics of the day—the feminist movement and the back-to-the-soil doctrines being two of the most conspicuous. There is a spirit of the open spaces about this story—a bigness that suggests that Miss Cather has taken more than her title from Whitman's hymn to progress, 'Pioneers, O Pioneers.'"—San ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... the taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wing of a lark. I eat them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time, about the bigness of musket bullets. They supplied me as they could, showing a thousand marks of wonder and astonishment ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... simple little incident, but there was something in it somewhere that moved Helen Ward strangely. A spirit that was new to her seemed to fill the room. She felt it as one may feel the bigness of the mountains or sense the vast reaches of the ocean. These two men, employer and employee, were in no way conscious of their relationship as she understood it. Tom did not appear to realize that he ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... hanging in a golden chain This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon. Paradise Lost, ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... than either of his mates that he would feel entirely at ease—as he could not with them—in trusting the navigation of the brig in my hands. As to the practical part of the work, that was a matter that with my quickness I would pick up in no time; and my bigness and strength, he added, would come in mighty handily when there was trouble among the crew, as sometimes happened, and in keeping the blacks in order, and in the little fights that now and then were necessary with folks on shore. And then he came to the real kernel ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... the dim surface except a few clumps of rushes and my unfortunate head. The outside of this member gradually assumed to its inside a gigantic magnitude; it had always annoyed me at the hatter's from a merely animal bigness, with no commensurate contents to show for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical feeling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the impression. I thought with envy of ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the place that holds a ship's compasses, deserves a word of mention. It was a little house, about the bigness of a common bird-cage, with sliding panel doors, and two drawing-rooms within, and constantly perched upon a stand, right in front of the helm. It had two chimney stacks to carry off the smoke of the lamp that burned in ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... by the greater Celandine have developed active and pernicious congestion of the lungs and liver. Clusius found by experience that the juice of the greater Celandine, when squeezed into small green wounds of what sort so ever, wonderfully cured them. "If the juice to the bigness of a pin's head be dropped into the eye in the morning in bed, it takes away outward specks, and stops incipient suffusions." Also if the yellow juice is applied to warts, or to corns, first gently scraped, it will cure them promptly and ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... No;—don't you leave your house to-morrow to see anybody unless it be Mr. Daubeny or her Majesty. I'll come to you at two, and if her Grace will give me luncheon, I'll lunch with her. Good night, and don't think too much of the bigness of the thing. I remember dear old Lord Brock telling me how much more difficult it was to find a good coachman than a good Secretary of State." The Duke of Omnium, as he sat thinking of things for the next hour in his chair, succeeded only ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... firstly we have the great Mangon or mangonel, fundis fundibula, that some do also term catapultum, the which worketh by torsion and shall heave you great stones of the bigness of a man fully two hundred yards an it be dry weather; next is the Trebuchet, like to the mangon save that it swingeth by counterpoise; next cometh the Balista or Springald that worketh by tension—a pretty weapon! and shall ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... author also calculates, that a globe of red-hot iron, of the dimensions of our earth, would scarce be cool in fifty thousand years. If then the comet be supposed to cool a hundred times as fast as red-hot iron, yet, since its heat was two thousand times greater, supposing it of the bigness of the earth, it would not be cool in a million ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... how lonely I was. You had Fanny and Jimmie and the baby, but I had no one. As I sat alone in the house—the bigness of which seemed to make it all the lonelier—I thought of you, and your goodness, and sweetness and there I fought things out—I fought them out, and now I can make you any ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... are fairly held against such gales as on Long Island blow the lower dunes hither and yon. The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket of the dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, and on week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop. On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and corners of these sandy hillocks devoted, as the dunes of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, who are here as freely and fearlessly affectionate as at home. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... without any apparrell sauing her Smocke, the said Deuill did get blood vnder her left arme'.[848] Of the witches who plagued the Fairfax family at Fewstone in 1621, five had domestic familiars: Margaret Waite's was 'a deformed thing with many feet, black of colour, rough with hair, the bigness of a cat'; her daughter, Margaret Waite, had as 'her spirit, a white cat spotted with black, and named Inges'; Jennet Dibble had 'her spirit in the shape of a great black cat called Gibbe, which hath attended her now above 40 years'; Dibble's daughter, Margaret ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... Frank Martin frowned down at Dal. Known as "Tiger" to everyone but the professors, the young man's nickname fit him well. He was big, even for an Earthman, and his massive shoulders and stubborn jaw only served to emphasize his bigness. Like the other recent graduates on the platform, he was wearing the colored cuff and collar of the probationary physician, in the bright green of the Green Service of Medicine. He reached out a huge hand and gently ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body our standard—the body whose dimensions are no doubt determined by convenience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but have otherwise no sort of sanctity or superiority, rightness or fitness. It happens ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... capped with snow. For two days she had been groping for a word to define, to sum up the feeling which had grown upon her, had been growing upon her steadily, as the amazing scroll of that four-day journey unrolled. She found it now, a simple word, one of the simplest in our mother tongue—bigness. Bigness in its most ample sense,—that was the dominant note. Immensities of distance, vastness of rolling plain, sheer bulk of mountain, rivers that one crossed, and after a day's journey crossed again, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Does an elephant or an eagle perhaps, viewing some immense landscape, catch any glimpse of the universe, as an object of contemplation, apart from the satisfaction of his own sensual needs? Probably not. But Whitman, as has been said a hundred times, was "cosmic." He had an unequalled sense of the bigness of creation and of "these States." He owned a panoramic eye and a large passive imagination, and did well to loaf and let the tides of sensation flow over his soul, drawing out what music was in him without much care for ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... except in an inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies. Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer and more powerful than the sects? It is not the fault of ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... His greens, browns, blacks, scarlets are rich, sonorous, and magnetic. He is a colourist. He also is master of a restrained palette and can sound the silver grays of Velasquez. His tonalities are massive. The essential bigness of his conceptions, his structural forms, are the properties of an eye swift, subtle, and all-embracing. It seems an image that is at once solidly rooted in mother earth and is as fluctuating as life. No painter to-day has a greater sense of character, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... turned toward the East seeking but never finding that all elusive Grail which seemed ever ahead of them. Strange lands they passed through and it left them with wonderment at the bigness of the world in which ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... 't is awnly your bigness of heart, as wouldn't hurt a beetle, makes you speak kind of the boozy auld sweep. I'll soon shaw un wheer he's out if he thinks you 'm tinkering ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... charming mouth. The youth had teeth of a dazzling whiteness, a smile that was a bewildering Irish compound of laughter and tears, and sooty blue-black hair that fitted his head like a thick cap. He was a noisy lad, this William Oliver, opinionated, excitable, a type that in its bigness and broadness seemed almost coarse, sometimes, but he had all a big man's tenderness and sweetness, and everyone liked him. Susan and he quarreled with and criticized each other, William imitating her little affectations ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... swinging seats of the Tavern lawn, or at the choice nooks of all the resorts from Tahoe City completely around the Lake, it is not possible to write a book on Lake Tahoe there. One must get out and feel the bigness of it all; climb its mountains, follow its trout streams; ride or walk or push one's way through its leafy coverts; dwell in the shade of its forests; row over its myriad of lakes; study its geology, before he can ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... did," said Barby. "They beat all, for bigness and goodness both. I can't keep 'em together. There's thousands of 'em, and I mean to make Philetus eat 'em for supper—such potatoes and milk is good enough for him, or anybody. The cow has gained on her milk wonderful, Fleda, since she begun ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... certain bigness in Smith's character because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child; now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about hallucinations and gold plates? The man in him had ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... She gave a musical laugh. He could have but one reason, and she felt she knew that reason! What a handsome dear he was, and how she loved the whole bigness of him! ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... we come to prepare is the Line, which though easy, yet admits of some Rule; wherefore to make it neat, handsome and strong, twist the Hair you make it of even, having seen if the Hair be of an equal bigness; then steep your Line in Water, to see if the Hairs shrink, if so, you must twist them over again. The Colour of the Hair is best of Sorrel, White and Grey; Sorrel for muddy boggy Rivers, and the two last for clear Waters. Nor is the Pale watry green contemptible, ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... head like a Swine,—a taile like a Rat, and is of the bigness of a Cat. Under the belly she hath a bagge, wherein she lodgeth, carrieth and suckleth ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... There was a knock at the study door, discreet, insistent, menacing, and it was Mr. Cowl's knock. He entered, smiling gravely and yet, as it were, teasingly. His easy bigness, florid and sinister, made a disturbing contrast with the artless and pure simplicity of Audrey in her new black robe, and even with Miss Ingate's pallid maturity, which, after all, was passably innocent and ingenuous. Mr. Cowl resembled ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... judges, peers and commoners, by the greatest of English statesmen and the greatest of English painters. But his kingship was in him from the first. He had been anax andron even among his schoolfellows. His bigness, in more ways than one, made them call him "the great boy," and the father of one of them was astute enough even then to perceive that he would be more than that: "you call him the great boy, but take my word for it, he will one day prove ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... her own smallness. She felt almost overpowered with the bigness of what the man's words had shown her. It was wonderful to her the thought of this—this "scallawag." The word flashed through her mind, and with it came an even fuller realization of Mrs. Ransford's stupidity. The ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... neither guide nor interpreter, and were totally ignorant of the way to deal with the savages, or provide food for themselves during long marches over barren plains and wild mountains. In this predicament Captain Sublette found them, and in the bigness of his heart kindly took them in tow. Both parties travelled amicably together, and they arrived without accident on the upper branches of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... old girl," he said, "and you know more about it than anyone. But you haven't any money question to worry you. You don't love the place a bit more than I do; you don't love it as much, because you only know the nature side of it, and I know the bigness of the rest of it, too. But the hope's almost dead, old lady; I can't tie my ambitions to a corpse, you wouldn't ask me to, and you know I'm not the only one to be looked after. But, oh, it'll ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... not only that I did you a great wrong, Tabby, but I did her a worse one. I coolly exploited something that I should have at least respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should have been more generous with. There wasn't even bigness in it, from my side of the game. I traded on that dead woman's weakness. And my hands would be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that I'd really cared for her, that I'd been swept off my feet, that passion had blinded me to the things I ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... interviewed by Aubrey. He conversed grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small button at ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... not mean either stolidity or lethargy; far otherwise. Nor does it mean sluggishness, apathy or phlegmatism; quite the contrary. It does mean depth as opposed to shallowness, bigness as opposed to littleness, and vision as opposed to spiritual myopia. It means dignity, poise, aplomb, balance. It means that there is sufficient ballast to hold the ship steady on its way, no matter how much ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... rods were rare and attracted an unreasonable amount of attention. One Forquer, who was Lincoln's opponent, had recently rodded his house—and every one knew it. This man's speech consisted partly in ridiculing his opponent, his bigness, his awkwardness, his dress, his youth. Lincoln heard him through without interruption and then took ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... made of cornel, which struck so deep into the ground, that no one of many that tried could pluck it up; and the soil, being fertile, gave nourishment to the wood, which sent forth branches, and produced a cornel-stock of considerable bigness. This did posterity preserve and worship as one of the most sacred things; and, therefore, walled it about; and if to any one it appeared not green nor flourishing, but inclining to pine and wither, he immediately made outcry to all he met, and they, like people hearing ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed them. Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the "seas" and "ocean" ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... benefit of others as for yourself. You are encouraging the right principle amongst your yeomen and your farmers. You are setting your heel upon feudalism—you, the daughter of a race who have always demanded it. You live amongst these wonderful surroundings, you grow into the bigness of them, nature becomes almost your friend. It is one of the most dignified and beautiful lives I ever knew for a woman, and ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which he so curiously picked that there fell not so much as one grain to the ground. As he went from the church, they brought him, upon a dray drawn by oxen, a heap of paternosters of Sanct Claude, every one of them being of the bigness of a hat-block; and thus walking through the cloisters, galleries, or garden, he said more in turning them over than sixteen hermits would have done. Then did he study for some paltry half-hour with his eyes fixt upon his book; but ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... played the damosel [person of rank—used of the younger nobility of both sexes] so long time, I would fain be a little maid a season. I looked forth from the lattice this morrow, and I saw far down in the base court a little maid the bigness of me, washing of pans at a window. Now, prithee, have yon little maid up hither, and set her under the cloth of estate in my velvets, and leave me run down to the base court and wash the pans. It were rare mirth ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... circle, strolled with her up and down the promenade, and gave her an American drink in a refreshment saloon. It was appallingly hot, and they were both longing to quench their thirst with something big and cold. A magnificent waiter brought them bigness and coldness in tall tumblers with straws, and they sat on a ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... soon as he was old enough to think for himself, or make others listen to him, "amending the great errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;" inventing instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in colonization ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... into argument with Tom, he looked at this revolutionary more carefully than he ever had before. Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's, Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and security—stubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... nine years old, his father determined to emigrate to America, and for that purpose went to Liverpool to embark for the United States. But when he had got as far as the docks, Mrs. Gibson, good soul, frightened at the bigness of the ships (a queer cause of alarm), refused plumply ever to put her foot on one of them. So her husband, a dutiful man with a full sense of his wife's government upon him, consented unwillingly to stop in Liverpool, where he settled ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... tracts that he wrote in the latter period of his life are instinct with a literary beauty of which he never could divest himself, and which gave an artistic value even to his sermons, so his earlier novels show a profound concern for the welfare of society, a broad, humanitarian spirit, a bigness of soul that included prince ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... them full of game, wild turkeys and partridges, bears and lynxes. Two deer, of unusual size, leaped up from the underbrush. Crossbow and arquebuse were brought to the level; but the Huguenot captain, "moved with the singular fairness and bigness of them," forbade his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... my eyes about me, they were attracted by a great tree that grew near by, a tree of vast girth and bigness. And, as I looked, I saw that it was an oak-tree, near the root of which there was a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... grasses and screened with verdure that the harsh noises of a chattering, working world could not ruffle its peace and serenity. Cynthia's son filled it and the still, lonely old woman was fascinated with his bigness, his merry gladness, but most of all with his understanding friendliness. She told him all her story, her past trials and present griefs. And he told her strange things about people he had seen in other parts of the world, blind people living in foul alleys instead ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... about the bigness of our large apple-trees, and about the same height, and the rind is blackish and somewhat rough. The leaves are of a dark colour; the gum distils out of the knots or cracks that are in the bodies of the trees. We compared it with some gum dragon, or dragon's blood, that was ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... present was a cup of ruby, a span high and a finger's length broad, full of fine pearls, each a mithcal[FN211] in weight and a bed covered with the skin of the serpent that swalloweth the elephant, marked with spots, each the bigness of a dinar, whereon whoso sitteth shall never sicken; also an hundred thousand mithcals of Indian aloes-wood and thirty grains of camphor, each the bigness of a pistachio-nut, and a slave-girl with her paraphernalia, a charming ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... of the pursuit; and the middle part and the ending varied only in degree. All the way up to midnight, at which hour a station of a bigness to supply a standard brass was reached, the tinkered journal-bearing gave trouble and killed speed. Set once more in running order upon its full quota of sixteen practicable wheels, the special had fallen so far behind its Denver-planned schedule ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... appetite he regarded anything less than a whole leg of a sheep as an insult) that night, half-a-dozen slap jacks, and a trifle of mushrooms." "How big were the mushrooms?" I asked. "Oh, they was rather fine ones, mum, I won't deny: they might have been the bigness of a plate." Now even supposing them to have been perfectly wholesome, a few dozen mushrooms of that size, eaten half raw with a whole shoulder of mutton, are quite enough to my ignorant mind to account for so severe a fit ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... quitted the low, narrow, white-walled farmhouse for the castle of the great Earl of Mackworth. He had never appreciated before how low and narrow and poor the farm-house was. Now, with his eyes trained to the bigness of Devlen Castle, he looked around him with wonder and pity at his father's humble surroundings. He realized as he never else could have realized how great was the fall in fortune that had cast the house of Falworth down from its ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... less definable odours, almost sickened her, evoking suggestions of tawdry, trivial, vulgar lives, fed on sensation and excitement; but the feeling was almost immediately swept away by a renewed sense of the bigness of the thing which she beheld,—of which, indeed, she was a part. And her thoughts turned more definitely to the man who had brought it all about. Could he control it, subdue it? Here was Opportunity suddenly upon him, like a huge, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... foliage. Shady and well-cover'd in, the middle walk at the top was, Which was ascended by steps of rough flat pieces constructed. And within it were hanging fine chasselas and muscatels also, And a reddish-blue grape, of quite an exceptional bigness, All with carefulness planted, to give to their guests after dinner. But with separate stems the rest of the vineyard was planted, Smaller grapes producing, from which the finest wine made is. So she constantly mounted, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... crawling together on flat tables of rock or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports I beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... accomplished. He had stayed the inundations of the Northmen, defended his kingdom of Wessex, and planted the seeds of a higher civilization in England, winning the love and admiration of his subjects. The greatness of Alfred should not be measured by the size of his kingdom. It is not the bigness of a country that gives fame to its illustrious men. The immortal heroes of Palestine and Greece ruled over territories smaller and of less importance than the kingdom of Wessex. It is the greatness of their characters that preserves their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... a cocos palm?" said I, rejoicing; and forthwith doffing my sword belt, I clambered up this tree hand over fist and had soon plucked and tossed down a sufficiency of great, green nuts about the bigness of my two fists. Now sitting beside him, Sir Richard showed me how I must cut two holes in the green rind and we drank blissfully of this kindly juice that to our parched tongues was very nectar, for verily never in all my days have I tasted drink ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the skin has a different space quality from the touch of the flat end of a pencil. Low tones seem to have more volume than high tones. Some pains feel sharp and others dull and diffuse. The warmth felt from spreading the palms of the hands out to the fire has a "bigness" not felt from heating one solitary finger. The extensity of a sensation depends on the number of nerve ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... Heaven was of a Spherical Figure; in which Opinion he was confirm'd, by observing the Return of the Sun, Moon and Stars to the East, after their Setting; and also, because they always appear'd to him of the same bigness, both when they rose, and when they were in the midst of Heaven, and at the time of their Setting; whereas, if their Motions had not been Circular, they must have been nearer to sight, at some times than others; and consequently their Dimensions would have appear'd proportionably ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... Tall, exceeding the meane, with a proportionable bigness to become it, but no way inclining to Corpulency: of an exact Straightnesse of the whole Body, and a perfect Symmetry in every part thereof. He was of a Sanguine constitution, which beautified his Face with a pleasant Ruddinesse, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... past—or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For, as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be—as if it was a million times as big. There is no more sublimity—per se—in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular fracture of a rock, ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... that Jill's bigness and cleverness surprised him. He evidently found her amusing, for he tried to draw her out; perhaps he liked to see how her great eyes opened and then grew bright, as she tossed back her black locks or shook them impatiently. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... digging a tunnel through a mountain with a mere pick and spade. We must assemble for the task great mechanical contrivances. And so with our energies of will; a slight tool means a slight achievement; a huge, aggressive engine, driving on at full blast, means corresponding bigness of results. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... he had exulted in the bigness and glory of this country of his, where strong men met hand to hand and eye to eye. There were the other kind in it, the sort that made his profession of manhunting a thing of reality and danger, but he expected these—forgot them—when the wilderness ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... indicate that it recognizes the urgency and bigness and significance of the momentous situation ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn
... bigness of that land the man walked with his thoughts—brooding, perhaps, over whatever it was that had so strangely placed him there—dreaming, it may be, over that which might have been, or that which yet might be—viewing ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... a beast, or bird, about the bigness of an elephant. Its body is made of iron, and it is always red-hot. A more terrible and cruel beast cannot be imagined; for, if you go near it, you are at once broiled by ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... presence was power and bigness, not the good-natured size that is hulking and awkward, but bigness that is elegant and ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... narrow ways behind the Exchange that, as I think, Genoa seems most herself, the port of the Mediterranean, the gate of Italy. Yet what I prefer in Genoa are her triumphant slums, then the palaces and villas with their bigness, so impressive for us who came from the North, which seem to be a remnant of Roman greatness, a vision as it were of solidity and grandeur. Something of this, it is true, haunts almost every Italian city; only nowhere but in Genoa can you see so many palaces ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the Devil had sent her to torment the Minister, and that she was ordered to use a Nail and strike it into his Head, but it would not enter very deep. They confessed also that the Devil gives them a Beast about the bigness and shape of a young Cat, which they call a Carrier, and that he gives them a Bird too as big as a Raven, but white. And these two Creatures they can send anywhere, and wherever they come they take away all sorts of Victuals they can get. What the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... top of Milmannoch Hill. "Eh," said Mysie, looking round her in amaze—"eh, sirs, it's a lairge place the world when you see it all!" Gourlay smiled because he had the same thought, but feebly, because he was cowering at the bigness of the world. Folded nooks in the hills swept past, enclosing their lonely farms; then the open straths, where autumnal waters gave a pale gleam to the sky. Sodden moors stretched away in vast patient loneliness. Then a gray smear of rain blotted the world, penning him in with his dejection. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... and putting them both into other Orders and Postures, which is Illustrated with Instances (60, 61.) Sixthly, by Motion, which is explain'd (62.) And lastly, and chiefly, by the Union of the Saline Bodies, with the Superficial parts of another Body, whereby both their Bigness and Shape must necessarily be alter'd (63, 64.) Explain'd by Experiments (65, 66.) That the Colour of Bodies may be Chang'd by the concurrence of two or more of these ways (67.) And besides all these, Eight Reflective causes of Colours, there may be in Transparent Bodies several ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... arraying them, from top to bottom, in a spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowls of the air,—a thumb's bigness of burnished plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. It was with indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used to thrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations with their countless regular avenues of palms. The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our waters in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a great volume of sound, so that once I thought I was passing near a mill, and it was only the voice ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... successors a great, consolidated railroad enterprise, skillfully and successfully administered. The great weakness of Commodore Vanderbilt and his associates, and of those who later imitated his work was their fundamental conception of the railroad as a private venture. Success consisted in bigness, great profits, crushing or buying out competitors, and administering the business for the best good of the few owners, regardless of the interests of the region through which the railway passed. Vanderbilt and many of his contemporaries were men ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... a sudden exclamation from Osborne, who had gone to one of the windows and stood looking out, interrupted the speaker. In spite of his bigness the detective was in excellent training; with a spring he went through the window which opened upon a walk fringed with autumn-brown bushes; and in another moment he was ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... said—she was sitting beside him by the outdoor fire—"I want you always to remember that I am more grateful than words can express for your—bigness, your wonderful understanding. I did not expect that ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming conceptions which the truth should disappoint. And here ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and compact—a domino of tiled houses and walled gardens, dwarfed by the disproportionate bigness of the church. From the midst of the thoroughfare which divided it in half, fields and trees were visible at either end; and through the sally-port of every street there flowed in from the country a silent invasion of green grass. Bees and birds appeared ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at times of a hardness like steel - of them we have much fear. For Miss Powers we have admiration greatly but our love we cannot show out to her; only can we show that to Miss Sterling who is of great dearness, with heart of so great bigness that for her we take the name of "Mother Heart." Each, to her gather and wish of her that she may play the new foreign game with us, but she make explanation that of the letters there are but seven, and soon all Chinese girl go to herself alone and open her envelope. As I have before spoken, B, ...
— Seven Maids of Far Cathay • Bing Ding, Ed.
... he said, "is the littlest hero on record as a sea-fighter, I guess. Like Napoleon Bonaparte, his bigness was not in his body but in his mind. And that's Paul Jones ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... ordinary squareness," Billy Louise put in quietly. "I mean bigness, too; a bigness that will make a man be more than square; a bigness that will let him see all around a thing and judge it from a bigger viewpoint than ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... was that the danger was all over already. There was no danger any more. The supposed nephew's appearance had a purpose. He had come, full, full to trembling—with the bigness of his news. There must have been rumours already as to the shaky position of the de Barral's concerns; but only amongst those in the very inmost know. No rumour or echo of rumour had reached the profane in the West-End—let alone in the guileless marine suburb ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... brought in, there was a little wee china teapot, that held about the matter of half a pint or so, and cups and sarcers about the bigness of children's toys. When he seed that, he grew most peskily riled, his under lip curled down like a peach leaf that's got a worm in it, and he stripped his teeth, and showed his grinders, like a bull-dog. 'What foolery is this?' said he. 'My dear,' said she, 'it's the ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... to musing over a bar of common laundry soap on the stationary wash-stand. It was impossible not to contrast this humble detergent—for it was of a bigness and coarse yellowness to suggest the largest possible quantity for the smallest possible price—with the dead man's wealth, and to wonder a little at such petty economies as were signified by it, by the paraffin candles, the absence of servants, and ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... laughing thereat most heartily, still provoking of Ned to curse that his mirth might be increased. I saw his father also when he was possessed. I saw him in one of his fits, and saw his flesh as it was thought gathered up in an heap about the bigness of half an egg, to the unutterable torture and affliction of the old man. There was also one Freeman, who was more than an ordinary doctor, sent for to cast out the devil, and I was there when he attempted to do it. The manner whereof was this. They had the possessed in an outroom, and laid ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... their perfection in the month of May, and decline with the buck. Now you are to take notice, that in several countries, as in Germany, and in other parts, compared to ours, fish do differ much in their bigness, and shape, and other ways; and so do Trouts. It is well known that in the Lake Leman, the Lake of Geneva, there are Trouts taken of three cubits long; as is affirmed by Gesner, a writer of good credit: and ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... service as he could through a study of some legend of ancient Britain or some epic of an extinct race. As Mr. Percy Boynton has said, "To foster in a whole generation some clear recognition of other qualities in America than its bigness, and of other distinctions between the past and the present than that they are far apart is to contribute towards the consciousness of a national individuality which is the first essential of national life.... We must put our minds upon ourselves, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... his companion's panic was growing beyond her control. They passed once more between the broken waves and entered the still bay with its border of flowering earth. There, when the yacht had been anchored, Millie sat gazing silently at the open sea whose bigness had so unexpectedly distressed her. Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight, hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk the enigmatic governess; it was in contradiction ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was thick in this part; I couldn't see before my nose, and must burst my way through by main force and ply the knife as I went, slicing the cords of the lianas and slashing down whole trees at a blow. I call them trees for the bigness, but in truth they were just big weeds, and sappy to cut through like carrot. From all this crowd and kind of vegetation, I was just thinking to myself, the place might have once been cleared, when I came on my nose over a pile of stones, and saw in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inevitableness of war stuff that chaps like you put up. Do you read the articles in the reviews and the quarterlies? They all pretty well prove that, apart from anything else, a big European war is impossible by the—well, by the sheer bigness of the thing. They say these modern gigantic armies couldn't operate, couldn't provision themselves. And there's the finance. They prove you can't fight without money and that credit would go and the thing would ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... was executed. And when Dakianos was placed there, "Prince," said the genie to him, "there is at the bottom of the sea a fish, the bigness of which is known only to Allah, and which every day comes to land. It remains there till noon to adore the Almighty. No person interrupts its prayers: when they are finished, it plunges again to ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... success. This last surprised even her friends and admirers. A moderate hit was quite expected, but not a triumph which placed her almost in the first rank, and was due not merely to her acting, but to a bigness of spirit and comprehension she had never before had an ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... we going to dress?" asked Amy. Nina, instantly diverted, suggested that they go in. Nina's awkward bigness and Amy's mousy neutral tones were as well displayed in one garment as another, but both girls debated over pinks and blues, crepes and mulls, every evening, as if the world was watching them alone. Harriet lingered for only ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... always been a great admirer of fine men, and as the Virginia colonel moved like Saul above the crowd, an erect, well-proportioned figure, he looked taller than he really was, but, as my aunt had said, was not of the bigness of ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... energy and ability which turn wealth to account, there is something sublime in the vista of the future. Do not suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly understood by national pride. I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... man may sit and give such a motion to it as shall convey him through the air. And this, perhaps, might be made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with food for their viaticum, and commodities for traffic. It is not the bigness of anything in this kind that can hinder its motion if the motive faculty be answerable "hereunto. We see that; great ship swims as well as a small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat. This ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... He was so still he appeared to be lifeless, a part of the ship; I looked hard before I decided it was a man. It was too dark to make out his features, almost too dark to discern outline, but by the bigness of the blot he made against his background I was sure the man was Newman. What he was doing in such a position I could not guess, but I was so sure of my man, I did not hesitate to move towards him. I even spoke his ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... reaches of green-brown plain that stretched and yawned into aching distances; the wonderfully blue and cloudless sky that covered it; they would have overlooked the timber groves that spread here and there over the face of the land, with their lure of mystery. No thoughts of the bigness of this country would have crept in upon them—except as they might have been reminded of the dreary distance from the glitter and the tinsel of the East. The mountains, distant and shining, would have meant nothing to them; the strong, pungent aroma of the sage ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... nearer, I thought it to be a white bowl of a prodigious height and bigness; and when I came up to it I touched it, and found it to be very smooth. I went round to see if it was open on any side, but saw it was not, and that there was no climbing up to the top of it, it was so smooth. It was at least fifty ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... such, before a noun: viz., to-day, to-night, to-morrow. If it is a "particle," so is any other preposition, as well as every small and invariable word. If it is a "little word," the whole bigness of a preposition is unquestionably found in it; and no "word" is so small but that it must belong to some one of the ten classes called parts of speech. If it is a "sign of the infinitive," because it is used before no other mood; so is it a sign of the objective case, or of what in Latin ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the door flung wide and the entrance of the cowboy. She did not recall how he had looked or what he had done. And the next instant she saw him cool, smiling, devilish—saw him in violence; the next his bigness, his apparel, his physical being were vague as outlines in a dream. The white face of the padre flashed along in the train of thought, and it brought the same dull, half-blind, indefinable state of mind subsequent to that last nerve-breaking pistol-shot. That passed, and ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Christians, in contempt of Christ and his holy religion, but had also taught the idolaters both how to make and use them. While I remained in Calicut, I saw them give a mould to the idolaters, by which they might cast brass cannon of sufficient bigness to receive a charge of 105 cantaros or measures of powder. At this time also there was a Jew in Calicut who had built a handsome brigantine, in which were four large iron cannons; but Providence soon after gave him his due reward, as he was drowned ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... fetching a great Compass in the swing, and having but little Compass in the brim, the Clapper keeps along by the side of the Bell, and gives no blow at all; but being hung short, the Bell fetches a quick and short Compass, equal to the bigness of the brim, ...
— Tintinnalogia, or, the Art of Ringing - Wherein is laid down plain and easie Rules for Ringing all - sorts of Plain Changes • Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman
... thanks to Evelyn for the happy designation, which was so grateful to Charles the Second, who was himself a virtuoso of the day, that the charter was soon granted: the king, declaring himself their founder, "sent them a mace of silver-gilt, of the same fashion and bigness as those carried before his majesty, to be borne before the president on meeting days." To the zeal of Evelyn the Royal Society owes no inferior acquisition to its title and its mace:[277] the noble Arundelian library, the rare literary accumulation of the noble Howards; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... forth Against our members, those same distances Take nothing by those intervals away From bulk of flames; and to the sight the fire Is nothing shrunken. Therefore, since the heat And the outpoured light of skiey sun Arrive our senses and caress our limbs, Form too and bigness of the sun must look Even here from earth just as they really be, So that thou canst scarce nothing take or add. And whether the journeying moon illuminate The regions round with bastard beams, or throw From off her proper body her own light,— Whichever it be, she journeys with ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... any value except a little ginger. It was inhabited by Papuas or blacks, whose ridiculous mode of dress, and their own natural deformity, made them appear little short of a kind of monsters. Hardly any of them but had something odd and strange, either in the bigness or position of their limbs. They had strings of hog's teeth hung about their necks; their noses were perforated, in which rings were fastened; their hair was frizled, and their faces very ugly. Their houses also were extremely ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... brilliant, as usual, but pale, and very nearly like the moon of a morning. But few of them were visible, and these ten times larger (as well as I could judge) than they seem to the inhabitants of the earth. The moon, which wanted two days of being full, was of a terrible bigness. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... bigness about the Court of the Universe, created not only by the architectural features, but by the symbolism of the final meeting of the Nations of the World, made possible by the completion of ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... a keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want of philosophy!" So in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," he, half in jest and half in earnest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... says my Lord; and from a Punnet they brought him he picks a Green Gooseberry; when, wonderful to relate, it swells in his hand to the bigness at least of an egg-plum, and turns the colour of Blood. "The de'il's in the Honey-Blobb," cries my Lord in a tiff, and flings it out of window, where it made a great ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... I saw here was prodigious, as well in quantity as in bigness, and seem'd in some places to be suffered to grow only because it was so far off of any navigation, that it was not worth cutting down and carrying away; in dry summers, indeed a great deal is carried away to Maidstone and ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... with their out-buildings, stood naked amid the lands, without screen or softening. There was something big and exposed about it all. No more the cosy English ambushed life, no longer the cosy littleness of the landscape. A bigness—and nothing to shelter the unshrinking spirit. It was all exposed, exposed to the sweep of plain, to the high, strong sky, and to human gaze. A kind of boldness, an indifference. Aaron was impressed and ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... call'd an Armadillo, a Thing which I can liken to nothing so well as a Rhinoceros; 'tis all in white Armour, so jointed, that it moves as well in it, as if it had nothing on: This Beast is about the Bigness of a Pig of six Weeks old. But it were endless to give an Account of all the divers wonderful and strange Things that Country affords, and which we took a great Delight to go in Search of; tho' those Adventures are oftentimes fatal, and at least ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... excess. If even the legitimate superlative must be handled, like dynamite, with extreme caution, blackguardism of every degree is a nuisance to be summarily discountenanced and abated by those who know the difference between grandeur and bigness, between Mercutio and Tony Lumpkin, between fair-play ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... a silent nod. He had nothing to add. He knew all that was stirring beyond that stony regard, and his sympathies were in full harmony. The bigness of these two men was unlimited by any of the conventions of human civilization. They were too deeply steeped in the teachings of the long trail to bow meekly to the laws set up by men. Their doctrines were primitive, but they saw with ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... when I found her under a beech-tree, sucking her thumb, but she hadn't. She only looked up at me—oh, so sweetly! SHE will never go bad and grow big! When they begin to grow big they care for nothing but bigness; and when they cannot grow any bigger, they try to grow fatter. The bad giants are very proud ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... in a picture by Jordaens and a fable by La Fontaine. The hairy son of Sycorax appeared in the noble world of Shakespeare. Putois, less fortunate, will be always neglected by artists and poets. He lacks bigness and the unusual style and character. He was conceived by minds too reasonable, among people who knew how to read and write, and who had not that delightful imagination in which fables take root. I think, Messieurs, that I have said enough to ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... which meant in plain English, stimulating his sexual desire to that fever-heat which they called impassioned living. As if there were not a thousand other forms of deep fulfilment in life. People who thought that, how narrow and cramped they seemed, and blinded to the bigness and variety of life! But then, of course, everybody hadn't had under his eyes a creature genuinely rich and various, like Marise, and hadn't seen how all children feasted on her charm like bees on honey, and how old people adored her, and how, just by being ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... was confused, painfully conscious of his inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inadequate. He could not express what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. Well, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... perhaps, but rubbing shoulders with some of the men who actually shaped the affairs of the business world. The realization stimulated him, lifted him up. And when he went to claim his next dance with the social arbiter, he felt more of an equal with "bigness." ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... saul, that meikle stane would build a bra' chappin-block for my Lord Provost," said royalty, its head again stationed at the window, surveying with solemn curiosity an egg-shaped stone of the boulder sort, which, sure enough, was of a remarkable bigness, though not of that rarity or infrequence that should have drawn forth the wonder of a king. His native dialect he generally employed on jocose and familiar subjects. In affairs of importance he affected the use of the English tongue, which ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... map-makers, as I am told, do not agree to it; however, it is certainly the eastern boundary of the ancient Siberia, which now makes a province only of the vast Muscovite empire, but is itself equal in bigness to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... Eustache at Paris, has left his Living, reckoned worth 80l. St. a year, and is very lately gone to London to be Chaplain to the Sardinian Minister: he has carried with him a quantity of coloured Glass Seals with the Pretender's Son's Effigy, as also small heads made of silver gilt about this bigness [example] to be set in rings, as also points for watch cases, with the same head, and this motto round "Look, Love, and ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... tore the letter into a thousand half-pence] [i.e. into a thousand pieces of the same bigness.] This is farther explained by a passage in As ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... and country life. Born in the country he is free, his thoughts and ambitions can feed on a pure atmosphere, but he thinks his conditions and his surroundings are circumscribed; he longs for the city, with its bigness, its turmoil, and its conflicts. He leaves the old homestead, the quiet village, the country people, and hies himself to the city. He forgets to a large extent the good boy he used to be, in the desire to keep up with the fashions and ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various |
