"Cyclopean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fighting during the days when Irish invaders, even if they came as travelling saints, were not always welcomed. The first and second vallum can be traced with their ditches, and there was doubtless an inner wall. The masonry is of different character from that cyclopean piling of boulders which was all the earlier men had known of building. Of such cyclopean style, though it is a small specimen, is the Chun cromlech, standing near. In the near neighbourhood are the Men Scryfa (the inscribed stone), the Men-an-tol ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... is something indescribably satisfactory in the intense solidity of those old stairs and floors—no spring in the planks, not a creak; you walk as over strata of stone. What clumsy grandeur! What Cyclopean carpenters! What a prodigality ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... forms may be made to produce twins by altering the constitution of the sea-water, and the twins can be made to grow together so as to produce monstrosities by another chemical change in the sea-water. The eyes of certain fish embryos may be fused into a single cyclopean eye by adding magnesium chloride to the water in which they live. Loeb says, "It is a priori obvious that an unlimited number of pathological variations might be produced by a variation in the concentration ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... explorations of the southwest, he laid his course by a temple of rock "lifting its opalescent shoulders against the eastern sky." His party first sighted it across seventy miles of a desert which "rose in a series of Cyclopean steps." When, climbing these, they had seen the West Temple of the Virgin revealed in the glory of vermilion body and shining white dome, and had gazed between the glowing Gates of Little Zion into the gorgeous valley within, these scenery-sated veterans of the Grand ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... tacked, and returned. As again we pass the cathedral cliff on the north, and join the western side with this in one view, we are somewhat prepared by familiarity to mingle its majesty and beauty, and take from them a single impression. The long Cyclopean wall and vast Gothic roof of the side, including many an arched, rounded, and waving line, emphasized by straight lines of blue seam, are set off against the strange shining traceries of the facade; while the union of flower-like softness and eternal strength, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... heart beats in all nature, differing But in the work it works; its doubts and clamours Are but the waste and brunt of instruments Wherewith a work is done; or as the hammers On forge Cyclopean plied beneath the rents Of lowest Etna, conquering into shape The hard and scattered ore: Choose thou narcotics, and the dizzy grape Outworking passion, lest with horrid crash Thy life go from thee in a night of pain. So tutoring thy vision, shall the flash Of dove white-breasted be to thee ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... of his grave adagios, even in some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi (perhaps his most original contributions), his art is rather more a refinement on another art than a fresh and vital expression. In him, education had produced the typical pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... with every passion which sways the human soul." His supremacy is in the mighty soaring of his intellectual conceptions. Marvellous as a creator, like Shakspeare; profound and solemn, like Dante; representing power even in repose, and giving to the Cyclopean forms which he has called into being a charm of moral excellence which secures our sympathy; a firm believer in a supreme and personal God; disciplined in worldly trials, and glowing in lofty conceptions of justice,—he delights in portraying the stern prophets of Israel, surrounded with an atmosphere ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... shattered peaks, and in the more broken recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,—the erections of some old gigantic race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing it. "The resemblance to ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... their pictures. Passing through was like walking into one of those pictures, getting round the hidden corner as one always longs to do on canvas. Before our eyes rose majestically the colossal shell of a palace, with carved golden walls, a vast courtyard, cyclopean round towers, and wonderful windows full of sky and dreams. Close by was the noble church where James IV had his vision warning him not to ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... identical. Tests by Superposition and intrusion. Test by Alteration of Rocks in Contact. Test by Organic Remains. Test of Age by Mineral Character. Test by Included Fragments. Recent and Post-pliocene volcanic Rocks. Vesuvius, Auvergne, Puy de Come, and Puy de Pariou. Newer Pliocene volcanic Rocks. Cyclopean Isles, Etna, Dikes of Palagonia, Madeira. Older Pliocene volcanic Rocks. Italy. Pliocene Volcanoes of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... walked slowly across the square where the prodigious monolith of the Alexander Column rises from its bronze socket, strolled between the palace and the colonnades, passed under an immense arch: everything seemed Cyclopean to him, and he never had felt so tiny, so insignificant. None the less he was happy in his insignificance, he was satisfied with himself in the presence of these colossal things; everything pleased him ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... endowed with a perfectly marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature beyond the reach and plumb of his rodomontade, he would have been ruined from the start. As it is, he has filled his work with grimace and vulgarity. He writes a few lines of epic directness and cyclopean vigor and naturalness, and then obtrudes ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... diffusion of the Malayan dialects over the Pacific, reaching as far as the Sandwich Islands, shows the great extension of that race in former times. On numerous islands in Polynesia there are cyclopean ruins utterly out of keeping with their present size and population. Who can look at the pictures of little Easter Island, with its gigantic images standing up in unworshipped solitude, without feeling that that insignificant islet ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Oh, what a slave I was! my flocks & kine, My vineyards & my corn were all my wealth And men esteemed me rich; but now Great Jove Transcends me but by lightning, and who knows If my gold win not the Cyclopean Powers, And Vulcan, who must hate his father's rule, To forge me bolts?—and ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... just reached the brow of an elevated ridge which forms one side of the fertile and extensive valley in which Cuzco stands, built, like ancient Rome, on a number of hills or slight rises. To the north of the city, on the summit of a lofty eminence, appeared the still dark and frowning fortress of Cyclopean architecture, composed of stones of vast magnitude. When I afterwards visited it, I was surprised to find the extraordinary nicety with which, without any cement, they were joined together; and I cannot tell with what machinery the Peruvians could have raised blocks so enormous to such heights, ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... cyclopean structure at Mundore (Tod's Rajasthan, vol. i. p. 727.), the cross appears as a sacred figure, together with the double triangle, another emblem of very wide distribution, occurring on ancient British coins (Camden's Britannica), Central American buildings (Norman's Travels in Yucatan), among ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... buyers and sellers; the fields were abandoned by the farmers; steeples were rent by lightning, and fell to the ground; the shingled roofs of churches caught fire and burned whole buildings. Shocks of earthquake were also felt, and round towers and cyclopean masonry were strewn in fragments upon the ground. These visitations first occurred in the second year of Donogh, and returned again in 783. When, in the next decade, the first Danish descent was made on the coast of Ulster (A.D. 794), these signs and wonders were superstitiously supposed ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... themselves into two parties: one was the Early Settlers and the other the Pequots, the latter the most numerous. The Early Settlers built a snow fort on the hill, and a strong fortress it was, constructed of snowballs, rolled up to a vast size (larger than the cyclopean blocks of stone which form the ancient Etruscan walls in Italy), piled one upon another, and the whole cemented by pouring on water which froze and made the walls solid. The Pequots helped the whites build it. It had a covered way under the snow, through which only could it be entered, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... my shoulder and made up my mind to start some other time on the cyclopean task I ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... she murmured. 'We are at the base of the Fell. Loughrigg rises up like a cyclopean wall between us ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... followed the way indicated to him, had instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height at ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... the great riddle that had loomed over more than twenty centuries! A key of supreme importance to whoever possessed it in the days of old, in those distant times when hordes of barbarians rode through and overran the old world! A magic key that opens the cyclopean cavern to whole tribes fleeing before the enemy! A mysterious key that guards the door of the most inviolable shelter! An enchanted key that gives ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... which the Brownings had entered differed little from the Florence of to-day. The Palazzo Pitti, within a stone's throw of Casa Guidi, stood in the same cyclopean massiveness as now; the piazza and church of San Miniato, cypress-shaded, rose from the sweep of the hills, and the miraculous crucifix of San Giovanni Gualberto was then, as now, an object of pilgrimage. The wonder of the Italian sunsets, that "perished ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... the summer fields, to the end of time, always old and always new. Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of saying over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,—in the dust where men lie, dust also,—on the mounds that bury huge cities, the Birs Nemroud and the Babel-heap,—still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of Nature is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... 22 m. SE. of Rome, on a slope of the Apennines, 2546 ft. above sea-level, on the site of the ancient Praeneste, with the remains of Cyclopean walls, with a palace of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... journeyed first from my native town to the city of Saragossa[3], and thence by way of the River Ebro to Tortosa. From there I went a journey of two days to the ancient city of Tarragona with its Cyclopean and Greek buildings[4]. The like thereof is not found among any of the buildings in the country of Sepharad. It is situated by the sea, and two days' journey from the city of Barcelona, where there is a holy congregation, including sages, wise ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... on the abbe's advice, at the Baths of Caracalla, and went through them. The cicerone explained where the different bathing-rooms had been and the size of the pools. Those cyclopean buildings, those high, high arches, those ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... ever doubted that Machpelah is actually at this site, but the building is, of course, not Patriarchal in age. The enclosure is as old as the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem. It belongs to the age of Herod; we see the same cyclopean stones, with the same surface draftings as at Jerusalem. Why Herod built this edifice seems clear. Hebron was the centre of Idumean influence, and Herod was an Idumean. He had a family interest in the ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... axle-tree hung, like drapery, a huge chain, worthy of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... together rapidly, and soon those on the bridge heard the faint but increasing patter of a gasoline exhaust. Carrying the same speed as The Bedford Castle, the launch shortly came within hailing distance. The cyclopean eye of the ship's searchlight blazed up, and the next instant, out from the gloom leaped a little craft, on the deck of which a man stood waving a lantern. She held steadfastly to her course, and a ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... had the opportunity of visiting a daimyo's castle. I was impressed by its strength not only because of the wide moats but because of the series of earthen fortifications faced with cyclopean stonework through which an invading force must wind its way. There was within the walls a surprisingly large drilling ground for troops and also an extensive drug garden. The present owner of the castle proposed to build here a library and a museum for the town. I was glad of the opportunity to ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the scanty herds of cattle and horses which form now the whole wealth of the farm. In the first days of March we arrived at the gate of the farm-house. The Majordomo had received orders to put himself and his men at our disposal. The ruined farm-house lies at the foot of a cyclopean structure. From the veranda, rising majestically in bold relief against the sky, is to be seen the most interesting and best preserved monument of Ake, composed of three platforms superposed. They terminate in an immense ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... free citizens reduced to servitude. We ended the giro at the Villa d'Este, and breakfasted on the terrace; the rest of the party then retired to sleep and play at cards at the inn, and I started with Stupendous to see the remains of an ancient city, and some specimens of Cyclopean walls, about four or five miles off. The first place is called Ventidius Bassa's, because that gentleman had a villa there, built on the ruins of a little Cyclopean town, where there are still some walls standing. From thence to Mitriano, which ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... morning. There was little suggestion of a disaster as we trudged through the sleeping town to the lava, two miles away. The brilliant moon gave us a superb view of the volcano, a gray-brown mass rising, expanding and curling in with a profile like a monstrous cyclopean face. But nothing in mythology gives a suggestion of the fascination of this awful force, presenting the sublime beauty above, but in its descent filled with the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... ordinary mountain range and lose it within its vast depths and ramifications. Multitudinous lofty mesas, buttes, and pinnacles began to appear, each a mighty mountain in itself, but more or less overwhelmed by the greater grandeur of the Cyclopean environment. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... intelligent cabman too, for having heard Frank say 'Thomas Carlyle's house' after giving the address 5 Cheyne Row, he pulled up on the Thames Embankment. Right ahead of them was Chelsea Bridge, seen through a dim, soft London haze—monstrous, Cyclopean, giant arches springing over a vague river of molten metal, the whole daintily blurred, as though out of focus. The glamour of the London haze, what is there upon earth so beautiful? But it was not to admire it that the ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... with dolmens and cyclopean boulders, and left their toys scattered in confusion. Stonehenge might have been copied from one of their strange structures; and they had given later races a rough idea of forts and cities. Giant children ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... handled, so that each reviews in some measure the whole history of Irish civilisation as it concerned one particular place. But in a fuller sense the chapters are arranged so as to suggest a continuous idea of Irish life, from the prehistoric period illustrated by cyclopean monuments, down to the full development of purely Irish civilisation which is typified by the buildings at Cashel. Seats of ancient sovereignty like Tara, or of ancient art and learning like Clonmacnoise, are described so as to ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... size. The Greeks of the historical period Viewed these imposing structures with as much astonishment as do we, and attributed them (of at least those in Argohs) to the Cyclopes, a mythical folk, conceived in this connection as masons of superhuman strength. Hence the adjective Cyclopian or Cyclopean, whose meaning varies unfortunately in modern usage, but which is best restricted to walls of the Tirynthian type; that is to say, walls built of large blocks not accurately fitted together, the interstices being filled with small stones. This style of masonry seems to ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... presented a precipitous front of dark volcanic rock to the lake. Their slopes were covered with grass and with natural copse-wood, intermixed with tall ilex trees, or umbrella pines; while on their summits were little villages surrounded with Cyclopean walls perched there not only for security, but also for the healthier air, just as we see at the present day all over Italy. On the summit of the Capitoline and Esquiline Hills were Sabine settlements, whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... enormous basin (one thousand nine hundred square yards) is enclosed within granite walls of extraordinary thickness, formed of solid blocks of stone of tremendous weight. To what depth must the daring workmen who undertook the Cyclopean task have gone in search of a stable standpoint, on which to lay the foundation of such a mass! In what subterranean layer could they have had such confidence, in this country where the earth sinks in, all of a sudden, where islands disappear without leaving a trace—that they ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... foundations of a ruined stronghold, the Burgkofel, we came upon a realm of gigantic boulders. Some, in the shape of huge granite slabs, formed a rude, continuous broadway; others, scarred and furrowed, but softened and beautified by golden and silver lichen, torn by storms and snow from the cyclopean mountain-walls, were scattered topsy-turvy on either hand; many had become lodged in the river, where they carried on a steady defence against the tumultuous Giessbach, which, having its rise in mountains ten thousand feet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, with firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of park-like country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see against the background of the foliage which threw it into relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... to approach the moon in such a manner that no hidden peril should surprise us. As we thus approached I suddenly perceived, crowning the very apex of the lofty peak near the termination of the cape, the ruins of what appeared to be an ancient watch tower. It was evidently composed of Cyclopean blocks larger than any that I had ever seen even among the ruins of Greece, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... water; and about halfway down the fall a mass of rock had recently slipped, leaving a bright scar, through which one saw, as it were, the inner mass of the Peak, the rectangular blocks, now thick, now thin, as of some Cyclopean masonry, wherewith the earth-forces had built it up in days before a single alp had yet risen on the face of Europe. Below the boy's feet a precipice, which his projecting stone overhung, fell to the bed of the stream. On this side at ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... elements strike you at first as instinctively conforming. This impression was doubtless after a little modified for me; there were levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there were walks and strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean wall, to the far end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, natural buttresses and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban spots (one would call them if the word had less detestable references) where games of bowls and overtrellised ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... series of cyclopean monuments are known under the name of NANETAS, and are not unlike overturned boats. Seven such NANETAS are still to be seen in the Balearic Isles. The one which is best preserved consists of large unhewn stones of rectangular shape, enclosing an inner chamber about six feet in ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... the Pantheon. The gods are all gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to fill, and which the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... they went to the point, where the cyclopean wall of granite cliff which forms the western side of Lundy, ends sheer in a precipice of some three hundred feet, topped by a pile of snow-white rock, bespangled with golden lichens. As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the topmost stone, black against the bright blue sky, flapped lazily ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the heart of ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... the dark green clumps of bushes rooted in crevices. From the plain the stamp sheds and the houses of the mine appeared dark and small, high up, like the nests of birds clustered on the ledges of a cliff. The zigzag paths resembled faint tracings scratched on the wall of a cyclopean blockhouse. To the two serenos of the mine on patrol duty, strolling, carbine in hand, and watchful eyes, in the shade of the trees lining the stream near the bridge, Don Pepe, descending the path from the upper plateau, appeared no bigger than ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... spacious plate-room and pantry began, there were walls massive enough for the immuring of refractory nuns; and this corkscrew Jacobean staircase, which wound with carved balusters up to the garret story, had its foundations in a flight of Cyclopean stone steps that descended to the cellars, where the monks kept their strong liquors and brewed their beer. Half of my lady's drawing-room had been the refectory, and the long dining-parlour still showed the groined roof of an ancient cloister; while the music-room, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... plastique representing processions and sacrifices, and they finally arrived at a remote portion of the ancient palace whose walls were built with stones of irregular form, put together without cement in the cyclopean manner. This ancient architecture was colossally proportioned and weirdly grim. The immeasurable genius of the elder civilisations of the Orient was there legibly written, and recalled the granite and ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... radiant valley darkened . . . Out of the sky, as if rising from worlds beyond the horizon, a cyclopean phantasm of clouds took form. Rising higher and higher toward the zenith, ominous and sinister, it gathered substance and spread across the glowing heavens like a film of smoke . . . It took upon itself ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... outline and massiveness of character with the alternate airiness and solidity exhibited by nature in the nicely-poised logging stones and columnar piles, and in the walls of prodigious cuboidal blocks of granite which often crest and top her massive domes and ridges in natural cyclopean masonry." ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... face of quadruped; but pain traces stronger lines, and understands the anatomy of expression better than pleasure. We wished to land for half an hour, but this being impossible, addio Pizzo! Our vessel is quickly off, and our Cyclopean stokers are already mopping off their black sweat in the dreadful glare of the engine-room. Some cages, full of canaries and parrots, just become our fellow-passengers, are all in a fluster at the screaming and bustle to which they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... lime soft and hard again; in fact of making mortar. The discovery was probably very ancient; and made, probably like most of the old discoveries, in the East, spreading Westward gradually. The earlier Greek buildings are cyclopean, that is, of stone fitted together without mortar. The earlier Egyptian buildings, though the stones are exquisitely squared and polished, are put together likewise without mortar. So, long ages after, were the earlier Roman buildings, and even some of the later. The famous aqueduct ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... towers in Irish annals are quoted by Mr. D'Alton; but they turn out to be written about the Cyclopean Forts, or low stone raths, such as we find at ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... might penetrate some way towards a consideration of the vascular organism of a true literary style in which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifeless word with word. And wherein lies the progress of architecture from the stupidity of the pyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and the flight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organic relation? But the way of such thoughts might be intricate, and the sun rules me ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... that occupied the imperial throne when it began, all traces of Hindu influence have vanished, and the buildings display the austere and massive grandeur suited to the faith of the desert prophet unalloyed by foreign elements. This style in its beginning is best seen in the cyclopean ruins of Tughlakabad and the tomb of the Emperor Tughlak Shah, and in some mosques in and near Delhi. Its latest phase is represented by Sher Shah's mosque in the Old Fort or Purana Kila'. To some the simple grandeur of this style will ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... has burned ever since. The stone arch bridge acted as a dam to the flood, and five towns were crushing each other against it. A thousand houses came down on the great wave of water, and were held there a solid mass in the jaws of a Cyclopean vise. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... line marked the course of the icy river, and here and there a phantom moon flashed upon it. The quiet beauty of all this was broken by the red harshness of artificial light which gleamed from a single window in the chateau, like a Cyclopean eye. Stillness was within. If any moved about on this floor it was on tiptoe. Death stood at the door and peered into the darkest corners. For the Marquis de Perigny was about to start out upon that journey which has no visible end, which leaves no trail behind: men setting out ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... triumph of civilisation over barbarism? Is there nothing of the picturesque in the long thin lines of gleaming steel, thrown across the countless miles of desert sand and alkali plain, and in the mighty mass of metal with its glare of cyclopean eye and its banner of fire-illumined smoke, that bears the conquerors of stubborn nature from side to side of the great continent? Is there not an element of the picturesque in the struggles of the Western ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... seemed still undecided. Life was there; but it was hidden under the luxuriance of the overgrowth, hidden to casual passers-by like the life of insects. Only by the seaside, where the houses were clustered together above a seawall of cyclopean stones, and on the beach, where the long narrow boats, sharp-prowed and piratical, were drawn up to the shore, the same gnome-like little men, with a generous display of naked brown limbs, were sawing and hammering ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... arranged, we left Ragusa at 2 P.M. We were in October, and the shortening days did not favor long journeys, and the road was even worse than those in Montenegro. On the way across the frontier the going was simply climbing a Cyclopean stairway, and we reached the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire." We would point out these radiant avenues of return; but sometimes we feel in our hearts that we sound but cockney choices, as guides amid the ancient temples, the cyclopean crypts sanctified by the mysteries. To be intelligible we replace the opalescent shining by the terms of the anatomist, and we speak of the pineal gland and the pituitary body in the same breath with the Most High. Yet when the soul has the vision divine it knows not it has a body. Let ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... characteristic article, on Biography, he furnished for Fraser's Magazine one of the finest biographical portraits ever painted,—that of Dr. Johnson, in which that cyclopean worker stands out, with even more distinctness than in Boswell's "Life," as one of the most honest, earnest, patient laborers in the whole field of literature. Carlyle makes us almost love this man, in spite of his awkwardness, dogmatism, and petulance. Johnson in his day was an acknowledged ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... rest. The Eye of Re was the fire-spitting uraeus-serpent; and foreign people, like the Greeks, Indians and others, gave the Egyptian verbal simile literal expression and converted it into an actual Cyclopean eye planted in the forehead, which ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... great cloud-white structure breasting the air that cooled their brows and cleaving unseen the flood so far beneath them. Together in this greater self they felt the headway of the long, low hull, the prodigious heart glow of the hungry fires, the cyclopean push of steam in eight vast boilers, the pulsing click and travail of the engines—whisper of valve and cylinder, noiseless in-plunge and out-glide of shining rods—the ten-foot stroke of either shaft and equal sweep of crank, the nimble beat of paddle-wheels ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... grimy surgery window over a foreground of blackened brick and slate, a line of enormous chimneys like Cyclopean pillars upheld the lowering, dun-coloured cloud-bank. For six days in the week they spouted smoke, but to-day the furnace fires were banked, for it was Sunday. Sordid and polluting gloom hung over a district blighted and blasted by the greed of man. There was nothing in the surroundings ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... scene. This "king of shreds and patches"—for, to the outward sense, he seems that now—has been "at large" for days, perhaps for two or three weeks; he has been unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no restraint upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain impressive recollections of the wee monster, from which they fled as a trifle too uncanny even for them. As to his subsistence during these rambles, it would be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bowlders, half hidden by the bracken, lie about in wildest confusion; the remains of what seem to be Druidic circles can be traced here and there, and it is hard to persuade one's self that the ragged towers and picturesque piles of rock are not the work of Cyclopean architects. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... from Nowhere to the southeast) commodious to lodge an army and fitly loopholed for discomfiture of the adversary. The long logs that it was our pride to cut and carry! The accuracy with which we laid them one upon another, hewn to the line and bullet-proof! The Cyclopean doors that we hung, with sliding bolts fit to be "the mast of some great admiral"! And when we had "made the pile complete" some marplot of the Regular Army came that way and chatted a few moments ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... gently heaving upon the mysterious waters in which the despairing pundit had sought Nirvana, until the boat returned with a report that it had picked up the buoy, but had seen no sign of the man. Doubtless he had been swept into the propellers, but if not quickly given release in their cyclopean strokes, he may have watched for a few minutes our vain attempt to negative his fate. If so, I imagine he smiled again, as when he gave me the god ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... hills appear to have been washed and swept by some mighty flood. They are worn into every shape—pyramids, castles, towers—standing desolate and brown, in long ranges, like the ruins of mountains. The plain is scarred with deep gulleys, adding to the look of decay which accords so well with the Cyclopean relics ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,—Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes a man human to live on these old humanized soils. He cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... windows and shattered portals. As the trap is columnar, and the columns are horizontal in their direction, the joints of the polygons show along the surface of the ramparts, causing them to look like the work of Cyclopean builders. The Indians and Mexicans of the expedition, deceived by the similarity between these freaks of creation and the results of human workmanship, repeatedly called out, "Casas Grandes! Casas ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... place, the little fishing town nestling on the cliff, with the grey granite rocks piled-up behind and spreading to east and west like cyclopean walls, built in regular layers by the giants of whom Josh Helston had told. The wonder was that in some north-east gale the little fleet of fishing vessels was not dashed to pieces by the huge breakers that came tearing in, to leap against the rocks and fall back with ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... whose uncertain medium mountain and headland loom as impalpable as the frontiers of a demon world, and as I kept gazing at the glimmering peaks, and monstrous crags, and shattered stratifications, heaped up along the coast in cyclopean disorder, I understood how natural it was that the Scandinavian mythology, of whose mysteries the Icelanders were ever the natural guardians and interpreters, should have assumed that broad, massive simplicity which is its most beautiful characteristic. Amid the rugged features of ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance of the upper air. They had broken through ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... it, and then fed her nestlings within. These nests are equally secure from snakes or monkeys, as neither can descend the delicate boughs to which they are pendent—nor can, indeed, climb the smooth stems of the trees. Before me rose a perpendicular cliff, like a wall of cyclopean masonry, surmounted by trees and shrubs; all around hung from the wide-stretching boughs a rich tracery of sepos and creepers of all sorts; vast arums hung suspended in the air, and numberless gay-coloured flowers; while at my feet rushed, boiling and foaming, the rapid stream, ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... them and such a subordination in those by whom they were executed as cannot be conceived of either under the looser organizations of barbarism or the more equitable arrangements of modern life. The cyclopean walls, the imposing edifices, the subterranean aqueducts, the mountain terraces, of Peru tell the same tale as pyramids and temples, towers and palaces, in Egypt, Assyria or India. The critic who can find in the ruins at Gran Chimu and Pachacamac only "communal houses" inhabited ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... amazing mystery swept through my mind. A thousand questions arose within me, all of which I desired to ask her, but there, in that noisome prison-house, it was impossible. As I stood there a woman's shrill scream of excruciating pain reached me, notwithstanding those cyclopean walls. Some unfortunate prisoner was, perhaps, being tortured and confession wrung from her lips. I shuddered at the unspeakable ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... Daylight's dock system went on apace, yet was one of those enterprises that consumed money dreadfully and that could not be accomplished as quickly as a ferry system. The engineering difficulties were great, the dredging and filling a cyclopean task. The mere item of piling was anything but small. A good average pile, by the time it was delivered on the ground, cost a twenty-dollar gold piece, and these piles were used in unending thousands. All accessible ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Trans-Himalayan countries. They took for their guides the principal rivers of Northern India, and were led by them to new homes in their beautiful and fertile valleys. It seems as if the great mountains in the north had afterwards closed for centuries their Cyclopean gates against new immigrations, while, at the same time, the waves of the Indian Ocean kept watch over the southern borders of the peninsula. None of the great conquerors of antiquity,—Sesostris, Semiramis, Nebuchadnezzar, or Cyrus,—disturbed the peaceful ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... they had covered about fifteen miles of ground, and could now see the city clearly. It was a great town, surrounded by a Cyclopean wall of boulders, about which the river ran on every side, forming a natural moat. The buildings within the wall seemed to be arranged in streets, and to be build on a plan similar to that of the house in which they had slept two nights before, the vast conglomeration of ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting pillars, but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first erected, and how that greater than cyclopean house affected the minds of those who made it, or those who were reared in its neighbourhood or within reach of its influence. We see the stone cist with its great smooth flags, the rocky cairn, and huge barrow and massive walled ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... rock into a broken column, crumbling capital, or stretch of wall pierced with mysterious arches. On high slumbered the mass of the Garrigues, suffused with a milky tinge, and resembling some immense Cyclopean city whose towers, obelisks, houses and high terraces hid one half of the heavens; and in the depths below, on the side of the plain, was a spreading ocean of diffused light, vague and limitless, over which floated masses ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... are vast quantities of masonry. Around their summits a chariot might be driven, inside their spaces horse races might be run. As a few examples, there are Staigue, in Kerry; Dun Angus, in Aran, off Galway; Aileach, above the walls of Derry. Of the earliest churches, cyclopean in construction and primitive in character, built of stone, with thick sloping walls from foundation to ridge, Gallerus still remains, and the Skelligs, those wondrous sea-girt rocks, preserve both church and cell almost perfect. There ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... low, dull, harsh, grating noise as of stone passing over stone; and though he could see nothing with his eyes, mentally he knew that one of the great time-bleached and weathered blocks of granite that helped to form the cyclopean face of the kopje wall had begun to ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... of ancient oaks near the village of Arta, there still exists a number of Cyclopean constructions, the character of which is as uncertain as the date of their erection. They are cones of huge, irregular blocks, the jambs and lintels of the entrances being of single stones. In a few the opening is at the top, with rude projections resembling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... to satisfy the general grossness of her male. It is not enough that she should be armed with strong hands, planted on large feet, and decorated in the German's favorite rococo manner of abounding breasts, to gratify his cyclopean aspirations. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... positions from which a large extent of country can be viewed. The great mass of a chulpa is solid, but within is a dome-shaped chamber, into which the opening seen in the cut leads. Sometimes the chulpas are round, and in some the masonry is of that variety we have already mentioned, called the Cyclopean. Another view of burial towers is given earlier ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... on the Cyclopean island, and discovered that Polyphemus, and Arges, and Brontes, and Steropes, and all the other one-eyed monsters were nothing but sea-wrack, bowlders, and weeds. He sailed farther, past Scylla and Charybdis, and discovered no greater ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... merry trot, the coolies hurried us away from the kindly group in the Legation porch, across the inner moat and along the inner drive of the castle, past gateways and retaining walls of Cyclopean masonry, across the second moat, along miles of streets of sheds and shops, all grey, thronged with foot-passengers and kurumas, with pack-horses loaded two or three feet above their backs, the arches of their saddles red and gilded ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... great, rough stones, with ends projecting in places cyclopean-wise, which to an active man might give a foothold. The little garrison was at its posts, and picked the men off with carbines and revolvers, and in emergencies gave a brown chest the straight bayonet-thrust home. The tribesmen fought like fiends, scrambling up silently with long ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... gentleman sat waiting the moment of departure, he was the witness of an incident strangely connected with the fortunes of his house. A packing-case of cyclopean bulk was borne along the platform by some dozen of tottering porters, and ultimately, to the delight of a considerable crowd, hoisted on board the van. It is often the cheering task of the historian to direct attention to the designs and (if it may be reverently ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eternity—of a size, material, and form to defy the "strong hours" which conquer all, it has bowed its head to their touch, and passed into the inevitable cycle of decay. "And this too shall pass away"—which the Eastern monarch engraved upon his signet ring—is carved upon these Cyclopean blocks. The stones of the Coliseum were once water; and they are now turning into dust. Such is ever the circle of nature. The solid is changing into the fluid, and the fluid into the solid; and that which is unseen is alone indestructible. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... Greeks borrowed from the civilised people of America. Only a few enthusiasts say that the civilised peoples of America, especially the Peruvians, are Aryan by race. Yet the remains of Peruvian palaces are often by no means dissimilar in style from the 'Pelasgic' and 'Cyclopean' buildings of gigantic stones which remain on such ancient Hellenic sites as Argos and Mycenae. The probability is that men living in similar social conditions, and using similar implements, have unconsciously and unintentionally ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... caste situated in other quarters. They mustered most thickly, however, about the castle, which stands to-day on the summit of its citadel hill—the Oshiroyama—solid as when first built long centuries ago, a vast and sinister shape, all iron-grey, rising against the sky from a cyclopean foundation of stone. Fantastically grim the thing is, and grotesquely complex in detail; looking somewhat like a huge pagoda, of which the second, third, and fourth stories have been squeezed down ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Sheds works, in her thousands, at her Cyclopean edifice, each has her own home, a sacred home where not one of the tumultuous swarm, except the proprietress, dreams of taking a mouthful of honey. It is as though there were a neighbourly understanding to respect the others' rights. Moreover, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... developed directly from the egg, in consequence of some difference in the chromosomes of the nucleus. It has been shown that placing a fish egg for a short time in MgCl[2] [Footnote: Stockard, Arch. Eut. Mech., xxiii. (1907).] causes a cyclopean monstrosity to be developed in which the two eyes are united into one: but the two eyes do not develop separately first and then gradually approach each other and unite, the development of the optic cups is different from the first. In the normal Flat-fish the evolution that has ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... seem to have been coeval with the substitution of the naked for the draped figure. Beauty, and ease, and grace, and power, were the result of the anatomical study of the human form. ARCHITECTURE has bequeathed to us, in the Pelasgic and Cyclopean remains, sufficient to indicate the massive strength it early acquired in parts of Greece. In the Homeric times, the intercourse with Asia had already given something of lightness to the elder forms. Columns are constantly introduced into the palaces ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... members of the Gun Club warmly congratulated the engineer Murchison; his cyclopean work had been accomplished with ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... population is dense, the poverty is undisguised. All this northward-bearing tract, between Camden Town on the one hand and Islington on the other, is the valley of the shadow of vilest servitude. Its public monument is a cyclopean prison: save for the desert around the Great Northern Goods Depot, its only open ground is a malodorous cattle-market. In comparison, Lambeth is picturesque and venerable, St. Giles's is romantic, Hoxton is clean and suggestive of domesticity, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... not have time today to review the mass of archeological data which the discoveries of this civilization have produced. They consist of cyclopean ruins of cities and strongholds, tombs, vases, statues, votive bronzes, and exquisitely engraved gems and intaglios. That which is most valuable in establishing the claim of the African origin of the Grecian civilization is the discovery ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... old place, with its towers, its dimly-lit long stone corridors, cyclopean ivy-clad walls, narrow windows, and great panelled chambers, breathed an atmosphere of the long ago. So extensive was it that only one wing—that which looked far down the glen to the blue distant mountains—had been modernised; yet that, in itself, was sufficiently ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... date are many ruinous strongholds, with Cyclopean walls, like the huge shattered bulk of Corfe, upon its green hill, between the shoulders of great downs. There are broken abbeys, pinnacled church-towers in village after village. And then, too, in hamlet after hamlet, rise quaint stone manors, high-gabled, many-mullioned, in the midst of ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... all saw it, a single, pin-point glow, far back in the blackness, a Cyclopean eye, that swayed as it approached. Alternately it waned and brightened. Suddenly it illuminated the dim lineaments of a face. The face neared them. It joined itself to reality by a very solid pair of shoulders, and ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... walls and roofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all trades plying, all goods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts canopied with blue, swarming pedestrians, eight hundred thousand people scurrying like ants in this gigantic framework of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a medley of greatness and squalor more strange and impressive. One quarter only is commonplace, that of the Legations. There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, with its cosmopolitan stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists, concession-hunters, and the like. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... took us ten days to cover as many miles. At length we trekked over a stony nek about five hundred yards in width. To the right of us was a stony eminence and to our left, its sheer brown cliffs of rock rising like the walls of some cyclopean fortress, the strange, abrupt mount of Isandhlwana, which reminded me of a huge lion crouching above the hill-encircled plain beyond. At the foot of this isolated mount, whereof the aspect somehow filled ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... drunk up the cold mist, and the moor basked in heat. We were in an empty world, save for a cottage now and then, and a Cyclopean wall of stones loosely piled one upon another. Yet this was the main road from Ashburton to Princetown! Apollo glided along a desolate white way between creamy and silver grasses artistically intermingled, and burning, golden gorse, which ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... secret of Mark Twain's world-wide popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the universality and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a master in the art of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour; and there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But these are mere surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power, to all forms of humour. Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to be attributed to any tricks of style, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... we turn to the great teacher of the last two thousand years. It was among the ancient Dorians, who descended from the mountains of Northern Greece eighty years after the fall of Troy, that art first appeared. The Pelasgi, supposed to be Phoenicians, erected cyclopean structures fifteen hundred years before Christ, as seen in the giant walls of the Acropolis, [Footnote: Dodwell's Classical Tour, Muller.] constructed of huge blocks of hewn stone, and the palaces ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... garments, white as snow, whose folds ripple around his body in harmony with his graceful movements. Many an echo of Phaeacia, in language, custom and costume, can be found in Greece at present, indicating, like the Cyclopean masonry, the solid and permanent substructure of Homer's poetry, still in place after more than 2500 ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... snowy peaks and ranges, many of them with a rosy glow in the sunshine, tier upon tier, terrace above terrace, here in serried ranks, there in isolated grandeur, some just beyond the dividing canyons, others fifty, sixty, a hundred miles away, cyclopean, majestic, infinite. Far to the north, Long's Peak lifts his seamed and hoary pyramid, almost as high as the crest on which we are standing; in the west rise that famous triad of peaks, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, their fanelike towers, sketched against ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... picture it to ourselves, not as it appears to the bees,—for we cannot tell in what magical, formidable fashion things may be reflected in the 6,000 or 7,000 facets of their lateral eyes and the triple cyclopean eye on their brow,—but as it would seem to us, were we of their stature. From the height of a dome more colossal than that of St. Peter's at Rome waxen walls descend to the ground, balanced in the void and the darkness; gigantic and manifold, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Othello's captivity,—where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,—in the Cyclopean architecture[631] of Egypt and India; in the Phidian sculpture;[632] the Gothic ministers;[633] the Italian painting;[634] the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,[635]—the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... account of their quick consolidation, possess advantages over those of hydraulic masonry apart from the necessity in the latter instance of constant supervision to prevent "scamping" by leaving chinks and spaces vacant, especially where large masses of stone or Cyclopean ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... by the Greeks, who excelled in so many things. It was among the ancient Dorians, who descended from the mountains of northern Greece eighty years after the fall of Troy, that architectural art worthy of the name first appeared. The Pelasgi erected Cyclopean structures fifteen hundred years before Christ, as seen in the massive walls of the Acropolis at Athens, constructed of huge blocks of hewn stone, and in the palaces of the princes of the heroic times. The lintel of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... soon stumbled upon a cluster of bibulous mortals in their element. Miss Wilberforce was there. She liked to linger near the fountain-head; the fountain-head, on this occasion, being a cyclopean bowl of iced punch. The lady was in grand condition; festive, playful, positively flirtatious. She nibbled, between her libations, at a savoury biscuit (she hated solid food, as a rule) in order, she said, to staunch ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... are in our eyes, and those yet left rise little above the plain; and such art thou, O hapless Mycenae, as I marked thee in passing by, more desolate than any hill- pasture, a thing that goatherds point at; and an old man said, "Here stood the Cyclopean ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... bald and shiny, and only at the back were the two spines visible, shifted downward. The front of the head was thickly clothed with golden hair, which hung down bang-like over a round, glistening, single, median eye. One by one, and then shoulder to shoulder, these Cyclopean Maxims lumbered forth to battle, and soon my boots were covered in spite of the grease, all sinking their mandibles ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... partout!'; but it has been reserved for Mr. Rossetti to speculate on Endymion's digestion, and we readily accord to him all the distinction of the position. Even where Mr. Rossetti seeks to praise, he spoils what he praises. To speak of Hyperion as 'a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse' is bad enough, but to call it 'a Stonehenge of reverberance' is absolutely detestable; nor do we learn much about The Eve of St. Mark by being told that its 'simplicity is full- blooded as well as quaint.' ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... in view, a little town in a strong position on the mountain side, its walls and citadel built in old time, long unused for defence, but resisting ages with their cyclopean force. On arriving, they found a scene of disorder, misery and fear. This morning the place had been attacked by a brigand horde, which had ravaged at will: the church was robbed of its sacred vessels, the beasts of burden were driven away, and, worst of all, wives and ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... to detect the line of junction between the blocks; and the approaches to it were defended by three semicircular parapets, composed of such heavy masses of rock, that it bore resemblance to the kind of work known to architects as the Cyclopean. The fortress was raised to a height rare in Peruvian architecture; and from the summit of the tower the eye of the-spectator ranged over a magnificent prospect, in which the wild features of the mountain scenery, rocks, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... escape, opening a passage for himself with his head lowered, like a cornered rat; but he felt himself seized by a pair of Cyclopean arms, accustomed to beating iron, and with a mighty thrust he was sent ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... livid, frog-like face, with his round, gleaming and fixed eyeballs, and his bold, maniacal stare and steady monotonous rage, common-sense rebels; no-one selects a homicidal maniac as a guide. At the mere sight of Danton, with his porter's vocabulary, his voice like an alarm bell of insurrection, his cyclopean features and air of an exterminator, humanity takes alarm; one does not surrender oneself to a political butcher without repugnance. The Revolution demands another interpreter, like itself captivatingly fitted out, and Robespierre fits ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the house his splendid physical energy seemed to radiate health and cheerfulness, infecting all those about him. She could see the men, too, moving in the glow of ruddy light; she could see again the brilliant sparks flying from under the thundering trip-hammers, the cyclopean eyes that glared up at heaven at night, the great rumbling drays, the freight moving to and from the spur. Now there was no sound; nothing but silence, with the suggestion of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... had undoubtedly been constructed for purposes of defence; and, to every one's intense delight, on passing through an opening in what proved to be a solid cyclopean wall, strengthened with tower-like edifices, there was a wide courtyard-like enclosure, quite beyond the reach of bullets, into which our horses were led, the walls themselves being of ample width to be manned, and with sufficient shelter from which our marksmen could command ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... in variegated carpet on the ground; the lanes through which we went were long arcades of arching boughs; the walls were composed of large square blocks of dried mud, which, in that bright, dazzling light somewhat resembled Cyclopean architecture, and gave, I know not what, of simplicity and primitiveness to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... friend who died one day. A metal casket held his honored clay. Of cyclopean architecture stood The splendid vault ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... of an extremely high and cultivated civilization, not barbaric in any sense, in these remote periods. Indeed, the civilization of the country at that far-off time must have been quite as advanced as in the Nile Valley. Cyclopean walls and other remains show a marvellous skill in construction; individual blocks of granite-stone, measuring as much as fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, being placed in these walls with such ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... hundred feet high indeed, and with a very large circumference. Further, its sides evidently once had been terraced, and it was on one of these broad terraces, half-way up and facing towards the rising sun, that the ruin-like remains were heaped. I examined them through my glasses. Undoubtedly it was a cyclopean ruin built of great blocks of coloured stone which seemed to have been shattered by earthquake or explosion. There were the pillars of a mighty gateway and ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... the panes by frost; with its church-drapery, its lace rochets, its fine pierced work, as light as gossamer, running up to the level of the second storey, and forming a fretted frame for the great stone-carvings of the porch. And above that it rose in hermit-like sobriety, unadorned, Cyclopean, with the colossal eye of its dull rose-window between the two towers, one full of windows and richly wrought like the doorway, the other as bare as ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... thirst. The automobile had not yet bitten so deeply into the country roads, but even a light horse and buggy traveled in a whirligig of its own dust. St. Louis lay stark as if riveted there by the Cyclopean eye of the sun. For twenty-four hours the weather vanes of the great Middle West stood stock-still while July came in like a lion. The city slept in strange, improvised beds drawn up beside windows or made up on floors, and awoke ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... readily moved and directed; and not improbably the same acquaintance with nature's finer forces greatly facilitated the labours of those who raised the enormous blocks of stone sometimes used in cyclopean architecture, or in the building of the Pyramids ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... run high, soar, tower, transcend; rise to a great height, carry to a great height; know no bounds; ascend, mount. enlarge &c. (increase) 35, (expand) 194. Adj. great; greater &c. 33; large, considerable, fair, above par; big, huge &c. (large in size) 192; Herculean, cyclopean; ample; abundant &c. (enough) 639 full, intense, strong, sound, passing, heavy, plenary, deep, high; signal, at its height, in the zenith. world-wide, widespread, far-famed, extensive; wholesale; many &c. 102. goodly, noble, precious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... "At the Cyclopean land I myself, with a few of my men, disembarked, and went up to seek the inhabitants and conciliate them with gifts of food and wine. The Cyclops were huge one-eyed giants who did not cultivate the land, had no government, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... amount of cash in hand, and Roger's stock was practically that. Then came the evil days. Laboriously, he had built up a name for conservatism which most of the town accepted, but secretly he had always been a gambler: Wall Street was his goal; to adventure there, as one of the great single-eyed Cyclopean man-eaters, his fond ambition; and he had conceived the distillery trust as a means to attain it; but the structure tumbled about his ears; other edifices of his crumbled at the same time; he found himself beset, his solvency endangered, and there was ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... the instant, then blacker night descended. But to the southeast a noiseless commotion was apparent. The glowing greenish gauze was in a ferment, bubbling, uprearing, downfalling, and tentatively thrusting huge bodiless hands into the upper ether. Once more a cyclopean rocket twisted its fiery way across the sky, from horizon to zenith, and on, and on, in tremendous flight, to horizon again. But the span could not hold, and in its wake the black night brooded. And yet again, broader, stronger, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... philosopher, who likened the world to a vast animal, is appearing each day as too real for poetry. The ocean lungs pulse a gigantic breath at every tide, her continental limbs vibrate with light and electricity, her Cyclopean fires burn within, and her atmosphere, ever giving, ever receiving, subserves the stupendous equilibrium, and betrays the universal motion. Motion is material life; from the molecular quiverings in the crystal diamond, to the light vibrations ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... long reaches of the barn filled with lifeless cars, where an occasional electric bulb burned like an ignis fatuus in the misty gloom. How much more attractive a railroad roundhouse, with iron monsters on its converging tracks, each with his cyclopean eye of fire, each panting deeply ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the dark pine forest, amid which you can descry, perhaps, the frozen billows of the glacier, or have glimpses of those still higher and drearier regions where winter sits on her eternal throne, and holds undivided sway. Your farther progress is completely barred. So it looks. A cyclopean wall rises from earth to heaven. The gate of rock by which you entered seems to have closed its ponderous jaws behind you, and shut you in,—there to remain till some supernatural power rend the mountains and give you egress. The mood of mind changes with the scene. ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... such multitudes and over such extents of ground as to suggest our own colossal swarms. Babylon and Memphis, Rome and Carthage, London and Paris, those frantic hives, occur to our mind if we can manage to forget comparative dimensions and see a Cyclopean pile in a pinch ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... the sixth, and the seventh sub-race they learnt to build great cities. These appear to have been of cyclopean architecture, corresponding with the gigantic bodies of the race. The first cities were built on that extended mountainous region of the continent which included, as will be seen in the first map, the present Island of Madagascar. ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... as likely as not split into two squalls which passed us harmlessly on either side while the tiny, innocent looking squall that appeared to carry no more than a hogshead of water and a pound of wind, would abruptly assume cyclopean proportions, deluging us with rain and overwhelming us with wind. Then there were treacherous squalls that went boldly astern and sneaked back upon us from a mile to leeward. Again, two squalls would tear along, one on each side ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... process, that renders views taken by such means so deficient in air, or, as the artists term it, aerial perspective, most distant objects seeming almost as near as those in the foreground. This indeed is the main defect of all photographs: they are true representations of nature to one eye—cyclopean pictures, as it were—appearing perfectly stereoscopic with one eye closed, but seeming absolutely flattened when viewed by the two eyes. I remember being shown a huge photograph of the city of Berlin, taken from an eminence; and a more violent caricature of nature I never set eyes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... whither all hack-work goes, fortunately enough for those of us who have to do it. The vast monument erected to him by his pupil, friend, and literary executor, Lord Russell, or rather Lord John Russell, is a monument of such a Cyclopean order of architecture, both in respect of bulk and in respect of style, that most honest biographers and critics acknowledge themselves to have explored its recesses but cursorily. Less of him, even as a poet proper, is now read than of any of the brilliant ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury |
