"Gigantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were pushed across the break, the track was laid and the gigantic work of filling the channel was begun. In every rock quarry reached by the S. & C. within two hundred and fifty miles of the battle, men were drilling and blasting and with steam shovels and derricks ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... hear, And catch your words before you speak. The woodlouse or the maggot's weak Clamour rings in his sad ear; And noise so slight it would surpass Credence:—drinking sound of grass, Worm-talk, clashing jaws of moth Chumbling holes in cloth: The groan of ants who undertake Gigantic loads for honour's sake— Their sinews creak, their breath comes thin: Whir of spiders when they spin, And minute whispering, mumbling, sighs Of idle grubs and flies. This man is quickened so with grief, He wanders god-like or like ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting." These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well known about risu inepto, and passes on. Such a tone on such a subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to bring Literature and Dogma into competition with A Tale of a Tub; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... lumps." Of the other vermin, including multitudinous snakes, and hairy spiders the size of toy terriers they took no particular notice. The amenities of the place were wonderful orchids, brilliantly coloured parrots and gigantic butterflies with great prismy wings. The Burtons kept a number of slaves, whom, however, they paid "as if they were free men," and Mrs. Burton erected a chapel for them—her oratory—where the Bishop ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... large plain cut by the Wady el-Kibrit. Moreover, a vein of the red variety, about three kilometres long by twenty-five to thirty metres broad, lies to the south-east near a gypsum hill: the latter also yields the crystallized salt which so often accompanies sulphur, and heaps of gigantic half-fossilized oyster-shells ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... work and cut up several fresh buffalo hides into long and strong lines with which he made a net of enormous mesh and strength. He arranged it in such a way, with a line run round the circumference, that he could draw it together like a purse. With this gigantic affair on his shoulder, he set off one morning at daybreak into the mountains. He met the agent, who was an early riser, on ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... river-side, and towards which we had often cast a wishful eye, being unable to drag it up the bank. The Indians set about every thing with an activity that amazed us. Indeed, contrasted with our emaciated figures and extreme debility, their frames appeared to us gigantic, and their strength supernatural. These kind creatures next turned their attention to our personal appearance, and prevailed upon us to shave and wash ourselves. The beards of the Doctor and Hepburn had been untouched since they left ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy, shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts, sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly, their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through the blackness one discerned ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Lee had now—so gigantic, compared to Earth—all the Inter-Stellar universe was a void here of what old Anthony considered would be perhaps eight or ten thousand miles. A void, to Lee now, was itself of no greater volume than the Earth had been to ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... beginning to assume gigantic shapes and to get mixed up with the horizon, and his eyes were aching. He was suffering keenly. Finally his eyes rested on the ground. A new trouble had arisen and was torturing him: he thought it was his duty to congratulate her on her engagement with his brother. If he wished her happiness without ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... 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 to arrive ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... be brought here and exhibited in their crude state. You can easily realize the value to our company of such a gigantic advertisement. Crowds will flock to see the wonderful crystals. The newspapers all over the country will give them the widest publicity. After everybody has seen them, we shall probably send them to Amsterdam ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... of the neighbouring village who was more than sixty years of age. It was even rumoured that he went so far in secret as to provide funds for the fireworks with which some of his flatterers were to celebrate the forthcoming event, and that one form of illumination was a gigantic frame which, set upon the Sky Hill, immediately in front of our house, was intended to display in brilliant lights the glowing words "God Bless the Happy Heir." Certainly the birth was to be announced by the ringing of the big bell of the tower ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... in an afternoon of gigantic effort. By six o'clock, the beds were made, dishes unpacked and in the china closet, the table was set for supper and an Irish stew of Lydia's make was simmering ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... from the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced me—for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army arrested upon a downward march — seemed something unusual and gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe than the extreme darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in the sky that introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple. Great clouds, so charged with rain that you ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... nodded. Genius, however exalted, acknowledges unsolicited testimonials from any source. He saw plainly that in Dan's eyes he loomed gigantic. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... north room, he fairly hugged himself with fierce partisanship. "What have I done to be treated in this way?" he demanded, setting his face ahead in the darkness; and he did not see Cephas Barnard's threatening countenance, but another, gigantic with its vague outlines, which his fancy could not limit, confronting him with terrible negative power like a stone image. He struck out against it, and the blows fell back on ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... bewildered and overwhelmed most persons in the woman's exhausted condition, seemed, on the contrary, to reassure her feelings and reanimate her powers. She disengaged herself from her preserver's support, and taking her child in her arms, advanced towards a man of gigantic stature, whose rich armour sufficiently announced that his position in the army ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... neither an engineer, nor a blacksmith, nor a builder, Brest will not interest you very much. The port is magnificent, I admit; beautiful, if you say so; gigantic, if you wish. It is imposing, you know, and gives the impression of a powerful nation. But those piles of cannons and anchors and cannon-balls, the infinite extension of those quays, which enclose a calm, flat sea that appears to be chained down, and those big workshops filled with grinding ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... 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,' as the Revised Version ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... can take it from us but ourselves, but we are so weak and surrounded by temptations so strong that we need Him to aid us if we are not to be beguiled by our own treacherous hearts into parting with our highest good. A handful of feeble Jews were nothing against the gigantic might of Assyria, or against the compacted strength of civilised Egypt; but there they stood, on their rocky mountains, defended, not by their own strength, but by the might of a present God. And so, unfit to cope with the temptations round us as we are, if we cast ourselves ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... writing. I have re-read it in a more favorable moment, and hesitate not to pronounce it sublime. If there be anything in it approaching to tumidity (which I meant not to infer; by "elaborate" I meant simply "labored"), it is the gigantic hyperbole by which you describe the evils of existing society: "snakes, lions, hyenas, and behemoths," is carrying your resentment beyond bounds. The pictures of "The Simoom," of "Frenzy and Ruin," of "The Whore of Babylon," and "The ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... that any one who could conquer the army of giants and dwarfs and Gray Men that served Terribus must surely be one to be regarded seriously. Moreover—and this was a secret—the Red Rogue had never been able to gain the strength to correspond with his gigantic size, but had ever remained as weak as when he was a puny boy. So he was accustomed to rely on his cunning and on the terror his very presence usually excited to triumph over his enemies. And he began to be afraid ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... and energy were so universally recognized, that on the retirement of Gabor Kemeny, in 1886, he was appointed minister of ways and communications. He devoted himself especially to the development of the national railways, and the gigantic network of the Austro-Hungarian railway system and its unification is mainly his work. But his most original creation in this respect was the zone system, which immensely facilitated and cheapened the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... that she was being tried seriously, and was delighted that the Pelican had come nearer to her stump, so that she had a better view of him. She thought him such an old, old looking bird, with his big bald head, and gigantic beak. She could not help thinking that his beak must be too heavy for him, and asked if he would like to rest it on the stump. The Pelican did not understand Dot's kindness, and gave her a look of offended dignity that was ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... discussing the chances, a faint star sparkled in the midst of the cavernous gloom. "You see it because you imagine it," cried some; yet, no, it was steadfast, and grew broad and bright, until even the most sceptical recognised the pale midnight sky at the bottom of the gigantic arch. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... have been excavated in the ninth century. The walls are covered with gigantic figures in relief. The temple is in the form of a cross, the main hall being a hundred and forty-four feet in depth. The ceiling is supported by twenty-six columns and eighteen pilasters, sixteen to eighteen feet high. They look clumsy, but ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... who should devote themselves body and soul to the interests of the Church; he resolved to bring all society into submission to that priesthood; finally, he resolved to make the priesthood itself acknowledge him as its sole master. His purpose in this gigantic scheme was a noble one; it was to establish the unity ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... history. Passion, sensuality, ferocity, superstitious ignorance, and fear characterized the age. It is supposed that western Europe was overpopulated and that the crusades operated a beneficial reduction of numbers.[441] These facts may account for the gigantic mass phenomena in the early Middle Ages. Every sentiment was extravagant. Men were under some mighty gregarious instinct which drove them to act in masses, and they passed from one great passion or enthusiastic ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that is the gold mine; for although every knowing man may not be able to be a rich man, yet out of ignorance riches do not spring anywhere. Ignorant men may be made the factors of wealth when they are guided and governed by superior intelligence. Slave labor produced gigantic plantations and estates. The slave was always poor, but his master was rich, because the master had the intelligence and the knowledge, and the slave gave the work. All through human society, men who represent simple ignorance will be tools, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... around a curve in the wall. Enoch edged gingerly beyond this and paused. The trail again was broken, but they were in full view of the cliff dwelling, which was snuggled in an inward curve of the Canyon, filling entirely a gigantic gap in the ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and near. I am even out of humor with pictures; a bit of broken stone or a fragment of a bas-relief, or a Corinthian column standing out against this lapis-lazuli sky, or a tremendous arch, are the only things I can look at for the moment,— except the Sistine Chapel, which is as gigantic as the rest, and forces itself upon you with ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... avenues, weird aircraft thronged the upper atmosphere, and gigantic buildings and palaces dotted the place. All ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... Intrenched behind a gigantic mit, the Big Man strove valorously to hold the difficult balls. After a long period of this mitigated pleasure they sat down to rest. Then Cap Kiefer's stocky figure appeared around the Dickinson, and the Butcher went off for ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... Salvation Army is prepared to face this gigantic task, it may be hoped that it will be given an opportunity of showing what it can do on a large scale, as it has already shown upon one more restricted. Prison reform is in the air. The present system is admitted more or less to have broken down. It has been shown to be incompetent ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... "take two of your best men; get pistols. Shut the offices! Let no one leave! There's been a gigantic robbery ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... of Mexico rose as it were from the waters of the great lake, with its towers and temples white and gleaming, and behind it the royal hill of Chapoltepec, the residence of the Mexican kings, crowned with the very same gigantic cypress trees which to this day fling their broad shadows across the land. The Spaniards gazed in rapture over the gay scene, exclaiming, 'It is the promised land!' but presently the evidences of a power and civilisation so far superior ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... open, and revealed the gigantic form of the celebrated watch-dog of Hell. It completely filled their wide expanse. Who but Pluto could have viewed without horror that enormous body covered with shaggy spikes, those frightful paws clothed with claws of steel, that tail like a boa constrictor, those fiery eyes that blazed like the ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... to close quarters with the Hanoverian infantry, who, deserted by the dragoons, were now attacked on both sides as well as in front. A few stood firm, and the gallant Colonel Gardiner put himself at their head. A blow from a scytheblade in the hands of a gigantic Macgregor ended his life, and spared him the shame and sorrow of another defeat. The Park walls at their back prevented the infantry from seeking ignoble security in flight, after the fashion of the dragoons, and they were forced ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... man looked fearfully at the giant and hung back. Even as they talked, his gigantic body had grown as high as the four-storied buildings lining the Square, and his feet were becoming too large for the place where they had first been put. And now a faint smile could be seen on the giant's ...
— A Scientist Rises • Desmond Winter Hall
... surface layers of the earth must have been the lightest, they would necessarily, when broken up by this gigantic convulsion, have come together to form the exterior of the new satellite, and be soon adjusted by the forces of gravity and tidal disturbance into a more or less irregular spheroidal form, all whose interstices and ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... seemed to be waiting solitary with everlasting patience in the web of wavering flame beneath the huge dark sky. Scores of posters, large and small, showed that Robertson's "School" was being performed in the theatre away over the sea at the extremity of the pier. The promenade, save for one gigantic policeman, and a few distant carriages, was apparently deserted, and the line of dimly lighted hotels, stretching vaguely east and west, had an air grim and forlorn at ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... energy of his mind, every muscle of his body, every hour of his life, to the Civil Service of his country. It was not much, perhaps, that he had been able to do; he could not boast of those acute powers of mind, of that gigantic grasp of intellect, of which they saw in those days so wonderful an example in a high place.' Sir Gregory here gratefully alluded to that statesman who had given him his present appointment. 'But still he had devoted all his mind, such ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... majestic trees, which grow but to decay! Enormous trunks lay on every side: some had passed into the rottenness which gives new life; and here fungi of bright and varied hues, grey lichen, and green moss preserved together the contour of the gigantic stem, which, prostrate and decayed now, had once held its head high amongst the lordlings ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... ascribed to FRODE, who makes the Finns pay him, every three years, a car full or sledge full of skins for every ten heads; and extorts one skin per head from the Perms. It is Frode, too (though Saxo has carved a number of Frodes out of one or two kings of gigantic personality), that made the Saxons pay a poll-tax, a piece of money per head, using, like William the Conqueror, his extraordinary revenue to reward his soldiers, whom he first regaled with double pay. But on the conquered ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... mustard seed, which all the symbolists accept in a figurative sense as representing Christ, to the sycamore and the terebinth, you have a wide range; you can at pleasure have a tiny cross, a mere nothing, or a gigantic crucifix." ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... she would say, when I gushed to her about our Master; but that was the most I could ever extort from her in the way of praise. Though she admitted intellectually Sebastian's gigantic mind, she would never commit herself to anything that sounded like personal admiration. To call him "the prince of physiologists" did not satisfy me on that head. I wanted her to exclaim, "I adore him! I worship him! He is ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... the wind, and she was now flying towards the inhospitable Chunks. The skipper was less concerned for his schooner than for the lives of his crew. The ship was already lost; the crew—well, how could the crew survive the rocks and gigantic breakers of the Chunks? ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... which formerly had resembled those gigantic pillars of sand that mould themselves continually under the action of sun and wind in the great deserts—suddenly showing themselves upon the remote horizon, rear themselves silently and swiftly, then stalking forward ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... station near the stern, Martin could not see the rail at the break of the poop, could hardly, indeed, discern objects a dozen paces distant. Familiar figures, entering his circle of vision, loomed gigantic and grotesque. The Cohasset sailed over a ghostly sea, whose quiet was broken only by the harsh squawking of sea-birds ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... widened out interminably, and he saw, looking ahead, a great heap of gigantic billows, leaping, sparkling, tossing, climbing over each other in the fitful light of the moon, like huge sea-monsters waiting to devour and engulf him. He smiled as he felt the yielding craft on which he stood swirl towards those breakers, and begin to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... hung inactive; as if knowing that it was no intrinsic part of what the attacking force wanted. Left so fearfully alone, any other man would have lain with his eyes shut where he fell: but the gigantic brain of Hook was still working, and under its guidance he crawled on his knees along the deck as far from the sound as he could go. The pirates respectfully cleared a passage for him, and it was only when he brought up against the bulwarks that ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... world or brought greater triumphs to England: but few have had more disastrous beginnings. Newcastle was too weak and ignorant to rule without aid, and yet too greedy of power to purchase aid by sharing it with more capable men. His preparations for the gigantic struggle before him may be guessed from the fact that there were but three regiments fit for service in England at the opening of 1756. France on the other hand was quick in her attack. Port Mahon ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... of ice. A strange sight suddenly attracted our attention. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the North: a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice. Before night the ice broke ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... to found professorships, to patronise men of learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise. Every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazars of the Tigris to the monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and manuscripts. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, were munificently encouraged. Indeed it would be difficult to name an Italian of eminence, during the period of which we speak, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I have said, a great philosopher, and the heart and mystery of his philosophy was, to look upon the world as a gigantic practical joke; as something too absurd to be considered seriously, by any rational man. His system of belief had been, in the beginning, part and parcel of the battle-ground on which he lived, as you shall ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... coming on deck, Bentley leaped into the mizzen rigging and ran up the shrouds with an agility surprising in one of his gigantic figure and advanced age. After a rapid survey he came down swiftly. "It's an English frigate, and not a doubt of it, sir, and rising ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the arm of his companion, he led him in silence and at a brisk pace to the door of a quiet establishment in Rupert Street, Soho. The entrance was adorned with one of those gigantic Highlanders of wood which have almost risen to the standing of antiquities; and across the window-glass, which sheltered the usual display of pipes, tobacco, and cigars, there ran the gilded legend: 'Bohemian Cigar Divan, by T. Godall.' ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... morality of their trade; they will be frank with you; all will tell you that the commission business is extortion. Complaints are made of the frauds and adulterations which disgrace manufactures: commerce—I refer especially to the commission business—is only a gigantic and permanent conspiracy of monopolists, by turns competing or joined in pools; it is not a function performed with a view to a legitimate profit, but a vast organization of speculation in all articles of consumption, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Balearic Isles, peaches from France, and dates from Tunis. The supper consisted of a roast pheasant garnished with Corsican blackbirds; a boar's ham with jelly, a quarter of a kid with tartar sauce, a glorious turbot, and a gigantic lobster. Between these large dishes were smaller ones containing various dainties. The dishes were of silver, and ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... he drank, held a tight grip on the rope. The ram settled back slightly, till the rope was almost taut. Then he launched himself forward. His movement was straight and swift, as if he had been propelled by a gigantic spring. His massive, broad-horned forehead struck the stooping man ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Indian corn are very numerous, exhibiting every grade of size, color, and conformation, between the "chubby reed" that grows on the shores of Lake superior—the gigantic stalks of the Ohio valley—the tiny ears, with flat, close, clinging grains, of Canada—the brilliant, rounded little pearl—the bright red grains and white cob of the eight-rowed haematite—the swelling ears of the big white and the yellow gourd seed of the South. From ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the gate of St. John stood the old mansion of Belmont, the country-seat of the Bourgeois Philibert—a stately park, the remains of the primeval forest of oak, maple, and pine; trees of gigantic growth and ample shade surrounded the high-roofed, many-gabled house that stood on the heights of St. Foye overlooking the broad valley of the St. Charles. The bright river wound like a silver serpent through the flat meadows in the bottom of the valley, while the opposite slopes of alternate ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... street extending like a shadowed band of darkness between gaunt, high walls. I had noticed for some time that the stone structure beside us seemed to be unbroken by door or window—that it appeared to be a single gigantic building, black and forbidding. I mentioned the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... Pierced with holes, and round, and roofed like the top of a lighthouse, And went forth to receive the coming guest at the doorway, Casting into the dark a network of glimmer and shadow Over the falling snow, the yellow sleigh, and the horses, And the forms of men, snow-covered, looming gigantic. Then giving Joseph the lantern, she entered the house with the stranger. Youthful he was and tall, and his cheeks aglow with the night air; And as he entered, Elizabeth rose, and, going to meet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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 ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... there for Colonel Clifford. That worthy frequented the spot because he had done so for years, and because it was a sweet turfy slope; and there was a wonderful beech-tree his father had made him plant when he was five years old. It had a gigantic silvery stem, and those giant branches which die crippled in a beech wood but really belong to the isolated tree, as one Virgil discovered before we were born. Mary Bartley then lowered her ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... in a place which seemed like a fissure rent in a mountain side, by some extraordinary convulsion of nature. All around rose black, precipitous cliffs. On the side nearest was the precipice by whose base he had passed; while over opposite was a gigantic wall of dark rock, Which extended far out into the sea. Huge waves thundered at its feet and dashed their spray far upward into the air. The space was ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... to me more than anything it was likely to bring. The water became smoother and smoother, and nothing broke 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. ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... whose characters and limitations will be further exposed, as surely as my own, as this narrative proceeds. But already we have enrolled certain retainers who may play no small part in what is to come. The first is a gigantic negro named Zambo, who is a black Hercules, as willing as any horse, and about as intelligent. Him we enlisted at Para, on the recommendation of the steamship company, on whose vessels he had learned ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... they themselves alone know all their wealth, and all their misery, all the boundless possibilities of happiness that are theirs, and all the dangers and the terrors that beset their path. He who has won woman in the face of daring rivals, of enormous odds, of gigantic obstacles, knows what love means; he who has lost her, having loved her, alone has measured with his own soul the bitterness of earthly sorrow, the depth of total loneliness, the breadth of the wilderness of despair. And he who has sorrowed long, who has long been alone, but who has watched ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... "Gigantic shadows, dancing in the twilight Fade with the sun's last golden ray. On quivering bat-wings, sad and silent, Flits darkness—night pursuing day. Hark! as the twelfth hour sounds its knell At midnight, tolls a whimpering bell When yawning graves profane ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... romance! I waked one morning, in the beginning of last June, from a dream, of which, all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story), and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down, and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add, that I was very glad to think of anything, rather than politics. In short, I was so engrossed ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Neropolis extended, a city of triumphal arches, enchanted temples, royal dwellings, shimmering porticoes, glittering roofs, and wide, hospitable streets. It was fair to the eye, purely Greek; and on its heart, from the Circus Maximus to the Forum's edge, the new and gigantic palace shone. Before it was a lake, a part of which Vespasian drained and replaced with an amphitheatre that covered eight acres. About that lake were separate edifices that formed a city in themselves; between them and ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... persevered in, to destroy all power of steady application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes, "is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... an air of having come in perfect and luxurious condition, fur-lined and jewel-clasped, as it were, from the hands of a good decorator, and of having stopped at that. The great triple lamp glowed green as if set with gigantic emeralds; and its soft light shone on a scheme of color full of charm for the eye. The stuffs, the woodwork, were of a delightful harmony, but it seemed that the books and the pictures were chosen to match them. The man talking, in the great carved armchair by the fire, fitted the place. His ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the Potomac. Bonham's Brigade was at Flint Hill, Cox's at Centerville, Jones's at Germantown, Hampton and Early on the Occoquon, the Louisiana Brigade at Bull Run, and Longstreet at Fairfax Court House. The troops were all in easy distance, and a gigantic plan of General Beauregard, with the doubtful approval of General Johnston and others, was for a formidable invasion of the North. General Johnston evinced that same disposition in military tactics that he followed during the war, "a purely defensive war." In none of his campaigns did ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... built upon them and is the greatest of them. They lie before the threshold and at the basis of all existence. For example:—here is a lump of compact, whitish, cheese-like substance, about as much as would go into a thimble. From this I profess to be able to produce a gigantic, intricate structure, sixty feet in height and diameter, hard, solid, and enduring, which shall furthermore possess the power of extending and multiplying itself until it covers the whole earth, and even all the earths in the universe, if it could reach them. Is such a profession ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... magnificent symphonies ever sung by that music, architecture. One dreams for a long time before this oratorio. Looking up from the square you see at a giddy height, at the base of the two towers, a row of gigantic statues representing kings of France. In their hands they hold the sceptre, the sword, the hand of justice, and the globe, and on their heads are antique open crowns with bulging gems. It is superb and grim. You push open the bell-ringer's door, climb the winding staircase, "the ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... friends keeping aloof because of his liberal sentiments; but it is delightful to witness the hearty affection with which an Independent minister recommends the work of a Baptist; and truly refreshing to hear so learned a man commending most earnestly the work of a poor, unlettered, but gigantic brother in the ministry. Surely there is water enough connected with that controversy to quench any unholy fire that differences of opinion might ignite. George Cokayn appears to have possessed much a kindred spirit with John Bunyan. Some of his expressions are remarkably Bunyanish. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... morning at dawn I went toward it across the sands, my eyes fastened on this, gigantic jewel, as big as a mountain, cut like a cameo, and as dainty as lace. The nearer I approached the greater my admiration grew, for nothing in the world could be more wonderful or ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... theatre and one of the most imposing structures in the world. It was inaugurated by 100 days' gladiatorial combats, in which 5000 wild animals were killed. It contained seats for 87,000 spectators. Only one-third of the gigantic structure now remains, yet the ruins are still stupendously impressive. The Colosseum has ever been a symbol of the greatness of Rome, and gave rise in the eighth century to a prophetic saying of the pilgrims: "While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; when falls the Colosseum, Rome ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... is some white linen!" said Porthos, in his turn, in a voice of thunder. At the sound of this gigantic voice, the cat took flight, the housekeeper woke up with a start, and Planchet, assuming a gracious air, introduced his two companions into the room, where ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... reception of their confession of faith by the Emperor at Augsburg, the Protestant princes of Germany had formed a defensive league. Francis, having basely abandoned his former allies, was left alone to combat the gigantic power of a rival between two portions of whose dominions his own kingdom lay exposed. Every consideration of prudence dictated the policy of lending to the German Protestants, in their endeavor to humble the pride of their common antagonist, the most efficient ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... the 30th, and the next night made bivouacs at Caulaincourt Chateau, formerly German Corps Headquarters, now wrecked past recognition. Amid the rubbish, whose heaps represented buildings of grace and dignity, the eye caught the half of a gigantic Easter egg. During our stay a German High Velocity gun several times shelled the chateau grounds. Our own artillery was now getting to work and made the nights ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... his journey on the morrow. The day is overcast, and the clouds threaten rain or snow. Why does he stop at the little village of Capellen? Because, right above him on the high cliff, the glorious ruin of Stolzenfels is looking at him with itshollow eyes, and beckoning to him with its gigantic finger, as if to say; "Come up hither, and I will tell thee an old tale." Therefore he alights, and goes up the narrow village lane, and up the stone steps, and up the steep pathway, and throws himself into the arms of that ancient ruin, and holds his breath, to hear the quick footsteps of ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... out, it is astonishing how easy it becomes to make light of the last, monotonous stretch of road that remains to be travelled. Is there not, just beyond, a resting-place?—and cool, green shadows? Events and circumstances which had hitherto loomed forth gigantic, threatening to crush, now appeared to Maurice trivial and of little moment; he saw them in other proportions now, for it seemed to him that he was no longer in their midst: he stood above them and ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... marvel of intricate inlaying, including the signs of the zodiac and a gnomic sentence which reads the same backwards and forwards—"En gire torte sol ciclos et roterigne". On this very pavement Dante, who called the church his "beautiful San Giovanni," has walked. Over the altar is a gigantic and primitive Christ in mosaic, more splendid than spiritual. The mosaics in the recesses of the clerestory—grey and white—are the most soft and lovely of all. I believe the Baptistery is the most ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... damsel, but far taller than she, rushed abroad and called for Antiphas. He came, and snatching up one of the two men, made as if he would devour him. The other fled. Antiphas raised a mighty shout, and instantly, this way and that, multitudes of gigantic people issued out at the gates, and making for the harbour, tore up huge pieces of the rocks, and flung them at the ships which lay there, all which they utterly overwhelmed and sank; and the unfortunate bodies of men which floated, and which the ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... that traverses the island. The top of the mountain had been levelled as flat as a table, and a space of about an acre was covered with what appeared to be a floor of huge basaltic prisms, laid closely together. What the purpose of such gigantic labour was none of my companions had any idea, and on my inquiring from Lizzie how these stones, many of which weighed several tons, were carried to such an extraordinary height up such a steep ascent, she shook her head, and said, "You ask Rii. He is a very old man, and not a Christian, and ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... high heaven's resplendent host! To whom I oft have of my lot complained, Hear and record my soul's unaltered wish Living or dead, let me but be renowned! May Heaven inspire some fierce gigantic Dane To give a bold defiance to our host! Before he speaks it out, I will accept, Like Douglas conquer, or like ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and in that awful solitude, under the spell of that eternal silence, a sense of the infinite hushed every tongue, and each one stood with bated breath, as if on holy ground. On every side the billowy ranges surged, like the gigantic waves of a storm-tossed ocean suddenly congealed to stone, while here and there, towered mighty peaks, like huge sentinels, their brows seamed with furrows plowed by the hand of the centuries, their heads white with the ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... tears, brought home to him the need of a steady head . . . and responsibility. Yes, he must keep his two feet solidly on the ground and face a gigantic responsibility. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the more you will come to the conclusion which I have arrived at, that this foreign policy, this regard for 'the liberties of Europe', this care at one time for 'the Protestant interests', this excessive love for 'the balance of power', is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain. (Great laughter.) I observe that you receive that declaration as if it were some new and important discovery. In 1815, when the great war with France was ended, every Liberal in England whose ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... that so delicate and laborious a task should have remained unattempted. Democracy is a gigantic current that has been fed by many springs. Physical and spiritual causes have contributed to swell it. Much has been done by economic theories, and more by economic laws. The propelling force lay sometimes in doctrine and sometimes in ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... conquered their conquerors, whose annals extend back indisputably to a period more remote than mythological or Bible times, who by their immutable institutions have preserved the integrity of their empire, whose monuments are gigantic, whose administration is perfect, among whom revolutions are impossible, who have regarded ideal beauty as a barren element in art, who have carried luxury and industry to such a pitch that we cannot outdo ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... towered the memory of their first minister, a man of gigantic power, scholarly and profound, grimly genial, carrying with him everywhere the air of the Eternal. He was as eloquent almost as human lips can be, magnetic to the point of tyranny, and grandly independent of everything and every one but ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... midst of the cheering crowd warm indeed was his welcome. Stalwart arms seized him, and hoisted him up on the shoulders of a couple of gigantic Indians, who at once began their march to the front of the mission house, where amid the cheering of the crowd a blue ribbon was pinned upon the breast of his coat by the trembling fingers of an equally happy maiden, ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... master pianists, Rubinstein and Liszt, were both marvelously broad in the scope of their knowledge. They knew the literature of the pianoforte in all its possible branches. They made themselves familiar with every possible phase of musical advancement. This is the reason for their gigantic prominence. Their greatness was not the hollow shell of acquired technic. THEY KNEW. Oh, for more students in these days with the genuine thirst for real musical knowledge, and not merely with the desire to make a ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... to duty, and without compassion: —that means that you are in train to grow a gigantic selfhood, which Nature abhors; emptiness of compassion is the vacuum nature most abhors. You see a strong man with his ambitions: scorning vices, scorning weakness; scorning too, and lashing with his scorn, the weak and vicious; bending men to his ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... any similarity to pride in it; would have deemed it the reverse. It was in fact the painful gathering of the atoms composing pride. For she had not only suffered; she had done wrongly: and when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings the wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against him. In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure; one of those that Romance delights to harass ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... British ambassador at the Russian Court, writing privately and in very homely phrase to his colleague at Constantinople, Sir William White: "I am convinced Russia does not want a general war in Europe about Turkey now, and that she is really suffering from a gigantic Katzenjammer (surfeit) caused by the last war[232]." It is safe to say that Bulgaria largely owes her freedom from Russian control to ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... blast of wind, which seemed to have rushed down from the clouds, and ripped its way through the bosom of the woodlands; rooting up, shivering, and splintering the stoutest trees, and leaving a long track of desolation. There was something awful in the vast havoc made among these gigantic plants; and in considering their magnificent remains, so rudely torn and mangled, and hurled down to perish prematurely on their native soil, I was conscious of a strong movement of the sympathy so feelingly ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... army and navy, withdrawn chiefly from the producing classes, and liberally fed, clothed, and paid by the Government, yet the yield of most of the great staples of agriculture for 1863 exceeds that of 1862.... This wonderful fact of history—a young republic carrying on a gigantic war on its own territory and coasts, and at the same time not only feeding itself and foreign nations, but furnishing vast quantities of raw materials for commerce and manufactures—proves that we are essentially an agricultural people; that three years of war have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... Philadelphia during the winter and spring season of '78 than John Anderson, would have been hard to find. For weeks he had applied himself with relentless energy to the work before him; for months he had deprived himself of the customary rounds of pleasure in the interests of the seemingly gigantic task allotted to him; until at length, for the first time, he was enabled to appreciate to some degree the results of his toil. It was now past Easter-tide and the moments were hurrying faster and faster in their haste towards the culmination of the conspiracy that was forming ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... so gigantic in their conceptions! Their ideas altogether overwhelm us poor, insignificant, latter-day mortals. They built these vast Pyramids; but for us, it is task enough ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope
... some species of monstrous, magic banyan tree. Here were machines of a hundred uses and shapes, singly, in batteries—a scrambled mass it seemed. There were small machines—and in the distance huge presses, massive, their very outlines speaking of gigantic power. Bonbright had seen sheets of metal fed into them, to be spewed out at another point bent and molded to a desired form. Overhead conveyers increased the scrambled appearance. Men with trucks, men on hurried ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... but he unluckily dropped at his seat a slip of paper on which his gushing sentences had been carefully written out. General Houston managed to leave the table in time to avoid being called upon to speak, and General Scott, who regarded Kossuth as a gigantic humbug, had escaped to Richmond. Kossuth was invited to dine at the White House, and on New Year's day he held a reception, but he failed in his attempt to secure ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... down the whole flight of stairs, and ended with a mighty blow against my door, put an end to my indecision. I took up the candle, and a stick, and went out. At the moment when I opened the door my light was blown out. A gigantic white figure glimmered opposite to me, and I felt myself suddenly embraced by two strong arms. I cried for help, and struggled so actively to get loose that both myself and my adversary fell to the ground, but so ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... have been ten or eleven feet high, and as broad as a boy of that height ought to be. his Norfolk suit had fortunately grown too, and now he stood up in it - with one of his enormous stockings turned down to show the gigantic bruise on his vast leg. Immense tears of fury still stood on his flushed giant face. He looked so surprised, and he was so large to be wearing an Eton collar, that the others could not ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... somnolent condition; a grave agricultural crisis affecting landed proprietors and peasants had begun, but it was merely a development of a state of things which I had previously described; the manufacturing industry had made gigantic strides, but they were all in the direction which the most competent observers had predicted; in foreign policy the old principles of guiding the natural expansive forces along the lines of least resistance, seeking to reach warm-water ports, and pegging out territorial claims ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... singer, he sometimes nearly equals the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of them have built in a gigantic syringa near our front door, and I have known the male to sing almost uninterruptedly during the evenings of early summer till twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an undertone, ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... pride of most genealogists were to her contemptible. Arms and mottoes set her beside herself. Ealfried of Ullathorne had wanted no motto to assist him in cleaving to the brisket Geoffrey De Burgh; and Ealfried's great grandfather, the gigantic Ullafrid, had required no other arms than those which nature gave him to hurl from the top of his own castle a cousin of the base invading Norman. To her all modern English names were equally insignificant. Hengist, Horsa, and such like, had for her the only true savour of nobility. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... and brightest hues—the denizens of the woods and the waters—of every variety of plumage, habit, song, and size—from the splendid macaw and toucan to the uncouth pelican and the shapeless puffin—from the gigantic ostrich to the beautiful but diminutive golden wren; in short, all the birds which are congregated in this spot come, literally, from every corner of our globe. The great alpine vulture may have sailed above the heights of Hohenlinden; the Egyptian vulture have roosted on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... Columbus's personal adventures. I shall now endeavor to present the reader with a brief outline of it, as far as can be collected from imperfect and scanty materials; for, however incomplete in itself, it becomes important as containing the germ of the gigantic system ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... hardly one of which it is not. And these histories are in many cases as rich and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence who have lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination which for centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes, beheld as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was neither one nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it was beside and in connection with the mounds and cairns that this history was elaborated, and elaborated concerning them and concerning the ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... fear of death; and yet the longest enjoyment which we can hope for of this kind is of so trivial a duration, that it is to a wise man truly contemptible. Few men, I own, think in this manner; for, indeed, few men think of death till they are in its jaws. However gigantic and terrible an object this may appear when it approaches them, they are nevertheless incapable of seeing it at any distance; nay, though they have been ever so much alarmed and frightened when they have apprehended themselves in danger of dying, they ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some instances, flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem; and the whole ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... regions of eternal ice, we climbed the Himalayas, we saw the world from the height of the aeroplane, and every child in Europe knows now the wonders of Niagara. But the kinematographer has not sought nature only where it is gigantic or strange; he follows its path with no less admirable effect when it is idyllic. The brook in the woods, the birds in their nest, the flowers trembling in the wind have brought their charm to the delighted eye more and more with the progress ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... into the Imperial fish-ponds to fatten lampreys for the Bacchanalian banquets, and many were mangled to death by savage beasts, or still more savage men, to make sport for thousands of pitiless sightseers, while not a single thumb was turned to make the sign of mercy. But perhaps the most gigantic and horrible of all Christmas atrocities were those perpetrated by the tyrant Diocletian, who became Emperor A.D. 284. The early years of his reign were characterised by some sort of religious toleration, but when his persecutions began many endured martyrdom, and the storm of his fury ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... little world to themselves, being completely ensphered by the fog, which here was dense as a sea of milk. Below was neither town, country, nor cathedral—simply whiteness, into which the iron legs of their gigantic ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... extremity of a huge, partly excavated bone, when the boat waiting for him would wait no longer." ("L.L." I. page 276 (footnote).) Writing to Haeckel in 1864, Darwin says: "I shall never forget my astonishment when I dug out a gigantic piece of armour, like that of the living armadillo." (Haeckel, "History of Creation", Vol. I. page ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Mackenzie had heard vague and terrible legends about the Russians, far, far away on the coast of Alaska; they were represented as beings of gigantic stature, and adorned with wings; which, however, they never employed in flying (possibly the sails of their ships). They fed on large birds, and killed them with the greatest ease. They also possessed the extraordinary power of killing ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... the Centennial, ancient garrets and modern household art stores, all tumbled together in hopeless confusion, and over all an emerald, golden halo that grew more and more concentrated till it burst into gloom as one gigantic sunflower, which, suddenly changing into the full moon just rising above the top of a neighboring roof, put an end ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... the more than Stygian night Descends with slow and owl-like flight, Silent as Death (who comes—we know— Unheard, unknown of all below;) Above that dark and desolate wave, The reflex of the eternal grave— Gigantic birds with flaming eyes Sweep upward, onward through the skies, Or stalk, without a wish to fly, Where the reposing lilies lie; While, stirring neither twig nor grass, Among the trees, in silence, pass Titanic animals whose race Existed, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... it were racing in neutral, getting nowhere. Within that sphere was the total energy that had been poured out by five gigantic beams, turned on full, for almost a minute's time. Compressed energy! Energy enough to blast these mountains down to the primal rock were it released instantly. Energy trapped and held by virtue of some peculiarity of that little borderline between ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... and the labor and capital invested in them were doubtless large for that period. A contemporary of Champlain informs us that the wood employed in the construction of the works, in the form of gigantic sluices, bridges, beam-partitions, and sieves, was so vast in quantity that, if it were destroyed, the forests of Guienne would not suffice to replace it. He also adds that no one who had seen the salt works of Saintonge would estimate the expense of forming them ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... acquired the astral senses of sight and hearing; or in other words to have attained perception and opened the doors of the soul, are gigantic tasks and may take the sacrifice of many successive incarnations. And yet, when the will has reached its strength, the whole miracle may be worked in a second of time. Then is the disciple the servant of ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the boat. Gigantic forest trees were about me; through which, like a silver snake, twisted and twined the great river. The little waves, when I moved in the boat, heaved and fell with a plash as of molten silver, breaking the image of the moon into a thousand morsels, fusing again ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... reprehensible admixture of the metaphysical element in the dogma, with all the accusation which we bring concerning acute or gradual Hellenisation, secularisation and defection from the Christ, we ought not to hide from ourselves that in this gigantic struggle there were real religious interests at stake, and that for the men of both parties. Dimly, or perhaps vividly, the man of either party felt that the conception of the Christ which he was fighting for was congruous with ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... exceedingly attractive but somewhat imperious young woman had surprised him in a most undignified position. She had come cantering down the drive on a horse which, by comparison with the Exmoor ponies which every one rode in those parts, had seemed gigantic, and, finding a difficulty in making her presence known, had motioned to him with her whip. He climbed down from the steps where he had been busy fastening up some roses, removed a nail from his ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... should reveal them as they were—Thoughts in the Earth's old Consciousness too primitive, too far away, too vital and terrific to be confined in any outward physical expression of the "civilized" world today.... The earth shone, glittered, sang, holding them close to the rhythm of her gigantic heart. Her glory was their own. In the blazing summer of the inner life they floated, happy, caught away, at peace ... emanations of ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... though it would need a gigantic prisoner to utter such fearful moans of distress. No wonder you thought somebody was being ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... savour there was only barrenness and desolation. To such as could find sufficient interest in the day-labour and day-wages of earthly existence; in the resources of the five bodily Senses, and of Vanity, the only mental sense which yet flourished, which flourished indeed with gigantic vigour, matters were still not so bad. Such men helped themselves forward, as they will generally do; and found the world, if not an altogether proper sphere (for every man, disguise it as he may, has a /soul/ in him), at least ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... simpler days, offered me the following scenario for a domestic story. It was an incident which, I doubt not, she had often read at the tail of a newspaper column, and which certainly savours of the gigantic gooseberry, the sea-serpent, and the agricultural labourer who unexpectedly inherits half-a-million. It was eminently a Simple Story, and far more worthy of that title than Mrs. Inchbald's ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... in tubs reared their foliage in this hall, and in their midst was seated a gigantic Buddha in gold. At the foot of the god sat a shabbily dressed ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... through the center of Germany into the heart of Gaul, where he was met at Chalons by the combined forces of the Visigoths, Alans, Franks and Romans, and was defeated, with the loss of one hundred and seventy thousand of his men. This was one of the most gigantic as well as one of the most important battles of history. A rivulet flowing through the field of battle is said to have been colored and swollen by the blood of the slain. The next year, however, with a greater force at his command, he fell with headlong fury upon northern Italy; but he did ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith |
