"Prodigious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three or four others that the small town from which he came in the far Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... first came in sight they made a prodigious clattering in their speech and held their arms over their heads. They spoke so quick that I could not catch one single word they uttered. We recollected one man whom we had formerly seen among the ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... lives, has revealed men and nations to themselves. It has shown us the nation's manhood suddenly stripped of the conventionalities, the restraints, and the outward respectability of civil life, subjected to the trial and testing of a prodigious strain. It has shown us the real stuff of which men are made. It is like the X-ray photographs now constantly used in all the military hospitals, and placed in the windows of the operating rooms, to guide the surgeon in discovering the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... man whose turn certainly was not flattery, nor his talent adapted to look on vanity without a sneer. Yet his facility in catching a likeness, and the methods he chose of painting families and conversations in small, then a novelty, drew him prodigious business for some time. It did not last: either from his applying to the real bent of his disposition, or from his customers apprehending that a satirist was too formidable a confessor for the devotees of self-love. He had already ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... charging the boat is apt to be discredited by fishermen. But it certainly is not doubted by the few who know. I have seen two swordfish threaten my boat, and one charge it. Walker, an Avalon boatman, tells of a prodigious battle his angler had with a broadbill giant calculated to weigh five hundred pounds. This fight lasted eight hours. Many times the swordfish charged the boat and lost his nerve. If that propeller had stopped he would have gone through the ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... prodigious yawn, dragged himself up out of his chair, and the two went off together. As they left the room the only other man present looked up from his newspaper, following ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... gluttony to a heavy test. Many a scandal came to light in the Roman community. The Elect made themselves sick by devouring the prodigious quantity of good cheer brought to them with a view to purification. As it was a sacrilege to let any be lost, the unhappy people forced themselves to get down the lot. There were even victims: children, gorged with delicacies, died of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... fruit-trees in it. The ripeness of this place, mossed and leafy, was gratifying to my senses, on which the rawness of our own bald garden jarred. There was an old brick wall between the two divisions, upon which it was possible for us to climb up, and from this we gained Pisgah-views which were a prodigious pleasure. But I had not the faintest idea how to 'play'; I had never learned, had never heard of any 'games'. I think Benny must have lacked initiative almost as much as I did. We walked about, and shook the bushes, and climbed along the wall; I think that ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... a prodigious yawn. "And now, Mr Carter, with your kind permission I will go below and lie down, for I feel ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... all men of mighty deeds after Julius Caesar had the greatest intellect, was a tireless reader, and since he needed only four or five hours' sleep in twenty-four he found time to read in the midst of his prodigious activities. Nowadays those of us who are preparing to conquer the world are taught to strengthen ourselves for the task by getting plenty of sleep. Napoleon's devouring eyes read far into the night; when he was in the field his secretaries forwarded ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... we were looping our way up the breast of Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun, lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding swiftly ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... persons of the town came out to meet us, and conducted us to our quarters, where they gave us a very poor entertainment. After supper, Cortes inquired respecting the military power of Montezuma, and was told that he was able to bring prodigious armies into the field. The city of Mexico was represented as of uncommon strength, being built on the water, with no communication between the houses, houses, except by means of boats or bridges, each house being terraced, and only needing the addition of a parapet to become a fortress. The only ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... attended with much inconvenience and difficulty, Gonzalo used every proper precaution that his troops might be supplied abundantly with water and other necessaries. For this purpose all the neighbouring Indians were ordered to bring a prodigious quantity of jars and other vessels calculated to contain water. The soldiers were ordered to leave at Motupe all their clothes and baggage of which they were not in immediate want, which were to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... does not apply to his writings, for his ideas lost much of their force in the process of getting into print. Like all natural orators his chief quality was a power of drawing and persuading, which, to use an expression often applied to Pere Lacordaire, had something magnetic about it. He had a prodigious gift of showing his Protestant or infidel hearers that their own hearts and their own reason aspired by instinct towards the Catholic truth which he was teaching them. In that way he drew his hearers to discover the truth in their own minds ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... to the English host. Great numbers were killed; others were driven headlong across the bridge or were drowned in the stream, which is said to have been literally choked with dead. But for a time the advance of the English was stayed; for one Norseman, a man of great stature and prodigious strength, took post in the middle of the narrow bridge and barred the way to the English host. But one foe could attack him at a time, and so great was his strength and prowess that it is said forty Englishmen fell under the mighty blows ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... Mr. Poynter had found a neatly indited ode to a wild geranium written in a flowing foreign hand, his literary output had been prodigious. Dirges, odes, sonnets and elegies frequently appeared in spectacular places about the camp and as Mr. Poynter's highly sympathetic nature led him to eulogize the lowlier and less poetic life of the woodland, the result was frequently of ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... about the construction of an extemporaneous bed in the easy-chair, with the addition of the next easy one for her feet. Having formed the best couch that the circumstances admitted of, she took out of her bundle a yellow night-cap, of prodigious size, in shape resembling a cabbage; which article of dress she fixed and tied on with the utmost care, previously divesting herself of a row of bald old curls that could scarcely be called false, they were so ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... in his advice to his son with reference to time. "Every moment you now lose, is so much character and advantage lost; as, on the other hand, every moment you now employ usefully, is so much time wisely laid out, at prodigious interest." ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... French poetry, tormented himself by a prodigious slowness; and was employed rather in perfecting than in forming works. His muse is compared to a fine woman in the pangs of delivery. He exulted in his tardiness, and, after finishing a poem of one hundred verses, or a discourse of ten pages, he used to say ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... or given, since each side was determined to exterminate the other. Flights of arrows were stopped in mid-air by flights of arrows from the other side. Great maces were cut in pieces by well-directed darts. Bhima, wielding his great club with his prodigious strength, wiped out thousands of the enemy at one stroke, and Arjuna did the same with his swift arrows. Nor were the Kauravas to be despised. Hundreds of thousands of the Pandavas' followers fell, and the heroic brothers were themselves struck ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... in the wheel for so vast a change as war dethroned, viz., that you see no cause, though you should travel round the whole horizon, adequate to so prodigious an effect. What could do it? Why, Christianity could do it. Aye, true; but man disarms Christianity. And no mock Christianity, no lip ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... in print: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play, written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional work of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he should have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius for the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German or Germanising commentary ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... up the Nile to join the Mamelukes, who were enjoying one of their seasonal rebellions against constituted authority, Eaton plunged into the desert and finally brought back the astonished and somewhat reluctant heir to the throne. With prodigious energy Eaton then organized an expedition which was to march overland toward Derne, meet the squadron at the Bay of Bomba, and descend vi et armis upon the unsuspecting pretender at Tripoli. He even made a covenant with Hamet promising with altogether unwarranted explicitness ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... stanza." Sachs states, as Walther pauses. "Take careful heed now that the one following must be exactly like it."—"Why exactly alike?" the free-born asks, ready to chafe at the shadow of a restriction. Sachs, indulgent, makes play for this prodigious child's sake of the to him so grave business of song-making: "That one may see that you have selected ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... and was seen hanging in the horizon: such was the popular notion. The Hy-Brasail of the Irish is evidently a part of the Atlantis of Plato; who, in his 'Timaeus,' says that that island was totally swallowed up by a prodigious earthquake." (O'Flaherty's "Discourse on the History and Antiquities of the Southern Islands of Aran, lying off the West Coast of Ireland," ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... distinct profession. George Ferrers, formerly commemorated as master of the pastimes to Edward VI., one Goldingham, and Churchyard, author of "the Worthiness of Wales," of some legends in the "Mirror for Magistrates," and of a prodigious quantity of verse on various subjects, were the most celebrated proficients in this branch; all three are handed down to posterity as contributors to "the princely pleasures of Kennelworth," and the two latter as managers of the Norwich entertainments. They vied with ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... now face will test us to the uttermost. Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... population—in terrible numbers and increasing. Practically all this is pure waste of money—to say nothing of the loss and suffering to humanity. Prisons, hospitals, insane asylums, poor houses, and the like cost the community a prodigious amount. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... pleasure in the society of her fellow writers. This was largely because she loved, beyond everything else, the business side of her profession. There was nothing at all that she did not know about the publishing and distribution of a novel. Her capacity for remembering other people's prices was prodigious and she managed her agent and her publisher with a deftness that left them gasping. There were very few persons in her world who had not, at one time or another, poured their troubles into her ear. She had that gift, valuable in life beyond ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... wall, on which are painted the coats of arms of all the families with whom the Fairfaxes have intermarried, ascending to very great antiquity; besides, every pane of glass in a very large bay window in the same room is stained with one of these coats of arms. Every morning after breakfast a prodigious flock of pea-fowl came from the woods around ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... this time a pleasant girl of thirteen or fourteen. Lady Shelburne had also two half-sisters, daughters of her mother's second marriage to Richard Vernon. Lady Shelburne took a fancy to Bentham, and gave him the 'prodigious privilege' of admission to her dressing-room. Though haughty in manner, she was mild in reality, and after a time she and her sister indulged in 'innocent gambols.' In her last illness, Bentham was one of the only two men ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... that consciousness, memory—all the faculties grow, and the experience of sense is so novel, crowded, and astounding. It is this beginning at a point, and expanding to the immense disk of our present range of sensuous experience, that gives to them so prodigious an illusory perspective, and makes us in childhood, measuring futurity by them, form so wild and exaggerated an estimate of the duration of human life. But, I beg ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... well remember when all these older rocks were called grau-wacke, and nobody dreamed of classing them; and now we have three azoic formations pretty well made out beneath the Cambrian! But the most striking step has been the discovery of the Glacial period: you are too young to remember the prodigious effect this produced about the year 1840 (?) on all our minds. Elie de Beaumont never believed in it to the day of his death! the study of the glacial deposits led to the study of the superficial drift, which ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... as I did this, Flatter poor enemies, entreat their servants, Stoop, court, and catch at the benevolence Of creatures, unto whom, within this hour, I would not have vouchsafed a quarter-look, Or piece of face! By you that fools call gods, Hang all the sky with your prodigious signs, Fill earth with monsters, drop the scorpion down, Out of the zodiac, or the fiercer lion, Shake off the loosen'd globe from her long hinge, Roll all the world in darkness, and let loose The enraged winds to turn up groves and towns! When I do fear again, let me be struck With forked ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... spirit of art. It was a house in which Pugin would have torn his hair. Those massive blocks of red-veined marble lining the hall—emulating in their surface-glitter the Escalier de Marbre at Versailles—were cunning imitations in paint and plaster by workmen brought from afar for the purpose, at a prodigious expense, by the present viscount's father, and recently repaired and re- varnished. The dark green columns and pilasters corresponding were brick at the core. Nay, the external walls, apparently of massive and solid freestone, were ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... cold increased as they rose; and Odo, though he had often wished to see the mountains, was yet dismayed at the gloomy and menacing aspect of the region on which they were entering. Leafless woods, prodigious boulders and white torrents foaming and roaring seemed a poor exchange for the pleasantly-ordered gardens of Pianura. Here were no violets and cowslips in bloom; hardly a green blade pierced the sodden roadside, and snowdrifts lingered ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... has aroused her. She is no longer the impassive Silence; she has found her fire. I hear of her as the charm of a brilliant court, as the soul of a nation of intrigue. Of her beauty one does not speak, but her talent is called prodigious. What impels me to ask the idle question, If it were well to save her life for this? Undoubtedly she fills a station which, in that empire, must be the summit of a woman's ambition. Delphine's Liberty ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that colours and forms had a significance for Strickland that was peculiar to himself. He ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... reader some idea of the character of this prodigious mine, and of the profits arising from it, to know, that during the four months preceding the 23rd October, 1847, the directors declared and paid three dividends, amounting to 200 per cent. on the subscribed capital, and that ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... jest;" if it is encomiastic, the same ruthless and ungrateful critic is but too likely to take it as an involuntary confession of folly and vanity. But when Fielding, in one of his serio-comic introductions to Tom Jones, described it as "this prodigious work," he all unintentionally (for he was the least pretentious of men) anticipated the verdict which posterity almost at once, and with ever-increasing suffrage of the best judges as time went on, was about to pass not merely upon this particular book, but upon his whole genius ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... please your Honour, I have been at my Lord's, and his Lordship thanks you for the Favour you have offer'd of reading your Play to him; but he has such a prodigious deal of Business he begs to be excus'd. I have been with Mr Keyber too: he made ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... assumes a position which, in virtue either of an imposing military force on the Oxus, or of a dominant political influence in Afghanistan, entitles her, in Native estimation, to challenge our Asiatic supremacy, the disquieting effect will be prodigious.' ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Ruth. Then, too, he was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of experience with girls and women who had been absolutely different from her. They had known about love and life and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things. Her prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness. Also he was handicapped in another way. He had himself never been in love before. He had liked ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... them!'[FN200] Then said her father Es Shisban to her, 'What is this laughing?' So she bespoke him in a tongue none understood but they [two] and acquainted him with that which Tuhfeh had said; whereat he laughed a prodigious laugh, as it were the ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... was the Queen mothers panegyrick or funebre oraison made at St. Pierre in a prodigious confluence of peeple of al ranks; the Intendant, the President and the Conseillers, the Mair, the Eschiwines,[340] and the Maison de Ville assisting; also many of the religious orders. The Cordelier ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... Mrs. Tretherick with an embarrassed voice and a prodigious blush, looking down, and addressing the fiery curls just visible in the folds of her dress,—"do you think you will be 'dood,' if I let you stay in here and sit ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... them then, ether to forewarne them of the death of their friend; or else to discouer vnto them, the will of the defunct, or what was the way of his slauchter, as is written in the booke of the histories Prodigious. And this way hee easelie deceiued the Gentiles, because they knew not God: And to that same effect is it, that he now appeares in that maner to some ignorant Christians. For he dare not so illude anie that knoweth that, neither can the spirite of the defunct returne to his friend, ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... to the satisfaction of his time that women have fewer teeth than men. Aristotle was a great man, and besides being a philosopher was the foremost scientist of his day. I cannot help thinking of this prodigious blunder. Perhaps (who knows?) the same famous fate which a sexual classification of teeth enjoys awaits a definition calling love ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... except possibly Peter the Great, ever gave so many ex cathedra opinions on so many different subjects in the same length of time, and of course it cannot be supposed that he has not made mistakes, but it shows that it is only by prodigious industry that he has been able to gather the materials on which these utterances are based. He is indeed the "first servant of the state," and long before his court or indeed many of the housemaids of Berlin are awake, he is up and attending ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... burghs stood in his hand; five-and-twenty years he was king here. He was mad, he was wild, he was cruel, he was bold; of all things he had his will, except the Peohtes were never still, but ever they advanced over the north end, and afflicted this kingdom with prodigious harm, and avenged their kin enow, ...
— Brut • Layamon
... in acting, I may avow, nothing but the immediate hand of the Almighty, (who favours the juster side, and is always ready for the support of those, who approach so near his own divinity; sacred and anointed heads) could have turned the fortune of the battle to the royal side: it was prodigious to consider the unequal numbers, and the advantage all on the Prince's part; it was miraculous to behold the order on his side, and surprise on the other, which of itself had been sufficient to have confounded them; yet notwithstanding all this unpreparedness ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... an unwillingness to leave the light, and a natural impulse into the Dominion of darkness, about this time our Hero's, shall I say, sally'd or slunk out of their Lodgings, and steer'd toward the great Palace, whither, before they were arrived, such a prodigious number of Torches were on fire, that the day, by help of these Auxiliary Forces, seem'd to continue its Dominion; the Owls and Bats apprehending their mistake, in counting the hours, retir'd again to ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... is primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a wonderful and a prodigious manner. How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs the head, is apparent to every one. How a faulty action of the liver disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial manner, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... the light properly distributed so that the rooms may be suffused with just the proper glow, but never a glare; so that the base outlets for reading-lamps shall be at convenient angles, so that the wall lights shall be beautifully balanced,—all this means prodigious thought and care before the actual placing of ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... a prodigious yawn which came from the Girl there was an ominous quiet hanging over the place that chilled the man. Sudden sounds startled him, and he found it impossible to make any progress with his preparations for the night. He was about to make some remark, however, ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... name of heaven, can it be? ere the silvery tones of her sweet voice had reached the ears of the petrified Alonzo, the "iron tongue" of the cathedral clock announced the hour of midnight, and the solemn intonation of its prodigious bell instilled new horrors into the confused minds of the affrighted lovers. The brave, the royal Alonzo heard not the voice of his enchanting dulcinea; he, poor fellow, with difficulty supported his trembling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... silence, on Racine's part, had elapsed, when Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV., asked the unemployed poet to prepare a sacred play for the use of the high-born girls educated under her care at St. Cyr. Racine consented, and produced his "Esther." This achieved a prodigious success; for the court took it up, and an exercise written for a girls' school became the admiration of a kingdom. A second similar play followed, the "Athaliah,"—the last, and, by general agreement, the most perfect, work of its author. We thus reach that tragedy of Racine's which ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the detachment reached the scene of action. Folkmar, governor of Prague, had fallen, Henry had fled, and the Bohemians were routed with prodigious slaughter. The fugitives rallied under the walls of Wartburg. But they were speedily dispersed and pursued, until nightfall ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... suspecting that in so very eccentric, garrulous a person he was permitting a spy to encroach upon the secrets of the house, continued to make up sundry parcels of the new publication which had so enchanted his customer, while he expatiated on the prodigious sensation the book had created, and while the customer himself had already caught enough of the low conversation within the recess to be aware that the author of the book was the very person who had so roused ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... most remarkable circumstance attending the phenomenon was the appearance of three large protuberances apparently emanating from the circumference of the moon, but evidently forming a portion of the corona. They had the appearance of mountains of a prodigious elevation; their color was red tinged with lilac or purple; perhaps the color of the peach-blossom would more nearly represent it. They somewhat resembled the tops of the snowy Alpine mountains when colored by the rising or the setting sun. They resembled the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... it had been said to Betty during the night, and though Mr. Chenoweth's predecessors had revealed their desires in a guise lacking this prodigious artlessness, she already possessed no novel acquaintance with the exclamation. But she made no comment; her partner's style was not a stimulant to repartee. "It would be heaven," he amplified earnestly, "it would be heaven to dance with you forever—on a desert isle where the ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... voices sounding from their stomachs and entrails. Such reports, bruited through the world by the foreign ambassadors at Smyrna, the clerks of the English and Dutch houses, the resident foreigners, and the Christian ministers, excited a prodigious sensation, thrilling civilized mankind. On the Exchanges of Europe men took the odds for and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... quarantine, no account being taken of the three weeks or a month that some of us had already spent in the German lines. The whole thing was a farce. We could then buy a change of underclothing, and daily consumed prodigious quantities of Dutch chocolate, also procurable from the canteen (which I afterwards bought in Holland for one-tenth of the price). Some of the British who had been in the camp for some time managed to get books and a little food ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... brothers, as a reward for delivering them from such monsters. Their residence was in the district called Whapaeenoo; and to this day there remains a bread-fruit tree, once the property of the Taheeais. They had also a woman, who lived with them, and had two teeth of a prodigious size. After they were killed, she lived at the island Otaha; and when dead, was ranked amongst their deities. She did not eat human flesh, as the men; but, from the size of her teeth, the natives still call any animal that has a fierce appearance, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... the doorway? Moreover, two of the holes open outwards, and not into the supposed store-chamber. It may be said that these were for hauling up the sacks of corn, but the incline on which they open is so steep, that it would be a prodigious waste of labour to drag the corn up under the cornice in which they are, whereas the other ascent is easy. The precautions taken to provide means of stabbing at an assailant point to this having been a fortress. My interpretation of the puzzle is this: ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... ignorant workers and stir their minds and their passions into swift and bitter revolt. Revolution! That was the thing. The world had come to a time, he said, when talking and writing weren't going to count. We were entering into an age of force—of "direct action"—strikes and the like—by prodigious masses of men. All I could ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... later he advanced into the space in the centre of his wari, where in the olden days the populace was wont to gather for its cannibal orgies; how he greeted his distinguished visitors with the most prodigious rubbing of noses seen in those parts for many a day; of the feast that followed; of the fowls and pigs that garnished the festive board, not omitting the keg of Three Star thoughtfully provided ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... but, being endued with an active fancy, he engendered on it theories so wild and chimerical, that they might be regarded with the same kind of wonder as the fictions of romance, if our pleasure were not continually checked by remembering the error in which they originate. What more prodigious transformation shall we read of in Ovid, than that which he supposes the organs of his strange ens to have undergone during the change of our globe ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... curly brown hair, silken young mustache, and firmly set mouth and chin well matched his stalwart, symmetrical form. He was not only handsome, he was brilliant in a way, and his memory was something prodigious. Unquestionably he would ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... see Leander's extraordinary exploit, whereat he is horrified and amazed. The valiant captain bellows like a bull, shrieks out the most frightful threats and curses, vowing all sorts of vengeance, and making prodigious efforts to draw his big sword, so that he may forthwith set about cutting up his unmannerly assailant into mince-meat. He tugs and strains until he is red in the face, but his "man-killer" cannot be ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... "you're a prodigious villain and imposter—a monstrous imposter, sir. I am told I am not to prosecute you. Well, then, I will not. But the dead men, sir, hang about ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'twill be this hour ere I have done weeping; all the kind of the Launces have this very fault. I have received my proportion, like the prodigious son, and am going with Sir Proteus to the Imperial's court. I think Crab my dog be the sourest-natured dog that lives: my mother 5 weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of scribbling which exists in Europe,' and they and the Germans are 'the two most gormandising races in Europe.' They display ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... man to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake, which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker—the Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Italian cultures—but there is hardly anything worth ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... also had been making prodigious strides during Caesar's stay in France, viz. the fortune of Gian Borgia, the pope's nephew, who had been one of the most devoted friends of the Duke of Gandia up to the time of his death. It was said in Rome, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... this journey, if I mistake not, that he encountered a prodigious giant, who was so wonderfully contrived by nature that, every time he touched the earth, he became ten times as strong as ever he had been before. His name was Antaeus. You may see, plainly enough, that it was a very difficult ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... answers spontaneously, that nothing but a clear necessity can justify any tax at all upon such subjects, and that the tax should be reduced, in all cases, to the very lowest practicable rate. The experience of the British government, the prodigious increase of correspondence produced by cheap postage, and the immense revenue accruing therefrom, demonstrate that TWO CENTS is not below the rate which the government can afford to receive. Let the people understand that all beyond this is a ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... zodiac; a library of thirty-six thousand five hundred volumes was open to their inquiries; and they could show an ancient manuscript of Homer, on a roll of parchment one hundred and twenty feet in length, the intestines, as it was fabled, of a prodigious serpent. [104] But the seventh and eight centuries were a period of discord and darkness: the library was burnt, the college was abolished, the Iconoclasts are represented as the foes of antiquity; and a savage ignorance and contempt of letters ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... but me: And you shall say that having spoken with me, And after look'd into yourself, you find That you meant nothing—as indeed you know That you meant nothing. Such as match as this! Impossible, prodigious!' These were words, As meted by his measure of himself, Arguing boundless forbearance: after which, And Leolin's horror-stricken answer, 'I So foul a traitor to myself and her, Never oh never,' for about as long As the wind-hover ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... too, the grizzly was a prodigious worker. No job was too big for him. Often he spent an hour or more in digging out a tiny titbit such as a chipmunk, and several times in his pursuit of a marmot he excavated in rockslides holes large enough for small basements. ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... eruptions, thirteen of which have been noted, are considered to have done more mischief than any others in the Island. Between the Myrdals and the 'Orœja Jökla' lies one of the most noted volcanoes of Iceland—the 'Skaptar-Jökull,' whose eruption in 1783 is chronicled in all works on Iceland, as the prodigious floods of lava it poured forth in that year were unparalleled in historic times. The molten streams rushing seaward, down the rivers and valleys, the glowing lava leaping over precipices and rocks, which in after ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... import the Anglo-Saxon man with the Anglo-Arabian horse if they would bring to a creditable conclusion the programme of 1833. And during all the long period that has since elapsed what courage and patience, what determined will, to say nothing of the prodigious expenditure of money, have been shown by the founders of the race-course in France and by their successors! Their perseverance has had its reward, indeed, in the brilliancy of the results obtained, but there is still due to them an ampler tribute of recognition ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... all those houses; never getting any nearer to the blazing fires that gleamed and shone upon the windows, or came puffing out of the chimney tops; and incapable of participation in any of the good things that were constantly being handled, through the street doors and the area railings, to prodigious cooks. Faces came and went at many windows: sometimes pretty faces, youthful faces, pleasant faces: sometimes the reverse: but Toby knew no more (though he often speculated on these trifles, standing ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... lady turned round, with a scream; her muslin dress, which she was holding up in front, dropped from her hand, and a prodigious lapful of flowers rolled out on ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... bow, and was taking my aim, when Gabriel, passing me, made a signal to forbear, and rushing upon the thief, he kicked him in the back, just as he was balancing the saddles upon his head. The thief fell down, and attempted to struggle, but the prodigious muscular strength of Gabriel was too much for him; in a moment he laid half strangled and motionless. We bound him firmly hand and foot, and carried him to his burrow; we laid the two bodies by his side, stowed our luggage in ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... sweetest bit of scenery imaginable. These cliffs have been for ages the admiration of all beholders, and though thousands of tons are taken from the quarries every year, yet the inhabitants say that no great change takes place in their appearance. The Avon has a prodigious rise of tide at Bristol, and at low water the bed of the river is a mere brook, with immense banks of mud. The country all around is exquisitely attractive, and affords us an idea of cultivation and adornment beyond what we are accustomed to at home. In these rocks are found fine ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... Indians bring away a great number of eggs to eat them dried in the sun; and they break a considerable number through carelessness during the gathering. The number of eggs that are hatched before the people can dig them up is so prodigious, that near the encampment of Uruana I saw the whole shore of the Orinoco swarming with little tortoises an inch in diameter, escaping with difficulty from the pursuit of the Indian children. If to these considerations be ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Niagara Falls—"a vast and prodigious Cadence of Water," he calls it—made a deep impression on the Father, and he proceeded to write in his journal this description, which, when it was printed, was the first published account of the cataract: "This wonderful Downfall is compounded of two great Cross-streams ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... make a prodigious effort of memory, seized his head between his hands, closed his eyes, and racked his brains: after quite a long silence, he declared emphatically ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... clouds of smoke and flame into the lurid sky all around the horizon. Up to the foot of the mountains the sea covered the vast plain; and the action of these waves of fire and steaming floods forms a natural epic of the grandest order. Prodigious quantities of ashes and cinders were discharged from the craters; and these, deposited and hardened by long pressure under water, formed the reddish-brown earthy rock called tufa, of which the seven hills of Rome ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... glory to be even briefly mentioned in an encyclopaedia. And there grew in me an enormous ambition that devoured all my other ambitions, which was no less than this: that I should live to know that after my death my name would surely be printed in the encyclopaedia. It was such a prodigious thing to expect that I kept the idea a secret even from myself, just letting it lie where it sprouted, in an unexplored corner of my busy brain. But it grew on me in spite of myself, till finally I could not resist the temptation to study out the exact place in the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... little doubt your power to make good your words unless you have the help of your brother Dionysodorus; then you may do it. Tell me now, both of you, for although in the main I cannot doubt that I really do know all things, when I am told so by men of your prodigious wisdom—how can I say that I know such things, Euthydemus, as that the good are unjust; come, do I know that ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... have been preserved with religious care. He was one of the most prolific of the ancient Greek writers. Diogenes calls him "a most voluminous writer," and estimates the number of works composed by him at no less than three hundred, the principal of which he enumerates.[764] But out of all this prodigious collection, not a single book has reached us in a complete, or at least an independent form. Three letters, which contain some outlines of his philosophy, are preserved by Diogenes, who has also embodied his "Fundamental Maxims"—forty-four propositions, containing ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to the highest Pinnacle of the Rock, and placing me on the Top of it, Cast thy Eyes Eastward, said he, and tell me what thou seest. I see, said I, a huge Valley, and a prodigious Tide of Water rolling through it. The Valley that thou seest, said he, is the Vale of Misery, and the Tide of Water that thou seest is part of the great Tide of Eternity. What is the Reason, said I, that the Tide I see rises out of a thick Mist ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... huge hemlock, luckily standing at no great distance on his right; a course which he thought would divert the monster from pursuit of the maiden, and, at the same time, best insure his own safety. But, so prodigious was the rushing speed of the foiled and now doubly exasperated moose, that the imperilled huntsman had barely time to reach the sheltering tree and dodge behind it, before the hotly pursuing foe was at his heels, rasping and tearing with ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... turned into the level, Stanley's musings were broken in upon by a sudden prodigious clatter. Looking up, he became aware of a terror, rolling portentous down the flinty ridge upon him; a whirlwind streak of billowed dust, shod with sparks, tipped by a hurtling color yet unknown to man; and from the whirlwind ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... could never perceive the prodigious improbability of the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly to say nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank from alarming her. Not feeling anything definite himself he could ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... soon fell in with their new scheme for preventing the peace. It was believed by many persons, that the ministers might, with little difficulty, have brought him over, if they had pleased to make a trial; for as he would probably have accepted any terms to continue in a station of such prodigious[77] profit, so there was sufficient room to work upon his fears, of which he is seldom unprovided[78] (I mean only in his political capacity) and his infirmity very much increased by his unmeasurable possessions, which have rendered him, ipsique[79] onerique ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... shall we represent a home? It is easy to represent a woman, but how shall we add the idea of wife? To do this we must pass from simple pictures to symbols. Chinese writing has never advanced beyond this stage. Its prodigious type-case of more than forty-two thousand characters contains, therefore, only a series of pictures, direct and symbolic, all highly conventionalized, but recognizable in their earlier forms. To represent "wife" the Chinaman combines the two signs for "woman" ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Madame Roussillon broke in contemptuously, "it's a piastre to a sou that you stood gawping in through a window while gentlemen and ladies did the dancing. I can imagine how you looked—I can!" and with this she took her prodigious bulk at a waddling gait out of the room. "I remember how you danced even when you were not clumsy as a pig on ice!" she shrieked back ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... scarcely consistent with healthy manhood of mind, and which seems growing, as is testified by the "Angel World"—that there is a great gulf between the powers it indicates, and the task of leading the age—and that, on the whole, it is rather a prodigious comet in the poetical heavens, than either a still, calm luminary, or even the curdling of a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... before the dawn, and when the sea was yet full of darkness, I was greatly startled to hear a prodigious splash amid the weed, mayhaps at a distance of some hundred yards from the boat. Then, as I stood full of alertness, and knowing not what the next moment might bring forth, there came to me across the immense waste of weed, a long, mournful ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... beginning to decline, or her flux of ill words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience. Francie bowed low, left the room, closed the door behind him: and then turned him about in the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a prodigious deal of sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one twenty times over, to the end of which, for the greater efficacy, he tacked on 'damnable' and 'hellish.' Fas est ab hoste doceri— disrespect is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt relieved, and went upstairs ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There was little doubt that one day—and that probably not many years distant—Max Wyndham would be a great man too. Even as it was, his grip upon all things that concerned the profession he had chosen was so prodigious that his patron would upon occasion consult with him as an equal, detecting in him that flare of genius which in itself is of more value than years of accumulated knowledge. He had the gift of magnetism to an extraordinary degree, and he coupled ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George! The prodigious effort ought to have kept the heart throb out of his voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took refuge in a truth that in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time; but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed, just close to my bed-room window is the club-room ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to sea, could be heard the Nibelungen! Wagner had, against his innermost conviction, consented to permit the use of the work by the larger theatres in the supposition that such personal experience of the "prodigious deed" would open heart and hand for a still grander one, the permanent establishment of a distinctive German art. Vienna came first. However excellent the performance of a few, for instance, Scaria as Wotan, Materna as Brunnhilde and the orchestra under Hans ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... race of South American birds, at once recognizable by the prodigious size of their beaks and by the richness of their plumage. "These birds are very common," says Prince Von Wied, "in all parts of the extensive forests of the Brazils and are killed for the table in large numbers during the cool seasons. Their eggs are deposited in the hollow limbs and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... to be married, and shall have many children by his wife. It lies not in our power to oppose this destiny; for it hath passed through the hands and spindles of the Fatal Sisters, necessity's inexorable daughters. Who knows but by his sons may be found out an herb of such another virtue and prodigious energy, as that by the aid thereof, in using it aright according to their father's skill, they may contrive a way for humankind to pierce into the high aerian clouds, get up unto the springhead of the hail, take an inspection of the snowy sources, and shut and open as they please ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... against France and Spain. The success of this war is worthy admiration [sic], and almost incredible. The conquest of the Spanish Guelderland, the Electorate of Cologn [sic], and the Bishopric of Liege; the prodigious victory over the French and Bavarians at Blenheim, under the surprising conduct of the Duke of Marlborough; the retaking of Landau; the conquering all the estates of the Duke of Bavaria in Germany; the forcing the French and Bavarians out of their ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... the French ambassador shaking his sides with laughter to see the women at battle. His Royal Highness, the Duke of York, got us access to present the furs. Egad, Ramsay, I am a rough man, but it seemed prodigious strange to see a king giving audience in the apartments of the French woman, and great men leering for a smile from that huzzy! The king lolls on a Persian couch with a litter of spaniel puppies on one side and the French woman on the other. And what do you think that black-eyed ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... thing about the business was that Jim was procuring a prodigious supply of excellent whiskey without any expense to himself, and without any cause ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World- Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... as just described, our hero, as you may well imagine, must have been a man of prodigious bodily strength. To be sure, a tall, supple, well-knit, athletic white man like Simon Kenton, for example, might, in a wrestling-match and by some unexpected sleight of foot, have kicked his heels from under him and brought him flat on his back with ease. But keeping him there ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... further prosecution. Whether these will be enough to break the Peace upon, or no, he cannot tell; but I perceive the certainty of peace is blown over. To Charing Cross, there to see the great boy and girle that are lately come out of Ireland, the latter eight, the former but four years old, of most prodigious bigness for their age. I tried to weigh them in my arms, and and them twice as heavy as people almost twice their age; and yet I am apt to believe they are very young. Their father a little sorry fellow, and their mother an old Irish woman. They have ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... rob the house; but she was altogether astonished when she found he had made shift to elude the inquiry of her parents, because she could not conceive the possibility of his escaping by the window, which was in the third storey, at a prodigious distance from the ground; and how he should conceal himself in the apartment, was a mystery which she could by no means unfold. Before her father and mother retired, she lighted her lamp, on pretence of being ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... we went under our fore-sail and main-top-sail close-reefed: At day-light the next morning, added to them the fore and mizen top-sails. At four o'clock it fell calm; but a prodigious high sea from the N.E., and a complication of the worst of weather, viz. snow, sleet, and rain, continued, together with the calm, till nine o'clock in the evening. Then the weather cleared up, and we got a breeze at S.E. by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Julian Jones. I looked up, for he stood something like six feet four inches in height. His hair, a wispy, sandy yellow, seemed as dimmed and faded as his eyes. It may have been the sun which had washed out his colouring; at least his face bore the evidence of a prodigious and ardent sun-burn which had long since faded to yellow. As his eyes turned from the exhibit and focussed on mine I noted a queer look in them as of one who vainly tries to recall ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... she looked up, while I walked slowly over to her and took the garden chair beside her. That gave me a view of her sketch, which was a violent little "lay-in" of shrubbery, trees, and the sky-line of the inn. To my prodigious surprise (and, naturally enough, with a degree of pleasure) I perceived that it was not very bad, not bad at all, indeed. It displayed a sense of values, of placing, and even, in a young and frantic way, of colour. Here was a young woman of more ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... and again a year later, other meetings were held at Casco Bay with the chiefs of the various Abenaki tribes, in which, after prodigious circumlocution, the Boston treaty was ratified, and the war ended.[272] This time the Massachusetts Assembly, taught wisdom by experience, furnished a guarantee of peace by providing for government trading-houses in the Indian country, where goods ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... the last century the Baron de Beaurepaire lived in the chateau of that name in Brittany. His family was of prodigious antiquity; seven successive barons had already flourished on this spot when a younger son of the house accompanied his neighbor the Duke of Normandy in his descent on England, and was rewarded by a grant of English land, on which he dug a mote and built a chateau, ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... death lives, and nature breeds Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable!'" N. ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... sailors. The rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however, until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under canvas. Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail. For her there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the quarter-deck. Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then in seventy-nine—records ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... the place, with the exception of some resemblance in the exterior of the buildings. Here, it is said, the royal family used occasionally to meet, and pass an afternoon in a silly representation of rural life, that must have proved to be a prodigious caricature. The King (at least, so the guide affirmed), performed the part of the Seigneur, and occupied the proper abode; the Queen was the Dairy woman, and we were shown the marble tables that held her porcelain milk-pans; the present King, as became his ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that we are alone, we had better have an explanation. I don't know by what philter or incantation you have obtained such prodigious influence over my betrothed; but I know that I love her, that I have been loved by her more than four years, and that I will not stop at any means ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... the army then fell to work upon a great image of a horse. They built it of wood, fitted and carved, and with a door so cunningly concealed that none might notice it. When it was finished, the horse looked like a prodigious idol; but it was hollow, skilfully pierced here and there, and so spacious that a band of men could lie hidden within and take no harm. Into this hiding-place went Odysseus, Menelaus, and the other chiefs, fully armed, and ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... the laws which govern their existence, and the destinies to which they are moving on—is calculated to have a very momentous effect on the welfare of mankind. Great results ensue from small beginnings, and the seeds of knowledge now being sown in the world may ultimately bear prodigious harvest. We, who are present merely at the sowing, may not realize the magnitude and importance of the impulse we are concerned in giving, but that impulse will roll on, and a few generations hence will be productive of tremendous consequences ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the case with some members of the same order. Why Cercopithecus, considering its habits while young, has not become thus provided, it would be difficult to say. It is, however, possible that the long tail of this monkey may be of more service to it as a balancing organ in making its prodigious leaps, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... because we had spoke of it already in a former Conversation; by the same Token, that I told you then, that [5] the Word Honour, I mean, the Sence of it, was very whimsical, and the Difference in the Signification so prodigious, according as the Attribute was either applied to a Man, or to a Woman, that neither shall forfeit their Honour, tho' each should be guilty, and openly boast of what would ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude; that numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra. It is no breach of charity to call these Fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the base ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... through several passages, to a room, where, before a well-spread board, at which stood several flagons of wine, we found that functionary, seated in a well-stuffed high-back chair, a large napkin being placed under his chin, and fastened over his shoulders. His height was not great, but his size was prodigious; his cheeks swelling out on either side, scarcely allowed his small grey eyes to be visible. A large dish was on the table, from which he appeared to have helped himself abundantly. We stood before him with our hats in ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... sun had disappeared. A gigantic black shadow was approaching fast from the west, as if prodigious bare feet were rustling over the sand. And the chill breezes stole ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous academy in Milan, they placed in ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... permission, so often demanded before in vain, to penetrate into the Middle Empire. Their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy facilitated their settlement and enabled them to gather, as well from the ancient annals of the country, as during their journies, a prodigious quantity of most valuable information concerning the history, ethnography, and geography of the Celestial Empire. Fathers Mendoza, Ricci, Trigault, Visdelou, Lecomte, Verbiest, Navarrete, Schall, and Martini, deserve especial mention for having carried ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... not common with authors then]—TO INTERRUPT OR CHANGE OTHER MEN'S ARGUMENTS, WITH A MAGISTERIAL AUTHORITY, to protect oneself from the opposition of others, by a nod, a smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that trembles with reverence and respect. A man of a prodigious fortune, coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that was foolishly set on foot at his table, began in these words:—'It can only be a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than so and so.' 'Pursue this philosophical point with ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the year 1537, was reigning Duke of Bracciano. Among Italian princes he ranked at least upon a par with the Dukes of Urbino, and his family, by its alliances, was more illustrious than any of that time in Italy. He was a man of gigantic stature, prodigious corpulence, and marked personal daring; agreeable in manners, but subject to uncontrollable fits of passion, and incapable of self-restraint when crossed in any whim or fancy. Upon the habit of his body it is needful to insist, in order that the part he played in this tragedy of intrigue, crime, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... entirely to prehension and thus relieving the jaws of that part of their work, has cooeperated in producing that peculiar contour of head and face which is the chief distinguishing mark of physical Man. These slight anatomical changes derive their importance entirely from the prodigious intellectual changes in connection with which they have been produced; and these intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance, psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as to dwarf in ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... every thing the fancy conjures up as important to happiness. The vulgar mistake even what they have the means of knowing, or, which is the same thing, what they are least practised in they are dazzled with; they proclaim it, accordingly, marvellous, prodigious, extraordinary; it is a phenomenon. They neither admire nor respect much what is always visible to their eyes; but whatever strikes their imagination, whatever gives scope to the mind, becomes itself the fruitful source of other ideas far more extravagant. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... time, he said, when he did not rhyme, and his sister records that as a very little boy he used to walk around the table "spanning out on the smooth mahogany the scansion of verses he had composed." Some of these early lines he could recall and he could recall, too, the prodigious satisfaction with which he uttered them, especially the sentence he put into the mouth of a man who had just committed murder—"Now my soul is satisfied." At twelve he had a volume named Incondita ready for publication. To discerning ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... that an accurate account should be taken of their numbers; but the persons who were employed soon desisted, with amazement and dismay, from the prosecution of the endless and impracticable task: [67] and the principal historian of the age most seriously affirms, that the prodigious armies of Darius and Xerxes, which had so long been considered as the fables of vain and credulous antiquity, were now justified, in the eyes of mankind, by the evidence of fact and experience. A probable testimony has fixed the number of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... theme; and so pleasantly did he talk, illustrating his arguments with anecdotes so amusing and apposite, that I felt myself being perceptibly influenced by his views, and used to dream of climbing trees of prodigious height, and gathering nuggets from their branches as if they were apples. When lending an assisting hand at our farm labors, he would descant on the fertility of the soil on the Pacific Slope, saying that crops grew almost spontaneously, and related ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... every fraction of which the fugitive put forth his highest possible effort. Such a terrific strain cannot fail to tell upon the most highly trained animal, and so, despite all he could do, the buck found himself unable to keep up his prodigious tension. He was losing ground, and he could not fail to know that escape was out of the question: he was as much doomed as if surrounded and driven at bay by a dozen hunters and their hounds. He was still running at his highest bent, when he suddenly ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... their enemies, would unanimously fly to his standard, and would seat him on the vacant throne, to which he brought such plausible pretensions. His aspiring spirit, inflamed by the fervor of youth, and buoyed up by his natural courage, saw the glory alone of the enterprise, or regarded the prodigious difficulties which attended it as the source only of further glory. The miseries and oppressions which he had beheld his countrymen suffer in their unequal contest, the repeated defeats and misfortunes which they had undergone, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... point as to be able to perform very extraordinary feats. But on such feats he sets little value. The habits of his mind, he tells us, are such that he is not disposed to rate highly any accomplishment, however rare, which is of no practical use to mankind. As to these prodigious achievements of the memory, he ranks them with the exhibitions of rope-dancers and tumblers. "These two performances," he says, "are much of the same sort. The one is an abuse of the powers of the body; the other is an abuse of the powers of the mind. Both may perhaps excite our wonder; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to understand by it was, that she designed this Summer to shew her Son his Estate in a distant County, in which he has never yet been: But she soon took care to rob me of that agreeable Mistake, and let me into the whole Affair. She enlarged upon young Master's prodigious Improvements, and his comprehensive Knowledge of all Book-Learning; concluding, that it was now high time he should be made acquainted with Men and Things; that she had resolved he should make the Tour of France and Italy, but could not bear ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... they do not fly at all; but the membrane which unites their limbs acts like a parachute in keeping them up in the air, and materially assists them in some of their prodigious leaps." ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... tells us that Atahuallpa's envoy addressed the Spanish commander in the most humble and deprecatory manner, as Son of the Sun and of the great God Viracocha. He adds, that he was loaded with a prodigious present of all kinds of game, living and dead, gold and silver vases, emeralds, turquoises, &c., &c, enough to furnish out the finest chapter of the Arabian Nights. (Com. Real., Parte 2, lib. 1, cap. 19.) It is extraordinary that none of the Conquerors who had a quick eye for ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Nightingale as to what would come of young Nightingale's growing up to the acquisition of that art. Suspended was the interest of Nightingale, when his name was done—as if he thought the letters were only sown, to come up presently in some other form. Prodigious, and wrong-handed was the cross made by Nightingale on much encouragement—the strokes directed from him instead of towards him; and most patient and sweet-humoured was the smile of Nightingale as he stepped ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... ground every where around it threatened us with unhealthy situations; neither could the shipping have ridden in perfect security when the wind blew from the SE to which the bay lay much exposed, the sea at that time rolling in with a prodigious swell. A removal therefore to Port Jackson was highly applauded, and would have taken place the next morning, but at daylight we were surprised by the appearance of two strange sail in the offing. Of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... by a dozen? They haven't. There was good reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time who was competent—not a dozen, and not two. A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain—footprints that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and stronger than the townsmen, he assaulted the city on all sides at once with arms and engines. A battering-ram having been brought up, shattered a part of the wall that reached from one tower to another, and this falling with a prodigious noise and crash, left much of the town exposed. On this a Roman cohort made an assault through the breach, while at the same time the townsmen, quitting their several posts, ran together from all parts to the place, which was endangered ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... to the extensive inland bodies of fresh water in the Canadas. Of these, Lake Superior is upwards of 1500 miles in circuit, with a depth of 70 fathoms near the shores, while Michigan and Huron are almost as prodigious; even Erie is 600 miles round, and Ontario near 500, and Nepigon, the head of the system geographically, though the least important at present commercially, but just now partially explored, is fully 400. Their ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... accustomed to the sight of him; he would run over my bed, and come and take the precious morsels out of my hand. Would to heaven these had been the only insects which visited my abode. It was still summer, and the gnats had begun to multiply to a prodigious and alarming extent. The previous winter had been remarkably mild, and after the prevalence of the March winds followed extreme heat. It is impossible to convey an idea of the insufferable oppression of the air in the place I occupied. Opposed directly to a noontide sun, under a leaden roof, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... confidence in it; perhaps you have heard the name; it is known as Kitchens's Spiritual Elixir. The Elixir has enlightened millions; and, I will take on me to say, will convert you in twenty-four hours. Its operation is mild and pleasurable, and its effects are marvellous, prodigious, though it does not consist of more than eight duodecimo pages. Here's a list of testimonies to some of the most remarkable cases. I have known one hundred and two cases myself in which it effected a saving change in six hours; seventy-nine in which its operations took place ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman |
