|
|
|
More "Puny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tremendous mistake of supposing that their lip homage, or interested expressions of love, are not properly appreciated by the Most High God, and 'Universal Emperor,' is indeed very strange. To overreach or deceive a God who created the heavens and the earth, is altogether beyond the power of puny mortals. Let not therefore those who bend the knee, while the heart is unbent, and raise the voice of thankful devotion, while all within is frost and barrenness, fancy they have stolen a march upon their Deity; for surely if the lord liveth, ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... fellows bemoaned their ill fate. And Loki said, "Wherefore did we foolishly take upon ourselves the likenesses of puny men? Had I my own power once more, I would never part with it in ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... nowadays, every puny whipster gets the sword of Sir Walter has already been remarked. If any Tom o' Bedlam chooses to tell the world that all the New Scottish novelists are Sir Walter's masters, what does it matter to anybody? ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... the gallant Count:—only one, and but a boy, a fair-haired boy, a blue-eyed boy! he had been gathering pansies in the fields but yesterday—it was but a few years, and he was a baby in his mother's arms! What could his puny sword do against the most redoubted blade in Christendom?—and yet Bohemond faced the great champion of England, and met him foot to foot! Turn away, turn away, my dear young friends and kind-hearted ladies! Do ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... out of His treasuries; Who hath His way in the whirlwind and the storm; Who holdeth the sea in the hollow of His hand. And this feeling was in nowise lessened—nay, it was rather intensified—by the thrill of exultation I experienced at the reflection that man, puny as is his strength compared with the mighty forces of Nature, has been endowed by his Creator with an intellect capable of devising and framing a structure so subtly moulded and so strongly put together, that it is able to face and triumphantly survive such a mad fury of wind and ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... ravaged territory, now from the beleaguered town, now from the carnage of the battle field, this awful form arises at last in its full strength, and rushing over the world, leaves far behind man's puny efforts at extermination. We have a domestic pestilence, it seems, dwelling with us; and if we look into the causes of that, shall we find less to blame, or less to mourn over, than in the insane wars which are the more acknowledged ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... mean? Yes, sure enough he had taken his passage, and to-morrow leagues of sea would lie between him and Rosey. That would end it for ever. No reconciliations, no repentance then!... Was there not still time? a chance if he chose to catch at it? Puny irresolution! Shake it all off, and have done with it.... He shuddered as he thought through his old part again, and then came back with a jerk to the strange knowledge that he was opening a closed book, a tragedy written twenty years ago; and that there, within a few feet of where he ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... being in the little house on the elephant's back in her best picture-book! True, little one! To be in the arms of love, be they ever so weak, is better than to ride the grandest horse in all the stables of God—and God would have you know it! Never mind your pale little face and your puny nose! While your heart is ready to die for love-sake, you are blessed among women! Only remember that to die of disappointment is not to die either ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... children; women and children were calling to their newly arrived husbands and fathers, some gaily, others shrieking, as though the train were on fire. There were a large number of handsome, well-groomed women in expensive dresses and diamonds, and some of these were being kissed by puny, but successful-looking, men. "They married them for their money," I said to myself. An absurd-looking shirt-waist-manufacturer of my acquaintance, a man with the face of a squirrel, swooped down upon a large ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... centuries, before it saw, as it might be yesterday, this town of Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence which seemed to promise for the human pygmies a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in the event, we have not been able even to equal. And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and derisory, since here it is laid low, after having subsisted barely four negligible ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back. The light of Algol shines upon it—a light which travels at one hundred and ninety thousand miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years to reach its destination. And the denizens of this puny ball have come to know that Algol possesses an invisible companion, three and a quarter millions of miles away, and that the twain move in their respective orbits at rates of fifty-five and twenty-six miles per second. They also know that beyond it are ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... subject-matter. Little movement can be contrived in a mere dialogue such as 'Paradise Regained '; it lacks the grandiose mise-en-scene and the shifting splendours of the greater epic; the stupendous figure of the rebellious archangel, the true hero of 'Paradise Lost,' is here dwarfed into a puny, malignant sophist; nor is the final issue in the later poem even for a moment in doubt—a serious defect from an artistic point of view. Jortin holds its peculiar excellence to be 'artful sophistry, false reasoning, set off in the most specious manner, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... surroundings—the pale, sad-faced mother, the blind grandfather, and ragged children. A dull fire was smouldering in the cooking stove, and beside it sat the grandfather, the baby on his knee, vainly trying to extract consolation from its own puny fist. As I looked at him closely I saw that Mr. Bowen had an unusually fine face—not old looking, but strangely subdued, and chastened. I fancied from his countenance, at once serene and noble, that he had beautiful ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... our way at last into peace, wisdom, the changeless and boundless consciousness, or into the hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our senses foretell, or that which our intelligence demands? Or are both senses and intelligence illusions, puny implements, vain weapons of a brief hour that were never intended to probe or contend with the universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it and to deem impossible that which we do not understand, seeing that we understand ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... world in the points in which he is superior. He is beyond a doubt the ablest head at unreasoning, and the greatest hand at writing it, of all who have tried in our day to attach their names to an error. Common cyclometers sink into puny orthodoxy by ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... forsooth, his'n, an invite, entre nous, tote, hadn't oughter, yclept, a combine, ain't, dole, a try, nouveau riche, puny, grub, twain, a boom, alter ego, a poke, cuss, eld, enthused, mesalliance, tollable, disremember, locomote, a right smart ways, chink, afeard, orate, nary a one, yore, pluralized, distingue, ruination, ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... beneath was a series of tracks carrying traveling and revolving cranes capable of handling the heaviest pieces. We climbed to the top and looked down at the vast stretch of hundreds of feet of deck. It was so vast that it seemed rather the work of a superman than of the puny ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... you, foul son of Sargouthe, that I had solved a mystery you have never guessed at? Although you destroyed me long ago, I have returned. Throw away your puny weapon. I am of the lower dimension and am invulnerable to your engines of destruction. You bloated...." His words trailed off into a stream of vileness that could never have ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... evil, but had deemed the supposition a monstrous and a deadly fallacy, to be combated, to be struck down to the dust. Even now he was chiefly conscious of a mental weakness in himself which had caused him to act as he had acted. He saw himself as one of those puny creatures whose so-called kind hearts lead them into follies, into crimes. Like many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniacke was disposed to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight hardness which sometimes ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... were lifted. She turned her head slowly, and looked steadily at him. He held his breath. A cart rumbled along the cobble-stones outside; the puny wail of a child sounded across the stillness; a handful of rose leaves from a vase at the foot of the altar dropped on the hem of Madame Arnault's dress. It might have been the gaze of an angel in a world where there is no marrying nor giving in marriage, so ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... 'I daresay you don't want; but beggars can't be choosers, you know. If you'd been a nice, smart, strong girl, I might have kept you instead of Betsey Ann; but a little puny thing like you wouldn't be worth her salt. No, no, miss; your fine days are over; to the house you'll go, sure ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... Norwegian mountain folks are big and strong," said Granbury Lapham. "I fancy the puny ones die ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... her brother and herself, a cook, a coachman, a nurse, and her brother's little son Albert. The child, with a fine instinct, had put out his puny arms to Rena at first sight, and she had clasped the little man to her bosom with a motherly caress. She had always loved weak creatures. Kittens and puppies had ever found a welcome and a meal at Rena's hands, only to be chased away by Mis' Molly, who had had a wider ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... one sees of St. Peter's the less easy it is to realize that so magnificent and wonderful an edifice has been constructed by man. Compare the stupendous structure with the puny attempts of the present day. Architecture seems almost a lost art. I think this is owing to want of patience; the lack of doing all things thoroughly and well; the preference for mere show rather than durability and beauty; and the selfish gratification of our own generation ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... want of attention to the feelings of others, from a neglect of the golden rule of putting ourselves in their place, and not from innate malice or a diabolical delight in giving pain, that the sorrows caused by domestic tyrants and puny oppressors chiefly proceed. Were self-love reduced within proper bounds, earth would resemble heaven. Let those, then, who deeply feel those "wrongs which patient merit of the unworthy takes," temper their aspirations after a state where universal ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... other flowering plants, shows the effects of continued neglect or ill usage in diminished vigor and inferior bloom. This is not saying that a variety will "go back" to some ancestral sort, or that it will lose its individuality, but it will become puny and unsatisfactory. This deterioration is principally due to mismanagement, and can be counteracted by a change of methods. Suppose a fine, conical bulb is planted. If it meets with no misfortune it will produce a perfect spike of flowers, and perhaps a dozen ...
— The Gladiolus - A Practical Treatise on the Culture of the Gladiolus (2nd Edition) • Matthew Crawford
... a dark tie of invisible pattern. Yet Trent knew that he was a type of that class which would look upon him as an outsider, and a black sheep, until he had bought his standing. They would expect him to conform to their type, to learn to speak their jargon, to think with their puny brains and to see with their short-sighted eyes. At the "Criterion" he turned in and had a drink, and, bolder for the wine which he had swallowed at a gulp, he told himself that he would do nothing of the sort. He would not alter a jot. They must take him as he was, or leave him. ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... breast that I am pained By what thou griev'st at, and if I had power, My censure of their deeds would soon be known. But in misfortune I have chosen to sail With lowered canvas, rather than provoke With puny strokes invulnerable foes. I would thou didst the like: though I must own The right is on thy side, and not on mine. But if I mean to dwell at liberty, I must obey ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... wan track cut across the open fields. Its course is marked afar by lines of puny trees, sooty as snuffed candles; by telegraph posts and their long spider-webs; by bushes or by fences, which are like the skeletons of bushes. There are a few houses. Up yonder a strip of sky still shows palely yellow above the meager suburb where creeps the muddy crowd detached from ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... of the barriers and coming so close to her with His request. These two, the prejudices of race and the contempt for woman, two of the crying evils of the old world, were overpassed by our Lord as if He never saw them. They were too high for men's puny limbs; they made no obstacle to the march of His divine compassion. And therein lies a symbol, if you like, but none the less a prophecy that will be fulfilled, of the universal adaptation and destination of the Gospel, and its independence of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... his glowing eyes shone an irresistible courage, a fire of passion, and such a purpose as few women could withstand. And so the wife of Scipio admitted her defeat and yielded the play of all her puny arts, that she might ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... made a point of applying to him for permission, as he indeed was bound to do by the simplest rules of courtesy. Mr. Smalley replied at once, willingly granting the favour, as I can prove by the note still in my possession; and presently, frightened by the puny yelping of a few critical curs at home, he has the effrontery ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the "Nar," the puny messenger of the Saxons, compared here to a "twrch," a boar, or ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... invention. With appropriate contrariety, an unfamiliar and hitherto almost detested line of investigation now attracted me. Abstruse mathematical problems which had defied solution for centuries began to appear easy. To defy the State and its puny representatives had become mere child's play. So I forthwith decided to overcome no less a force than ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... Miss Davis? I ain' much to speak bout dis mornin. I tell you de truth, Miss Davis, dese chillun keeps me so worried up dat I don' know whe' half my knowin gone, I say. Great Lord a mercy, dere Possum out dere in de air now en he been puny, too. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... soldiers might well say after the Boyne, "Change kings with us, and we will fight it over again." Indeed, the fight was not fair between the two. 'Twas a weak priest-ridden, woman-ridden man, with such puny allies and weapons as his own poor nature led him to choose, contending against the schemes, the generalship, the wisdom, and the heart of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... believe that my heart for some seconds ceased to beat, and I am sure that Joe shared my dismay, for he tightened the grip of his great strong hand upon my puny one until I could have sworn it was crushed to a pulp. At the bridge head were two gentlemen, who had to all appearance been engaged in chatting, for one still sat on the parapet, while the other stood within a foot or two of him. They were not talking ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... his eloquent, passionate speech, and, above all, his burning patriotism, soon brought him to the front as the leader of the national party; and he now strove with all his might to prevent his land falling to the position of a mere satrapy of the liberators. Better the puny autocracy of Prince Alexander than the very real despotism of the nominees of the Emperor ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... healthy woman he considers to have lost her great charm. Science makes the astonishing discovery, that on the whole, women average a little smaller than men, and society seems to accept the idea that therefore, the smaller they are, the more womanly. But before we decide upon this puny condition as the necessary state of woman, let us look at some of the facts on the other side, and see what are the possibilities of physical strength and health compatible with womanhood. In the University of Michigan, pursuing her studies ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... importance is far beyond the puny functions of comedy and tragedy. The grotesque farce of vaudeville and the tawdry show which only appeals to sentiment at highest and often to the base passions ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... ears with her fingers and run from the spot. The tough fellows standing around enjoyed the war of words hugely. Mr. Sherwood was too big to strike Gedney Raffer, and of course the latter dared not use his puny fists on ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... days," repeated themselves over and over again. His vindictive feeling against society died out in the consciousness of his weakness and insignificance. What is the use of one's smiting a mountain with his fist? Only the puny hand feels the blow. The world became, under Mrs. Arnot's words, too large and vague a generality ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... "seminary," where I hid it till after "dismiss.*"! I grant it does not look well in me to become I my own panegyrist; but I can at least declare, that there were few among the Gaseys able to, resist the prowess of this right arm, puny as it was at the period in question. Our battles were obstinate and frequent; but as the quarrels of the two families and their relations on each side, were as bitter and pugnacious in fairs and markets as ours were in school, we hit upon the plan of holding our Lilliputian engagements upon ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... no skeptic's puny hands, While near the school the church-spire stands, Nor fears the bigot's blinded rule, While near the church-spire stands ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... were too puny to do much harm, but they counted for something, Putnam said, as he tore a cartridge in pieces and, ladling the powder and canister into the gun, aimed and discharged it into the advancing ranks of the foe, with effect. But all ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... brothers were very handsome, but baby bear was a little puny fellow, whose coat couldn't keep out much cold, as it was short and shaggy, and of a dirty brown color. The three older brothers were very unkind to baby bear, but the fourth one always took baby's part, and was always kind to ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... that, he had been for over a year affianced to another—a rich man's only child—a woman older than he, whose shriveled, jaundiced face, weak, scrawny body, and puny, sickly soul, would have been repulsive even to him, had ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... policy of his great predecessor. Where she with supreme tact had loosened the screws so that the great authority vested in her might not press too heavily upon the nation, he tightened them. Where she bowed her imperious will to that of the Commons, this puny tyrant insolently defied it, and swelling with sense of his own greatness, claimed, "Divine right" for Kingship and demanded that his people should say "the King can do no wrong," "to question his authority is to question that of God." If ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... a pathway through a pasture-lot, comprising some ten acres, poor land, covered with puny bushes, and a few gnarled trees, producing cider-apples. It belonged to an old bachelor farmer, who lived in solitary fashion, doing his own cooking, and in general taking care of himself. He was reputed to have money concealed about his premises, which was quite probable, ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... would be worth while to endeavour to penetrate: I mean the Scottish College at Paris. I have heard formerly, that numbers Of papers, of various sorts, were transported at the Reformation to Spain and Portugal: but, if preserved there, they probably are not accessible yet. If they were, how puny, how diminutive, would all such discoveries, and others which we might call of far greater magnitude, be to those of Herschel, who puts up millions of covies of worlds at a beat! My conception is not ample enough to take in even a sketch of his glimpses; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Gen. John A. Sutter The Donner Party's Benefactor The Least and Most that Earth Can Bestow The Survivors' Request His Birth and Parentage Efforts to Reach California New Helvetia A Puny Army Uninviting Isolation Ross and Bodega Unbounded Generosity Sutter's Wealth Effect of the Gold Fever Wholesale Robbery The Sobrante Decision A "Genuine and Meritorious" Grant Utter Ruin Hock Farm Gen. Sutter's Death Mrs. E. ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... and change his jacket. When he had jumped in, and Hugh had bidden the rest good-bye, a sudden shyness came over his poor conscious visitor: and it was not lessened by Mr Shaw telling Tooke that he did not do credit to Crofton air,—so puny as he seemed: and that he looked at that moment more like one that had had a bad accident than Hugh did. When Mr Shaw perceived how the boy's eyes filled with tears in an instant, he probably thought within himself that Tooke was sadly weak-spirited, and altogether ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... even noticed the campanile before, and the reason was that the cathedral happened not to be on the route between Alexandra Grove and her principal customers. Suddenly, out of Victoria Street, they came up against the vast form of the Byzantine cathedral. It was hemmed in by puny six-story blocks of flats, as ancient cathedrals also are hemmed in by the dwellings of townsfolk. But here, instead of the houses having gathered about the cathedral, the cathedral had excavated a place for itself amid the houses. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... peevish words From him, the sole requital of it all! Child after child she bore him; but, compelled Too quickly after childbirth to return To the old wash-tub, all her sufferings Reacted on the children, and they died, Haply in infancy the most of them,— Until but one was left,—a little boy, Puny and pale, gentle and uncomplaining, With all the mother staring from his eyes In hollow, anxious, pitiful appeal. In this one relic all her love and hope And all that made her life endurable At length were centred. She ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... more disinterested and abstracted character than a mere author. The first looks at the numberless volumes of a library, and says, "All these are mine;" the other points to a single volume (perhaps it may be an immortal one) and says, "My name is written on the back of it." This is a puny and groveling ambition, beneath the lofty amplitude of Mr. Coleridge's mind. No, he revolves in his wayward soul, or utters to the passing wind, or discourses to his own shadow, things mightier and more various!—Let us draw the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the smith retorted gruffly, as a puny atomy of a man with a stick and lanthorn was pushed with difficulty to the front. 'But so being you are here, supposing you put Joe Hincks a foot or two back, and let the gentleman ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... His vast and wondrous might He does His deeds of power; But yours are puny in His sight, For strength is not ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... was foaming and tumbling about in a fearful way for the voyager. It was not a regular roll or swell, but short, quick, chopping waves, tumbling about in all directions, that whirled him round and round, rolled him over and over, rendered his puny sail utterly useless and blinded him with foam and spray. It was a strangely fascinating spectacle to watch him in his hand to hand struggle with the ocean. The waves seemed to become living things animated ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... as the one most adapted to excite admiration; and in those churches, from the way the ladies hold their fans, you know that they are not so much impressed with the heat as with the picturesqueness of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshipers, with two thousand dollars' worth of diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent into the poor-box, and then the benediction is pronounced and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Four little craft in a group, with twenty-four men in them, silently waiting for battle with one of the mightiest of God's creatures—one that was indeed a terrible foe to encounter were he but wise enough to make the best use of his opportunities. Against him we came with our puny weapons, of which I could not help reminding myself that "he laugheth at the shaking of a spear." But when the man's brain was thrown into the scale against the instinct of the brute, the contest looked less unequal than at first sight, for THERE ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... again and ignorant to me! Gadsbodikins, you puny upstart in the law to use me so, you green bag carrier, you murderer of unfortunate ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... to overturn the card-castles of this puny race. Come upon them unexpectedly, stare at them undauntedly, and interrogate them abruptly, and they are put to the rout. Their looks even intreat pardon for the ill they thought, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... encompassed them. They seemed to be all alone in a corner of the world that was peopled by diabolical sounds, but not by humans. They had a feeling that because of an error in the plans they had been sent forward without supports; that they—a puny handful—were to be sacrificed under the haunches of the Hindenburg line while all those thousands of others who should have been their companions upon this adventure bided safely behind, held back by the countermand which through some hideous blunder had failed to reach them in ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... after this day was one not soon forgotten in London. In the still darkness came an earthquake—that most terrible of phenomena held in God's hand, whereby He saith to poor, puny, arrogant man, "Be still, and know that I am God." Isoult awoke to hear sounds on all sides of her—the bed creaking, and below the dishes and pans dancing with a noisy clatter. In the next chamber she heard Walter ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... when I avail myself of the privilege of joining in the responses and the singing, I feel that I am fertilizing my spirit for the truth that is proclaimed. As a citizen I have certain rights, but when I come to think of my privileges my rights seem puny in comparison. Then, too, my rights are such cold things, but my privileges are full of sunshine and of joy. My rights seem mathematical, while my privileges seem curves ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... he'lt' is bin-a gone; 'e bin-a gone un lef' you. Wut mekky you is look so puny lak dis? Who is bin hu't-a ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... take any advantage of so puny a rival, Wotan refuses to take the forfeited head, and departs, after telling the Nibelung that the sword can only be restored to its pristine glory by the hand of a man who knows no fear, and that the ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... be glad to leave inflammations and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that "girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle;" when the other crosses my imagination, I ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... have passed on and I more thoughtful have become, for mighty revolutions have gone on within my frame. My mind, a once too puny thing, has year by year grown stronger, until to-day I realize that feeble is my flesh - a thing to be abhorred, and mind does rule above all else. My very face which once was rude and lacked that fire that strong intelligence ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... for a mere puny girl that the chief assented at once; and the Fox was content to take a gun, which proved part of the spoil, for ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... people were whisked from city to city at the unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. At the present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant of the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler and Levassor of the eighties of the last century) can do better than these ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... more perilously, Raleigh. Crites, like Asper-Macilente in "Every Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... main street opened on the sea-front, a lady and gentleman were advancing with hesitating steps, as though unfamiliar with the place. The brother was a puny little man, with a sallow complexion. He was wearing a motoring-cap. The sister too was short, but rather stout, and was wrapped in a large cloak. She struck them as a woman of a certain age, but still good-looking under the thin ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... in need of some such cordial after the losses they had sustained, and the ministry of Versailles did not fail to make the most of this advantage: they published a pompous narrative of the battle of St. Cas, and magnified into a mighty victory the puny check which they had given to the rear-guard of an inconsiderable detachment. The people received it with implicit belief, because it was agreeable to their passions, and congratulated themselves upon their success in hyperboles, dictated by that vivacity ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, 'What merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some previous state of existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?... Often as I (p. 090) have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... also a moon for the night. Nec tibi occurrit perfecta universitas, nisi ubi majora sic praesto sunt, ut minora non desint. This is the judgment we ought to make of every part with respect to the whole. Any other view is narrow and deceitful. But what are the weak and puny designs of men, if compared to that of the creation and government of the universe? "As much as the heavens are above the earth, as much," says God in the Holy Writ, "are My ways and My thoughts above ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... not, however, tall and strong, like most of his fellow-citizens, but puny and very lame. His small size and bad health had not lessened his courage, however, and he was always ready to plan a new campaign or to lead his ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... leaves for sale or home use. Among these, provided the seed has been good and true, at least 90 per cent will be about alike in appearance, productivity and otherwise. The remaining plants may show variations so striking as to attract attention. Some may be tall and scraggly, some may be small and puny; others may be light green, still others dark green; and so on. But there may be one or two plants that stand out conspicuously as the best of the whole lot. These are the ones to mark with a stake so they will not be molested when the crop is being gathered and so they ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... demanded Toby, appalled at the thought of any one venturing out on that swirling river in a puny powerboat. ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... mind, and not her local habitation or employment, that entitles her to consideration—that entitles her to equality, to justice. With equal advantages, women are no whit behind men in any thing except physical strength. Are men deprived of civil rights because some of them are puny? ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... hen in very hot weather. As we had more eggs than were required, we did so during part of June, July, and August, but had very bad fortune with them; the hen seldom hatching more than three or four, and those puny little creatures. ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... the Los Amigos criminals should perish in the old-fashioned manner. And then came the news of the eleotrocutions in the East, and how the results had not after all been so instantaneous as had been hoped. The Western Engineers raised their eyebrows when they read of the puny shocks by which these men had perished, and they vowed in Los Amigos that when an irreclaimable came their way he should be dealt handsomely by, and have the run of all the big dynamos. There should be no reserve, said the engineers, but ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mysterious purposes but little known:—it seems as if the bell disliked its little wooden cottage, on the unfinished spire; or was inspired, or in a towering passion to live in a tower, or saw no fun in waiting for funds; and so, continually pealed an appeal to the public:—however, it was a puny, little, curious bell, with a tongue of its own, now clacking for a charity sermon; and, curiously, Mr. Brown thinks a charity sermon always edifies him with the headache, and is doubtful about going, as they make him a reluctant ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... Whilst living, ah, how few were known to fame! One in a million has not left a name,— A single token, on life's shifting scene, To tell to other years that such has been. Yet man, unaided by a hope sublime, Thinks that his puny arm can cope with time; That his vast genius can reverse the doom, And shed a deathless light upon his tomb; That distant ages shall his worth admire, And young hearts kindle at the sacred fire Of him whose fame no envious clouds o'ercast, Yet died ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... of wild, rolling clouds, the moon was a drowning face. Stunted trees bent before the wind like puny men who strained impotently to advance. Over there was one more like a real man—a figure, Bobby thought, with a black thing over ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... breeze bears, the limitless deep green of the unmeasured seas, the great arch of the zenith, the clear view of the sun's march, the purity and the stillness and the mastery of it all, the consciousness of the puny power of man, the mind message recalling the sublimity and the awe of the unseen Power beyond—all these things impress you, move in you the deepest thoughts, turn you from the little estimates of self as Nature only can in the holiest of her moods, which are ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... their necks rise from their shoulders like ivory towers. Any costume will look beautiful on such women. But how are poor, puny, ill-made women to dress in such fashions? They could not wear those dresses without exhibiting all those personal defects which our present fashion conceals. It's all very fine for perfectly beautiful women to have such fashions; but it's very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... opening of the war she far outclassed Germany which in point of numbers was her superior. At that moment Great Britain possessed about five hundred machines, of which two hundred were seaplanes, and fifteen dirigibles. Despite this puny force, however, British aviators flew across the channel in such numbers to the headquarters in France that when the Expeditionary Army arrived on the scene it found ready to its hand a scouting force vastly ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... to behave becomingly and also to make a figure in dialogue, he is only like the bad artist whose picture is a failure. We may pity these ill-gifted strivers, but not pretend that their works are pleasant to behold. A man is bound to know something of his own weight and muscular dexterity, and the puny athlete is called foolish before he is seen to be thrown. Hinze has not the stuff in him to be at once agreeably conversational and sincere, and he has got himself up to be at all events agreeably conversational. Notwithstanding this deliberateness ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... inmates died of starvation. One nurse had to provide for the wants of four infants. Garibaldi wrote off an address to the ladies of Palermo, in which he implored them to interest themselves in the wretched little beings created in the image of God, at the sight of whose wasted and puny bodies he, an old soldier, had wept. He had money and food distributed every morning to the most destitute, at the gates of the royal palace, where he lived with a frugality that scandalised the aged servants of royalty whom he kept, out of kindness, at ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... soft and puny for lack of hardships. The difficult places and dreaded conditions, through which Christians pass, make life strong, sublime, triumphant, fruitful in good work, resourceful in the Holy Spirit, and ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... vessel. In the last day's fighting, however, the Active became entangled among several of the Spanish galleons, and being almost becalmed by their lofty hulls, one of them ran full at her, and rolling heavily in the sea, seemed as if she would overwhelm her puny antagonist. ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... sight of as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers holding possession of the centre of the landscape—majestically beautiful—imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even now, when the towns are ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Bax, O Bax! Saint Cuthbert aid me now! O Bax, see how to sweat thou'st made me now! Thy speed abate! O sweet Saint Dominic! Why pliest thou thy puny shanks so quick; O day! O Bax! O hot, sulphurous day, My flesh betwixt ye melteth fast away. Come, sit ye, Bax, in shade of yon sweet tree, And, sitting soft, I'll ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... sense of helplessness and constraint. It was impossible to speak with the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their puny efforts to deflect the course of events: and Amherst, without reverting to her last words, asked after a moment if his ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... will empty that horn at a draught. Some men make two draughts of it, but the most puny drinker of all can empty ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... an Artist with a soul worthy of being wedded to Nature. Puny, shallow artists will not be able to see much more of Nature than a midge sees of a man. What we want is a man with the physique, the abounding health and spirits, the fine intellect, the poetic power and imagination, the love of animals ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... his height and strength was fitted to be not only an officer but actually a private in his former gallant regiment, and brother Barnes was but a puny young gentleman, the idea of a personal conflict between them was rather ridiculous. Some notion of this sort may have passed through Sir Brian's mind, for the Baronet said with his usual solemnity, "It is ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... all, it wasn't wuth what it cost him. An' it wasn't! No, it wasn't," repeated Uncle Billy, solemnly shaking the ashes from his pipe. "What's the good of a head full of book learnin' with a poah puny body that kaint ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... German proverb says, 'Give a boy a wife, and a child a bird, and death will soon knock at the door.' Even an author so old as Aristotle warns young men against early marriage, under penalty of disease and puny offspring. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... the philosophical, and the cruel—these were the divided streams, as it were, of his character, which all, however, united to make up the dark and terrible current of his great ambition; great, however, only as a passion and a moral impulse of action, but puny, vile, and base in its true character and elements. Here, then, stood the victim of his own creed, the baffled antagonist of God's providence, who despised religion, and trampled upon its obligations; the man who strove to make himself his own deity, his own priest, and who administered to his ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... short a time To wage our wars, to fan our fates, To take our fill of armored crime, To troop our banner, storm the gates. Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red, Blind in our puny reign of power, Do we forget how soon is sped One ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... George's purpose had been to ignore the man, but he had to take his hand for a moment; whereupon old John began to tell George that he was looking well, though there had been a time, during his fourth month, when he was so puny that nobody thought he would live. The great-nephew, in a fury of blushes, dropped old John's hand with some vigour, and seized that of the next person in the line. "Member you v'ry well 'ndeed!" he ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets are born; souls slowly evolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endless diversity and specialization, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... cheek. I gave a great gasp of anguish, and with all the pent-up force of despair clutched at the branch overhead. My finger-tips just curled over it; I tightened them, but, at the most, it was a very feeble, puny grasp, and totally insufficient to enable me to swing my body out of reach of the tiger. I immediately gave myself up as lost, and was endeavouring to reconcile myself to the idea of being slowly chewed alive, when an extraordinary thing happened. The wer-tiger gave ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... close of this Paleozoic era the Appalachian Mountains were slowly upheaved in great convoluted folds, some of them probably reaching three or four miles above the sea-level, though the tooth of time has since gnawed them down to comparatively puny limits. The continental areas thus enlarged were peopled during the ensuing Mesozoic time with multitudes of strange reptiles, many of them gigantic in size. The waters, too, still teeming with invertebrates and fishes, had their quota of reptilian ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... river is left, to the summit of the streams falling into it. Long slopes or terraces are thus formed, furrowed here and there by the ravines, which serve to drain off the water from above into the river below. Puny rivulets where they begin, these watercourses cut deeper as they run on, until, at the river, they become impassable gulches. The old military road skirts the foot of the heights, which sometimes abut closely upon the river, and sometimes draw back far ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... 'mongst the big men of the world! I'm the only one on airth as kin be as big as that, hain't I? Yeou hain't amountin' ter nuthin', air ye? Why shouldn't ye take my place afore the law? Hain't hit Natur's way fer the puny ter go ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... deteriorated in size since the Crimean war; but I believe that the men of one regiment still average six feet two inches in height; and I am sure that nobody ever saw them in line without noticing the contrast between these magnificent men and the comparatively puny officers who command them. These officers are from the highest social rank in England, the governing classes; and if it were the whole object of this military organization to give a visible proof of the utter absurdity of the "Saturday Review's" theory, it could not be better ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... "And her so big and him so puny! She'd ought to lift him off the earth with one arm and lam him with a baste or two with the ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... started to steal the beans; and one by one subsequently received each an arrow and started on his errand. There only remained the scented taros, so that picking again a mandatory arrow, he ascertained who would go and carry away the taros: whereupon a very puny and very delicate rat was heard to assent. 'I would like,' he said, 'to go and steal the scented taros.' The old rat and all the swarm of rats, upon noticing his state, feared that he would not be sufficiently expert, and apprehending at the same time that he was too ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... nor Hindley, nor all the dreams that ever I dreamt. Two words would comprehend my future—death and hell: existence, after losing her, would be hell. Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine. If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough as her whole affection be monopolised by him. Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... to detect; and if you plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin it was, and how little color it had. But viewed at a distance in a favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like, enriching the earth. Such puny causes combine to produce these decided effects. I was the more surprised and charmed because grass is commonly of a sober ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... hauling upon it. But the pull of the shoreward rushing waters was as great as their strength. The boat made no movement out of her dangerous position. Dan was sculling like mad, but his efforts, compared to the might of the sea, were puny. In deep silence the mass of lumber worried at its unforeseen anchor. It ripped free and, rolling and twisting in spineless abandon, bore down upon the lifeboat with crushing momentum. On it came. They began to pay out the line in order that ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... declining to become jealous of the bevy of titled lords, who pay fawning court to my wealth and social position, here in Washington, you do yourself justice; while at the same time, you pay me the compliment of a lifetime! When compared with you, how puny and feeble are the princes and titled lords, made by kings and courts, in lands where selfishness reigns supreme at the expense of millions of unfortunate subjects! An impecunious host of these fortune-hunting lords swarm in the society of our large cities. With faded titles ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... word of the Langrois dialect, signifying a puny, sickly, effeminate being. In the mouth of Madame Sejournant, this picturesque expression acquired a significant amount of ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... of his puny body Wolfgar flung Georg backward—safely away from the deadly violet beam. And then, without warning, without a cry which would endanger us, the little Mars man sprang headlong, into and through the ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... watched with deep anxiety over her little Maria. The child was pale, and puny, yet very affectionate and intelligent. Whenever her mamma said, "Where is dear papa gone?" the little creature started up, and pointed to the sea. She could not speak plainly, for she was only ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... pair on his right, a thin, puny little fellow lugging a burly sergeant, with both legs broken, suspended from his neck; the sight reminded the young man of an ant, toiling under a burden many times larger than itself; and even as he watched them a shell burst directly in their path and they were lost to view. When the smoke ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Reason sway the times, Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes? [108] ROSCOMMON! [109] SHEFFIELD! [110] with your spirits fled, [111] No future laurels deck a noble head; No Muse will cheer, with renovating smile, The paralytic puling of CARLISLE. [li] [112] The puny schoolboy and his early lay Men pardon, if his follies pass away; But who forgives the Senior's ceaseless verse, Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse? 730 What heterogeneous honours deck ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... equally untutored mind—had entered the presence of Mr. King! And no devotee of the Ammonite god had had greater faith in his potent protection than Soames had in that of his unseen master. What should a servant of Mr. King fear from the officers of the law? How puny a thing was the law in comparison with the director of that secret, powerful, invulnerable organization whereof to-day he (Soames) formed ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... answer, Victor Lamont?" cried the woman, shrilly. "Ten to one it's some girl whose puny, pretty face has fascinated you, and ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... that little word 'my,' we rise to the wonderful thought that the creature can claim an individual relation to Him, and in some profound sense a possession there. The tiny mica flake claims kindred with the Alpine peak from which it fell. The poor, puny hand, that can grasp so little of the material and temporal, can grasp all of God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... grey goose across the zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two thousand miles of boiling Yukon flood. At such times he felt impelled to—express his own unconquerable essence; and with strong drink, wild music, and Batard, he indulged in vast orgies, wherein he pitted his puny strength in the face of things, and challenged all that was, and had been, and was ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... and inhumanities of the world it wages eternal war, without vengeance, without violence, but by softening the hearts of men and inducing a better spirit. Apparitions of a day, here for an hour and tomorrow gone, what is our puny warfare against evil and ignorance compared with the warfare which this venerable Order has been waging against them for ages, and will continue to wage after we ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. "That is well enough for men like you," he would say, "silpnas, puny fellows—but my back ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of the city of God. Coelius Secundus Curio wrote a little book, De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis, which was reprinted not long since; but he is indeed far from having apprehended the compass of the kingdom of heaven. The ancients had puny ideas on the works of God, and St. Augustine, for want of knowing modern discoveries, was at a loss when there was question of explaining the prevalence of evil. It seemed to the ancients that there was only one earth inhabited, and even ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... the burden of pecuniary care that his father was carrying, and himself volunteered the wish that his uncle would take him to sea. However it happened, the suggestion staggered Suckling, who well knew the lad's puny frame and fragile constitution. "What has poor little Horatio done," cried he, "that he, being so weak, should be sent to rough it at sea? But let him come, and if a cannon-ball takes off his head, he will at least be provided for." ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... child was weakly and puny to boot; its parents often thought it looked sickly and would soon become a little angel in Heaven. But it was not so; Matthew thrived, became a priest subsequently, and weighed in his prime two hundred and fifty, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the water of the canal and crept up the mountain-side, shrouding the black pines and hiding the summit from view. Beyond, the tops of the hills on the Virginia shore were beginning to blush as they caught the first rays of sunrise, and the fish-hawk's puny scream echoed from the islands in the stream. It was a lovely morning, and promised a day, as Mr. McGrath observed, on which some elegant fish should die. After a few delays at locks, in which canal-boats took precedence of us, we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... and all were unusually hopeful and animated; for it was popularly believed that these fires would effectually check the pestilence. But the angry fiat of a Mighty Judge had gone forth, and the tremendous arm of the destroying angel was not to be stopped by the puny ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... my readers any one has been presumptuous enough to attempt to confine the power and purpose of God by man's puny understanding, let me persuade him to abandon this absurd position by the use of an illustration which I once found in a watermelon. I was passing through Columbus, Ohio, some years ago and stopped to eat in the restaurant in the depot. My attention was called to a slice of watermelon, and ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... increased to double their former size, and they yield about four and some of them five times as much milk as formerly. By greater attention to breeding and feeding, they have been changed from an ill-shaped, puny, mongrel race of cattle to a fixed and specific breed of excellent color and quality. So gradually and imperceptibly were improvements in the breed and condition of the cattle introduced, that although I lived in Ayrshire from 1760 ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... ship at that time in the French aerial service, which had proved the fastest airship in commission, and which also was a product of the Astra Company. But this fine craft was completely outclassed by the puny Astra-Torres. ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... shot had struck the hull of the vessel. In the last day's fighting, however, the Active became entangled among several of the Spanish galleons, and being almost becalmed by their lofty hulls, one of them ran full at her, and rolling heavily in the sea, seemed as if she would overwhelm her puny antagonist. ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... to her. And she is the Queen of Englond; for Englishmen have taken all the Lond of Ynde. For they were right good werryoures of old, and wyse, noble, and worthy. But of late hath risen a new sort of Englishman very puny and fearful, and these men clepen Radicals. And they go ever in fear, and they scream on high for dread in the streets and the houses, and they fain would flee away from all that their fathers gat them with the sword. And this sort men call ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... compelled Too quickly after childbirth to return To the old wash-tub, all her sufferings Reacted on the children, and they died, Haply in infancy the most of them,— Until but one was left,—a little boy, Puny and pale, gentle and uncomplaining, With all the mother staring from his eyes In hollow, anxious, pitiful appeal. In this one relic all her love and hope And all that made her life endurable At length were centred. She had ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... flames had spread and almost before they knew it the town seemed doomed. Arches of flame, myriads of falling sparks, hundreds of fleeing half-clad men, women and children, the hissing of the engines in their puny attempts to fight the monster, and ever and anon the dull roar of the falling walls, made a scene, as grand and weird as it was desolate and awful. In less than two hours time fifty-two squares had been laid waste, leaving a trail of smoldering black ashes. That the whole ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... sang Of brotherhood, and freedom, love and hope, With strong, wide sympathy which dared to cope With all life's phases, and call nought unclean. Whilst hearts are generous, and whilst woods are green, He shall find hearers, who in a slack time Of puny bards and pessimistic rhyme, Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice. His "yawp barbaric" was a human voice; The singer was a man. America Is poorer by a stalwart soul today, And may feel pride that she hath given birth To this stout laureate ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... "lay aside my 'Orpheus' for one of Hasse's puny operas? Never! My opera is almost complete. It needs but one last aria to stand out before the world in all its fulness of perfection, and shall I suffer it to be laid aside to give place to one of his tooting, jingling performances? ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the day was hot, And Philip had an orange got. The fruit was fragrant, tempting, bright, Refreshing to the smell and sight; Not of that puny size which calls Poor customers to common stalls, But large and massy, full of juice, As any Lima can produce. The liquor would, if squeezed out, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... heavily forward, and, without any apparent effort, he buried his axe to the eye, in the soft body of a cotton-wood tree. He stood, a moment, regarding the effect of the blow, with that sort of contempt with which a giant might be supposed to contemplate the puny resistance of a dwarf, and then flourishing the implement above his head, with the grace and dexterity with which a master of the art of offence would wield his nobler though less useful weapon, he quickly severed the trunk of the tree, bringing its tall top crashing to the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... nearer vision it discerns What in the distance like ripe roses seemed Crimsoning with odorous beauty the gray rocks Are the red lights of wreckers! Just as well The obstinate traveler might in pride oppose His puny shoulder to the icy slip Of the blind avalanche, and hope for life; Or Beauty press her forehead in the grave, And think to rise as from the bridal bed. But let the soul resolve its course shall be Onward and upward, and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... find how far this foolish method hastens the work of nature and ruins the character. This is one of the chief causes of physical degeneration in our towns. The young people, prematurely exhausted, remain small, puny, and misshapen, they grow old instead of growing up, like a vine forced to bear fruit in spring, which fades ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... experience of many observers that the first whelps born in a litter are the strongest, largest, and healthiest. If the litter is a large one, the last born may be noticeably puny, and this disparity in size may continue to maturity. The wise breeder will decide for himself how many whelps should be left to the care of their dam. The number should be relative to her health and constitution, and in any case it is well not to give her so ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... is not mine, Aminta, to commend you According to your merits. Miles above My puny lyre were this; I therefore send you, For reference, "The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... in importance is far beyond the puny functions of comedy and tragedy. The grotesque farce of vaudeville and the tawdry show which only appeals to sentiment at highest and often to the base ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... got a mother, and if ever there was a woman on the face of this earth that deserves the love of a son, that woman is my mother. Sister," he added, turning to one of those who sat on a bench near him with a thin, puny, curly-haired boy wrapped up in her ragged shawl, "the best prayer that I could offer up for you—and I do offer it—is, that the little chap in your arms may grow up to bless his mother as heartily as I bless mine, but that can never be, so long as you love ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... Lavretzky shouted at him, ordered him to leave the room, but afterward begged his pardon; but this caused Anton to grow still more disconsolate. Lavretzky could not sit in the drawing-room; he felt as though his great-grandfather Andrei were gazing scornfully from the canvas at his puny descendant.—"Ekh, look out for thyself! thou art sailing in shoal water!" his lips, pursed up on one side, seemed to be saying. "Can it be,"—he thought,—"that I shall not be able to conquer myself,—that I shall give in to this—nonsense?" (The severely-wounded in war always call their wounds ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... despondent at night. Then, after refreshing sleep, the spirit of hope reawakened. He felt very certain now that he was going to get in; and still with morning light he hailed the victory; while, after a heavy day, he doubted of its fruits and mistrusted himself. His powers seemed puny contrasted with the gigantic difficulties that the machine set up between a private member and any effective or independent ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... bids for man all nature sweetly smile, And sends his rain upon the just and vile; His attribute is love; and shall ye dare To take the life mercy and love would spare? Shall ye destroy what he has formed to live, And take away what ye can never give? Shall puny mortal claim the right his own Belonging to Omnipotence alone? Rash man, forbear! and stay the ready dart That seeks to lodge within thy brother's heart. But, no; for mercy's voice, now hushed and ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... means puny either in proportions or slaughter, as, for instance, when he meditated the conquest of Kauai, his expedition included seven thousand picked warriors, twenty-one schooners, forty swivels, six mortars, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... in face of the ever-changing and often menacing aspects of nature. No wonder, therefore, that he is thrown into a panic by an eclipse, and thinks that the sun or the moon would surely perish, if he did not raise a clamour and shoot his puny shafts into the air to defend the luminaries from the monster who threatens to devour them. No wonder he is terrified when in the darkness of night a streak of sky is suddenly illumined by the flash of a meteor, or the whole expanse of the celestial arch glows with the fitful light of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... little hour,—how short a time To wage our wars, to fan our fates, To take our fill of armored crime, To troop our banner, storm the gates. Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red, Blind in our puny reign of power, Do we forget how soon is ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... throttle rammed down. The gleaming, thousand-foot shell of the ZX-1 roared by it at equal altitude, making it a puny fly-speck in the sky. But the fly-speck was faster. It turned in a screaming bank; it straightened; it lunged back after the swaying, retreating mammoth like a whippet, lower, now, than its quarry. It maneuvered expertly as it gained, for one of the best pilots of the service ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... heat and dry, thirsty sand, miles upon miles of it flashing by in a gray, barren blur. A flat, arid, monotonous land, vast, threatening, waterless, treeless. Its immensity awed, its bleakness depressed. Man's work here seemed but to accentuate the puny insignificance of man. Man had come upon the desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles with their glistening wires, two gleaming parallel rails of burning steel ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... that would astonish people, to perform some patriotically heroic feat; and like a child he made sport of the momentous, and unavoidable event—the abandonment and burning of Moscow—and tried with his puny hand now to speed and now to stay the enormous, popular tide that ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... 'twas David's puny hand That caused his overthrow! Though long the terror of the land, A ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence which seemed to promise for the human pygmies a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in the event, we have not been able even to equal. And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and derisory, since here it is laid low, after having subsisted barely four ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... the card-castles of this puny race. Come upon them unexpectedly, stare at them undauntedly, and interrogate them abruptly, and they are put to the rout. Their looks even intreat pardon for the ill they ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... outline; and the sight produced in Amherst and Justine a vague sense of helplessness and constraint. It was impossible to speak with the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their puny efforts to deflect the course of events: and Amherst, without reverting to her last words, asked after a moment if his wife ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... In whose high seat is set a Nothingness, A woman naught availing. Worst of all The wise deep-thoughted! Never in my hall May she sit throned who thinks and waits and sighs! For Cypris breeds most evil in the wise, And least in her whose heart has naught within; For puny wit can work but puny sin. Why do we let their handmaids pass the gate? Wild beasts were best, voiceless and fanged, to wait About their rooms, that they might speak with none, Nor ever hear one answering ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... is a wan track cut across the open fields. Its course is marked afar by lines of puny trees, sooty as snuffed candles; by telegraph posts and their long spider-webs; by bushes or by fences, which are like the skeletons of bushes. There are a few houses. Up yonder a strip of sky still shows palely yellow above the meager suburb where creeps ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... burst from the Ash Goblin at the sight of his work destroyed before his very eyes and by the one for whom the snare had been laid. Coward though he was, he would have rushed upon the Prince to attack him with all his puny strength, had not the heat which streamed from the Sword of Fire made his limbs powerless to stir from the spot where he lay hid, had not the glow which surrounded him become so intense that he was forced to bury his head in his cloak, lest his eyes ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... cried, catching up the word the more hotly because she knew it to be Jacqueline's own gage of battle, "an empire, August Sire, to be gained by fighting, as your forefathers, as mine, won theirs. And that is nobler, I suppose, than puny inheritance. I do not know what the Hapsburg may be fallen to, but a daughter of Orleans still has the right to expect a crown from her husband. If ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the misshapen figure into his arms, he rained kisses upon the pinched, discolored face. But Rosa did not respond; her puny strength had flown and she lay inert in his embrace, scarcely breathing. Tears stole down her cheeks and very faintly her fingers fluttered ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... the Glacial period, I throw in your teeth your own facts, at the base of the Himalaya, on the possibility of the co-existence of at least forms of the tropical and temperate regions. I can give a parallel case for animals in Mexico. Oh! my dearly beloved puny child, how cruel men are to you! I am very glad you approve ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... enter into the joys of his Lord, such as these might be. But I do not know that I ever met with a human being who seemed to me to have a stronger claim on the pitying consideration and kindness of his Maker than a wretched, puny, crippled, stunted child that I saw in Newgate, who was pointed out as one of the most notorious and inveterate little thieves in London. I have no doubt that some of those who were looking at this pitiable morbid secretion of the diseased ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Church of God that if a Bishop of the Anglican Church should admit Presbyterians, Methodists, or members of other denominations to his communion table a scream of rage would go up all over England, and a mighty demand would be raised to impeach the Bishop for heresy! Think of it! God above! the puny human mind. Do you wonder that the dogma of the Church has lost force? That, despite its thunders, thinking men laugh? I freely admit that our great need is to find an adequate substitute for the authority which others ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... had Angouleme at his fingers' ends; he saw all the difficulties at a glance, and resolved to sweep them out of the way by a bold stroke that only a Tartuffe's brain could invent. The puny lawyer was not a little amused to find his fellow-conspirator keeping his word with him; not a word did Petit-Claud utter; he respected the musings of his companion, and they walked the whole way from the paper-mill to the Rue ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... compared with water and air, is dependent on sustenance, as Heracleitus so well realised, as also its consequent limitations in regard to free and independent movement: but the sage solved this difficulty by making the Fire-motion feed, as it were, upon itself. The god was represented as puny at birth because flame, especially as kindled artificially, so often starts from a tiny spark. His marriage to Aphrodite typifies "the association of fire with the life-giving forces of nature." So, remarks Max Mueller, the Hindu Agni was the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... excitement that he had forgotten himself, but Condell told him to think no more of it, as it was the sort of spirit that he liked to see a young man display. There was little time for conversation, however, for the Huascar, as though in revenge for the damage inflicted by her puny enemy, again discharged her whole broadside—or at least so much of it as was still capable of being fired; and the marksmanship was so excellent that every missile again struck the Covadonga, while at the same moment the Union again started firing ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... again: This life is a school. From the puny, helpless infant to old age, life is a development of the attributes with which we come into the world. We get all our education through our senses. No faculty of mind or body is useless. The perfect man has these all perfectly developed. We have at least one example of a perfect man, ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... inherited by the child? Not invariably; if the mother is fretful, irritable, cross, repining, etc., her child may be puny, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... number of the inhabitants of that State could never much increase. For as all our actions imitate nature, and it is neither natural nor possible that a puny stem should carry a great branch, so a small republic cannot assume control over cities or countries stronger than herself; or, doing so, will resemble the tree whose boughs being greater than its trunk, are supported with difficulty, and snapped by every gust ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... on Monday night was a very stylish jam. He is a small, puny-built man, with gold rings in his ears, and a face of genteel ugliness, but touchingly lugubrious in its expression. With his violin at his shoulder, he has the air of a husband undergoing the nocturnal ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... custom of her many friends, both young and old, to gather there, and listen to her stories, if she had any to tell. I often joined the group of listeners. On many, many days, as the season advanced, Lib had no words for us. She had always been a fragile, puny little creature, and this year she seemed to grow weaker, thinner, more waxen white, each day. She had a wonderful voice, shrill, far-reaching, but strangely sweet and clear, with a certain vibrating, ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... found to contain every species of fruit, from the cooling nectarine and luscious peach to the puny pippin and the noxious nut. There Indolence may repose, and Inebriety revel; and the spruce apprentice, rushing in at second account, may there chatter with impunity; debarred, by a barrier of brick and mortar, from marring that scenic interest in others, which nature and education have ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... them (God knows how!) what I have always done with everybody except Mr. Armadale—I produced a disagreeable impression at first sight; I couldn't mend it afterward; and there was an end of me in respectable quarters. It is quite likely I might have spent all my savings, my puny little golden offspring of two years' miserable growth, but for a school advertisement which I saw in a local paper. The heartlessly mean terms that were offered encouraged me to apply; and I got the place. How I prospered in it, and what became of me next, there is no need ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Those to whom the labour of ruining the outward structure had been confided were less successful than their neighbours who had pillaged its contents. The ponderous stones of the pillars, the massive surfaces of the walls, resisted the most vigorous of their puny efforts, and forced them to remain contented with mutilating that which they could not destroy—with tearing off roofs, defacing marbles, and demolishing capitals. The rest of the buildings remained uninjured, and grander even now ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... invariably give their fellow Africans sturdy lower limbs while they do not do so invariably to Europeans. The latter of a certain type are made to stand on well planted feet, while such Europeans as are in any way about to use their guns have their legs bent and puny." ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... from the horrible roof Into the alien sunshine merciless, The shrill satiric fields ghastly with day, Raging to front God in his pride of sway And hurl across the lifted swords of fate That ringed Him where He sat My puny gage of scorn and desolate hate Which somehow should undo Him, after all! That this girl face, expectant, virginal, Which gazes out at me Boon as a sweetheart, as if nothing loth (Save for the eyes, with other presage stored) To pledge me troth, And in the ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... is never established; the world does not follow him; only of Wisdom is he known, and of her children, who are children of light. He never speaks by their mouths who say "Shalt not." He knows that "shalt not" is illegitimate, puny, trying always to usurp the throne of the true king, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... anchorage, which we found in twenty-two fathoms, near South-West Point. By half-past fire that evening we anchored. The excitement ashore was great, and before the anchor was really down we were surrounded by canoes. As a people, they are small and puny, and much darker than the Eastern Polynesians. They were greatly excited over Pi's baby, a fine plump little fellow, seven months old, who, beside them, seemed a white child. Indeed, all they saw greatly astonished ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... her life held for her an agony more terrible than anything she had ever known. Sea, sky, wind, and sudden pelting rain seemed leagued against her in a monstrous array against which she battled vainly with her puny woman's strength. The horror of it was like a leaden, paralysing weight. She fought and struggled because instinct compelled her; but at her heart was the awful knowledge that the sea had claimed her and she could not ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... compelled to inform us that there were no red meats of any sort to be had, but only sea foods. So we started in with oysters. Personally I have never cared deeply for the European oyster. In size he is anaemic and puny as compared with his brethren of the eastern coast of North America; and, moreover, chronically he is suffering from an acute attack of brass poisoning. The only way by which a novice may distinguish a bad European ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... was puny, and did not make a very sturdy fight for life. Still he weathered along, season after season, and survived two stronger children, Margaret and Benjamin. By 1839 Judge Clemens had lost faith in Florida. He removed his family to Hannibal, and in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... belonged; their business it was carefully to view the infant, and, if they found it stout and well made, they gave order for its rearing, and allotted to it one of the nine thousand shares of land above mentioned for its maintenance; but if they found it puny and ill-shaped, ordered it to be taken to what was called the Apothetae, a sort of chasm under Taygetus; as thinking it neither for the good of the child itself, nor for the public interest, that it should be brought up, if it did not, from the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... a path leaves the road, and the pilgrim has either to proceed on horseback or on foot. We had to go on foot, and a very long and tiring walk it proved to be. Besides Dr. S. and his factotum, Lazo, we took another man with us, a wretched puny individual, but seemingly possessed of more endurance than any of us. He led us by a short cut over rocks, and up slippery breakneck walls of cliffs, over which our guide skipped nimbly, and having reached the top seemingly hours before us, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... the magic illusions of color made it a land of remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative. And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him. Here was life and here was love. He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world's desire. Barriers there were none. A man and woman, both as vital as the morning, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... in the past two years paid these humble rooms by the lady of Tamiya. To all her neighbours O'Taki has pointed out and bragged of the favour of the Ojo[u]san. The very clothing now on your wretched puny body came from her hands. While Cho[u]bei spent his gains in drink and paid women, Taki was nourished by the rice from Tamiya. When Taki lay in of this tiny body it was the Ojo[u]san who furnished aid, and saw that child and mother could live. Alas! That you should grow up to be like this villainous ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the quivering eyelids were lifted. She turned her head slowly, and looked steadily at him. He held his breath. A cart rumbled along the cobble-stones outside; the puny wail of a child sounded across the stillness; a handful of rose leaves from a vase at the foot of the altar dropped on the hem of Madame Arnault's dress. It might have been the gaze of an angel in a world where there is no marrying nor giving in marriage, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... have run away with it. The ground was dug in various places, as if for the purpose of further improvements, and here and there a sickly little tree was carefully hurdled round, and seemed pining its puny heart out at ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... say it's ill coming from me to fault any man's conduct; but I hate your little vices as much as your little virtues: sickly, puny goods and evils, that are too weak for sun to ripen, too low for blast to break, but which endure, the same withered, sapless things, to the death-day—Augh! a bold villain, or a real downright good man, for my money. How the devil can Charles Stuart do any thing great, or think of any thing great, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... his also! for he loved her! he loved her! he loved her! the thought went on hammering in her mind, for she knew of its great truth! He loved her and went away! And she, poor, puny weakling, was unable to hold him back; the tendrils which fastened his soul to hers were not so tenacious as those which made him cling to suffering humanity, over there in France, where men and women were in fear of death and torture, and looked upon the elusive ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... crash came. Our efforts to escape the pier were of no avail. I made a puny effort to break the impact with a pole, but was sent sprawling on the deck. Al tumbled headlong on top of the engine, which he had stopped at last, our passenger rolled over and over, but we all stayed with the ship. Each grabbing ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... here state that the scene related, innocent as it was, and, as one would naturally imagine, of puny consequence, if any, did no less a thing than, subsequently, to precipitate the Protestant Countess de Saldar into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. A ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knew they had at last cast off his mastery. So he was not taken unawares when he ordered them back in quest of their abandoned charge, and saw the gleam of the hunting knives that they drew from the sheaths. A pitiful spectacle, three weak men lifting their puny strength in the face of the mighty vastness; but the two recoiled under the fierce rifle blows of the one and returned like beaten dogs to the leash. Two hours later, with Joe reeling between them and Sitka Charley bringing up the rear, they ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... and trampled it under his feet, coldly and quietly! She was in his way, and he had put her aside. How the fine subtile spirit had risen up out of its agony of shame, and scorned him! How it had flashed from the puny frame standing there in the muddy road despised and jeered at, and calmly judged him! He might go from her as he would, toss her off like a worn-out plaything, but he could not blind her: let him put on what face he would to the world, whether they called him a master among men, or a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... world's wild surge Doubt if my soul can face the strife, The waves of circumstance that urge That slight ship on the rocks of life. O soul, be brave, for He who saves The frail shell in the giant waves, Will bring thy puny bark to land Safe in the ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... howl of a blood-hound for murder; or, if a wolf could have written a journal, the gaunt and famished wretch could not have ravened more eagerly for slaughter. It was blood which was Marat's constant demand, not in drops from the breast of an individual, not in puny streams from the slaughter of families, but blood in the profusion of an ocean. His usual calculation of the heads which he demanded amounted to two hundred and sixty thousand; and though he sometimes raised it as high as three hundred thousand, it never fell beneath the smaller number. It ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... the Spaniards had to recoil before their puny adversaries. The terrible loss of life entailed by the capture of Haarlem had struck a profound blow at the haughty confidence of the Spaniards, and had vastly encouraged the people of Holland. The successful defence ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... enfeebled by their disposition to run profusely. Kerr's Prolific, for example, will speedily sod the ground with small, puny plants, whose foliage will burn so badly that the fruit can scarcely mature. Set out these small plants, and give the tonic treatment of cutting off all runners, and large, bushy stools, with vigorous ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Bumble Bee had lived on sweet Till he couldn't help but overeat; Miss Worm had measured her puny length Till she had no longer any strength; And Mr. Beetle was shocked to find His eyes were failing and ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... the fact that he had got married and honeymooned for that length of time. And in that time, in a large cage of concrete and iron, Ben Bolt had exercised and recovered the use of his muscles, and added to his hatred of the two-legged things, puny against him in themselves, who by trick and wile had so helplessly ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... wrists. Thus I held her at arm's length, and my fingers tightened until I saw the flesh grow white beneath them. The intensity of my rage beat hers down and made it a puny thing. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... The puny race of men Soars, in imagination, to the skies; While tackling Science and Theosophy Their hands the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 12, 1891 • Various
... his emotions stirred to their profoundest depths, Jack Dudley took no note of the passage of time. Midnight came and passed, and still he held his post, wondering, admiring and worshipping, as must puny man when brought face to face ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only too ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... Aaron turned and addressed his brother. "The young lady is asleep," said he, "and now you and I can have a little talk together. You asked me how our two brothers came to be captured. Let me begin at the beginning, and you shall hear all about it. You know when freedom is first born she is a puny infant and has to be suckled. That she cries for blood instead of milk is something we can't help. So all the young men of Toroczko enlisted in the militia,—every mother's son of them,—and they are now serving in the eleventh, the thirty-second, and the seventy-third battalions. You ask ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith—not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph. To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic debauchery ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... scrap of her own flesh and blood tight in her arms; the procession to the jail, the men in front chained together, she bringing up the rear, walking beside the last guard; the first horrible night in jail, the walls falling upon her, the darkness overwhelming her, the puny infant resting on her breast; the staring, brutal faces when the dawn came, followed by the coarse jest. No wonder that she hung limp and hopeless to the bars of her cage, all the spring and buoyancy, all the youth and lightness, ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of strength of Milton, thus alone on the stage, and knowing himself to be confronted and surrounded by a jeering multitude, was a somewhat puny and unnecessary one. It was an onslaught on Dr. Matthew Griffith for his Royalist sermon. He wanted some object of attack, and the very notoriety given to Dr. Griffith's performance by the rebuke of the Council of State recommended it for the purpose despite its intrinsic ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... tribe, is sent back by the angel, Ishmael is born, and this son of a slave (?) is regarded not only as free, but heir of the house of Abraham. Years pass, and the wild, reckless Ishmael is seen ridiculing Isaac, his puny brother and coheir. At the sight, all the mother and the aristocrat again rise up in Sarah, and she cries out to Abraham, "Cast out this bondwoman and her son, for he shall not be heir with my son, even Isaac;" and Abraham, so far from regarding them as chattels personal, and selling them ...
— Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible? • Isaac Allen
... construction of their cells, either by chance, or because they are profoundly versed in the most intricate mathematics? Are we not compelled to acknowledge that the mathematics must be referred to the Creator, and not to His puny creature? To an intelligent, candid mind, a piece of honey comb is a complete demonstration that there is a "GREAT FIRST CAUSE:" for on no other supposition can we account for so complicated a shape, and yet the only one which can possibly unite ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... funny little cuss; like you, a trifle puny. Has coughin' fits. Coughs six times each fit. Spits up a chunk o' lead ev'y time he ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... he was one of those cruel potentates of the school who joy in the smart of their subjects; on the contrary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity; taking the burden off the backs of the weak, and laying it on those of the strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice were satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little tough wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... literary republic, to overwhelm each other with invectives, and to consider that their own grandeur consisted in the magnitude of their volumes; and their triumphs in reducing their brother giants into puny dwarfs. In science, Linnaeus had a dread of controversy—conqueror or conquered we cannot escape without disgrace! Mathiolus would have been the great man of his day, had he not meddled with such matters. Who is ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... The child was puny, and did not make a very sturdy fight for life. Still he weathered along, season after season, and survived two stronger children, Margaret and Benjamin. By 1839 Judge Clemens had lost faith in Florida. He removed his family to Hannibal, and in this Mississippi River town ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the state of affairs in Acadia was a peculiar one. By the Treaty of Utrecht it was a British province, and the nominal sovereignty resided at Annapolis, in the keeping of the miserable little fort and the puny garrison, which as late as 1743 consisted of but five companies, counting, when the ranks were full, thirty-one men each.[206] More troops were often asked for, and once or twice were promised; but they were never sent. "This ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... said Black Panther, 'our tribes, if we just whistle them up, will far outnumber your puny forces; so resistance is useless. Return, therefore, to your own land, O brother, and smoke pipes of peace in your wampums with your squaws and your medicine-men, and dress yourselves in the gayest wigwams, and eat happily of the juicy ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... Belsize from his height and strength was fitted to be not only an officer but actually a private in his former gallant regiment, and brother Barnes was but a puny young gentleman, the idea of a personal conflict between them was rather ridiculous. Some notion of this sort may have passed through Sir Brian's mind, for the Baronet said with his usual solemnity, "It is the cause, Ethel, it is the cause, my dear, which gives ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... doubters, with a puny joy, Accept amusement for their little while And feed upon some nourishing employ But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile— Protesting that one man can no more move the mass For good or ill Than could the ancients kindle the sun By tying torches to a wheel and ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... Christianity, if he may thereby extend it among the vulgar. It has been attempted to justify him by the examples of Luther and Bunyan, to neither of whom does he bear more than the most superficial resemblance. He is, to be sure, as natural as Luther, but then his nature happens to be a puny nature as compared with that of the great Reformer; and, not to insist on specific differences, it is certain that Luther, if alive, would have the same objection to Mr. Spurgeon's bringing down the doctrines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... stations at strategic points both eastward and westward. The only external interference with this scheme that could be apprehended at its inception was from the Spanish colonies, already decaying and shrinking within their boundaries to the west and to the southeast, and from a puny little English settlement started only a year before, with a doubtful hold on life, on the bank of the James River. A dozen years later a pitiably feeble company of Pilgrims shall make their landing at Plymouth to try the not hopeful experiment ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... very poor, and their seven children incommoded them greatly, because not one of them was able to earn his bread. That which gave them yet more uneasiness was that the youngest was of a very puny constitution, and scarce ever spoke a word, which made them take that for stupidity which was a sign of good sense. He was very little, and when born no bigger than one's thumb, which made ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... not thus my daughter, she Prize of heroic worth shall be.(247) To Mithila the suitors pressed Their power and might to manifest. To all who came with hearts aglow I offered Siva's wondrous bow. Not one of all the royal band Could raise or take the bow in hand. The suitors' puny might I spurned, And back the feeble princes turned. Enraged thereat, the warriors met, With force combined my town beset. Stung to the heart with scorn and shame, With war and threats they madly came, Besieged my peaceful walls, and long To Mithila did grievous wrong. There, wasting ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... contrasts, the magic illusions of color made it a land of remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative. And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him. Here was life and here was love. He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world's desire. Barriers there were none. A man and woman, both as vital as the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... beautifies unlovely things, begins to cast its glamour over the old Italian regimes. It is forgotten how low the Italian race had fallen under puny autocrats whose influence was soporific when not vicious. The vigorous if turbulent life of the Middle Ages was extinct; proof abounded that the role of small states was played out. Goldsmith's description, severe as it ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Wolf proudly, "see how big I am! Fancy me running away from a puny Lion! I'll show him who is fit to be king, he ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... escape after all, you say?" asked Phil, who had some difficulty in keeping a grin of satisfaction from showing on his face; for the idea of these seven stalwart men chasing one puny little chap was pretty close to ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... delayed. Those to whom the labour of ruining the outward structure had been confided were less successful than their neighbours who had pillaged its contents. The ponderous stones of the pillars, the massive surfaces of the walls, resisted the most vigorous of their puny efforts, and forced them to remain contented with mutilating that which they could not destroy—with tearing off roofs, defacing marbles, and demolishing capitals. The rest of the buildings remained uninjured, and grander even now in the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... advantage of so puny a rival, Wotan refuses to take the forfeited head, and departs, after telling the Nibelung that the sword can only be restored to its pristine glory by the hand of a man who knows no fear, and that the same man will claim it as his lawful prize ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... brave Stoops not to be to any man a slave; Least, to the puny tribe his soul abhors, The tribe whose wigwams sprinkle Simcoe's shores. With scowling brow he stands and courage high, Watching with haughty and defiant eye His captors, as they council o'er his fate, Or strive his boldness to intimidate. Then fling ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... illustrative of Almighty wrath and the just man's recompense? Who can gaze upon the majesty of this mount, towering above the 'high places' and the hills, and turn without repining to the plains beneath, where puny man has pitched his tent and wars upon his fellow, mocking the sublimity of Nature with his paltry tyranny? I felt as if I lived in other times, and my eye eagerly but vainly sought for some traces of that 'ark' which furnished a refuge and a shelter to the creatures ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... of men whose liberalism came from their being made liberally. Large and capacious souls of mighty yearnings are they. They stand in contrast with the puny critics who assert that the Bible fails to feed them, because they have never ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... forgot myself. Am I not king? Awake, thou coward majesty! thou sleepest. Is not the king's name twenty thousand names? Arm, arm, my name! a puny subject strikes At thy great glory. Look not to the ground, Ye favourites of a king; are we not high? High be our thoughts. I know my uncle York Hath power enough to serve our turn. But ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... Widgeon and their friends, who prepared to rush into the fray trusting to Heaven for speech and parliamentary law. O for a leader now! Horatius is on the bridge, scarce concealing his disdain for this puny opponent, and Lartius and Herminius not taking the trouble to arm. Mr. Bascom will crush this one with the flat ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Isis on the north, and from Folly Bridge, through Christ Church meadows and Merton gardens (where the remains can still be seen) to Magdalen on the south, and with the numerous rivers and conduits which form so many natural moats on west and east, the city soon becomes impregnable. To-day such puny efforts would be ludicrous, but in those times of cannon balls which could scarcely pierce a two-inch board, they more than suffice, did he for whom the work was done but have ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... produced by a he-dromedary and a she- Arabian camel. The people of Anatolia keep these male dromedaries as stallions for the purpose of covering the females of the smaller Arabian breed, which the Turkmans, yearly bring to their market. If left to breed among themselves the Caramanian camels produce a puny race of little value. The Arabs use exclusively their smaller breed of camels, because they endure heat, thirst, and fatigue, infinitely better than the others, which are well suited to hilly districts. The camels of the Turkmans feed upon a ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... ground, rising to a nearly uniform level next the river, but gradually ascending, as the river is left, to the summit of the streams falling into it. Long slopes or terraces are thus formed, furrowed here and there by the ravines, which serve to drain off the water from above into the river below. Puny rivulets where they begin, these watercourses cut deeper as they run on, until, at the river, they become impassable gulches. The old military road skirts the foot of the heights, which sometimes abut closely upon the river, ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... regiment with the little orphan, which she had observed in the case of her own boy; and it was equally successful. By a more sparing use of medicine, by a bolder admission of fresh air, by a firm, yet cautious attention to encourage rather than to supersede the exertions of nature, the puny infant, under the care of an excellent nurse, gradually improved in strength and ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... hair Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr Who still am free, unto no querulous care A fool, and in no temple worshiper! I, that have bared me to your quiver's fire, Lifted my face into its puny rain, Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain! (Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave, Punish me, surely, with the shaft ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... there was at least four feet, out of the sum total of six, composed of blue cotton net, which fitted very close to a very spare figure. He wore no cravat, but a turn-down collar with a black ribbon, his hair very long, with a very puny pair of moustachios on his upper lip, and something like a tuft on his chin. Altogether, he was a strange-looking being, especially when he had substituted for his long coat a short nankeen jacket, which was the case at the ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... invade the field of invention. With appropriate contrariety, an unfamiliar and hitherto almost detested line of investigation now attracted me. Abstruse mathematical problems which had defied solution for centuries began to appear easy. To defy the State and its puny representatives had become mere child's play. So I forthwith decided to overcome no less a force than ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... with your eyes, Greek, men over the face of the earth, slay with your eyes, the host, puny, passionless, weak. ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... those that had been useful to her father and George; they had needed her courage and her self-reliance. It was very comfortable to depend entirely upon Alec's love. Here she could be weak, here she could find a greater strength which made her own seem puny. Lucy's thoughts were absorbed in the man whom really she knew so little. She exulted in his unselfish striving and in his firmness of purpose, and when she compared herself with him she felt unworthy. She treasured every ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... Canterbury, (281;) in our last, (282,) we introduced our readers to the palatial splendour of the Regent's Park; and our present visit is to Haddon Hall, in Derbyshire, one of the palaces of olden time, whose stupendous towers present a strong contrast with the puny palace-building of later days, and the picturesque beauty of whose domain pleasingly alternates with the verdant pride of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... narrow of mind. As they stood by the gate now, this last hour grudged to them, neither dreamed that this was the final canto in the poem of boyhood. They had been fast friends since the first day pale, puny Fred made his appearance in school, and was both laughed at and bullied by some boys larger in size, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... this power that he was trifling with, that brought him now this cold, dead fear before which he quailed! What was this something that in his temerity he had dared invoke—that rose now engulfing him, a puny maggot—that snatched him up and flung him headlong, shackled, before this nebulous, terrifying tribunal, where out of nothingness, out of a void, the calm, majestic features of the Patriarch took form and changed, and changed, and kept changing, ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... one of the doors and out into a narrow passage that ran up into the deserted street. To have gone down into the stalls and hit that oily martinet in the mouth would have been to lay himself open to a charge of cruelty to animals. He was so puny and fat and soft. Poor little Tootles, who had had a tardy and elusive recognition torn from her ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... mother that the child should not, must not die, possibly had something to do with keeping the breath of life in the puny man-child. The fond mother had given him the name of his father, even before birth! He was to live to do the work that the man now dead had hoped to do; that is, live a long and honest life, and leave the fair acres more valuable than he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... year as the one most adapted to excite admiration; and in those churches, from the way the ladies hold their fans, you know that they are not so much impressed with the heat as with the picturesqueness of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshipers, with two thousand dollars' worth of diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent into the poor-box, and then the benediction is pronounced and the farce ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... lying motionless and inanimate at my feet. Yet I am as far from all sight of humanity as before! Should the whole nation be swarming below the mountain, armies drawn up before armies, with my eyes resting upon them, I should not see them, but sit here in sublime peace. Man's puny form were from this height as undistinguishable as the blades of grass in the meadows below. I know, that, if all the world stood beneath, and strained their vision to the utmost upon the very spot where I stand, I should still be in the strict privacy of invisibility. This isolation I pine for. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Many a weak, puny boy was returned to his parents a robust, healthy, manly man. Many a timid, helpless boy went home a brave, independent man. Many a wild, reckless boy went home sobered, serious, and trustworthy. And many whose career at home was wicked and blasphemous ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... like the front door of a house: when once you got on the other side of it, you were in the family, as it were, formality was dropped, and an easy atmosphere of familiarity prevailed. You read that Uncle Enoch Siller had Sundayed over at the Ridge, or that Aunt Gussy Williams was on the puny list, and frequently there were friendly references to "Ye Editor" or "Ye Quill Driver," for after soaring to dizzy heights in his editorials, Mr. Opp condescended to come down on the second page and move in and out of the columns, as a host ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... cry from Mag behind them. "They'll kill him, that's what they'll do! Oh, pore Pappy! They'll beat him up, an' it'll kill him, he's so puny. Oh, my Gawd! Cain't nobody stop ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... purpose—to produce good soldiers and obedient citizens. A sound body formed the first essential. A father was required to submit his son, soon after birth, to an inspection by the elders of his tribe. If they found the child puny or ill-shaped, they ordered it to be left on the mountain side, to perish from exposure. At the age of seven a boy was taken from his parents' home and placed in a military school. Here he was trained in marching, sham ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... only their puny knives with which to give battle to the serpent, the boys stood petrified with terror. Even Ben, to whom his rescue and Frank's peril had been unfolded so swiftly that he was half-dazed, seemed unable to ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... on Mary was frightful. She was extended at full length with her legs braced against an outcrop of rock. Stonor could see her agonized expression. He shouted to her to slack off the line, but of course the roar of the water drowned his puny voice. In dumb-play he tried desperately to show her what to do, but Mary was possessed of but one idea, to hang on until her arms ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... the voracious beast has bitten deep into the spot, and can with impunity ransack the entrails." What a slow and horrible agony for the paralysed victim, should some glimmer of consciousness still linger in its puny brain! What a terrible nightmare for the little field-cricket, suddenly plunged into the den of the Sphex, so far from the sunlit tuft of thyme which sheltered ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... residence is supreme: art, science, politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith—not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph. To my mind there is no sadder ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... was born at Knob Creek farm; a puny, pathetic little stranger. When this baby was about three years old, the father had to use his skill as a cabinet maker in making a tiny coffin, and the Lincoln family wept over a lonely little grave ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... husband and her stolen children, of the scouts and couriers shot down from ambush in their efforts to reach them in their isolation or to creep through with messages to the columns afield, of the wounded lying with but scant attention and puny guard, weary marches away, of the comrades killed or died of wounds in fierce grapple with the warriors of the desert and the mountains—even of this young soldier within their gates, sore stricken in daring rescue of a helpless woman, he to whose coolness and command ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... Fleming have got to?" exclaimed Jerry at last; "I am certain that we are up to the spot where we left him." I thought so likewise. We shouted at the top of our voices, but the puny sounds seemed lost in the vast solitudes which encompassed us. "I think it must have been further on," said I, after I had taken another survey of the country. So on we rushed, keeping our eyes about us ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... fell, and regaining his feet rushed madly and blindly about in vain hope of finding the lost trail and escaping the doom that seemed closing in upon him. The snow clouds were like dense walls, and he, like a child, in puny effort wildly trying to batter them ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... on through the mists, Luke's doubts increased and he began to lose his respect for the man's intellect and for the cunning which had enabled him to outwit the neutralizing energies used by the guards. After all, he was a weak and puny specimen. They all were, the smart guys who held the people of two worlds in their power by exercising the knowledge they had learned from books. And this one had failed even in that; whatever he might have been, he had run afoul of the law himself and was already a doomed man. ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... a bigger piece; but, though we could find plenty of small ones, which we sent bounding down by the help of the iron lever with more or less satisfactory results, the heavy masses all seemed to have portions so wedged or buried in the live rock that our puny ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... Bulwer Lytton, Lytton Bulwer erst, Unseen amidst a metaphysic fog, Howl melancholy homage to the moon; For you once more Montgomery shall rave In all his rapt rabidity of rhyme; Nankeened Cockaigne shall pipe his puny note, And our ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... rather puny figures of an old man and woman were shown up into the school-room where Miss Davis was sitting alone, looking into the fire and thinking of her distant home. Hetty was supposed to be arranging her wardrobe in her own room, and the other girls ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... of the principal parts and characters, which a judicious critic will observe, though I point not to it in this preface. And there may be also some secret beauties in the decorum of parts, and uniformity of design, which my puny judges will not easily find out: let them consider in the last scene of the fourth act, whether I have not preserved the rule of decency, in giving all the advantage to the royal character, and in making Dorax first submit. Perhaps too they may have ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... know the mother poor, Three pounds of flesh wrapped in her shawl: A puny babe that, stripped at home, Looks like a rabbit ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies
... colour-blind. The visible world for him existed as a contrapuntal net-work of lines, silhouettes, contours, or heavy dark masses. When a sailor he sketched. Meryon tells of the drawing of a little fungus he found in Akaroa. "Distorted in form and pinched and puny from its birth, I could not but pity it; it seemed to me so entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not deny it a place in my souvenirs de voyage, and so I drew it ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... world. The Australian or American maxima may be as brutal, or even more so, but the average efficiency in smiting with the fist of wickedness is, beyond all question, on the English side. 'English fair play' is a fine expression. It justifies the bashing of the puny drapers' assistant by the big, hairy blacksmith; and this to the perfect satisfaction of both parties, if they are worthy the name of Englishmen. Also, the English gentleman may take off his coat to the potsherd of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of several English governors of Ceylon to seek to improve the position of the women of the Rodiya caste, especially of the young girls. Some benefit is claimed as a result of the efforts of the English women—but the majesty and power of Great Britain are puny institutions compared with the force of caste among native races. To keep down the Rodiya population a certain Kandyan king, it is stated on good authority, used to have a goodly number of them ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of the saint. The monument is of silver, and the worth of the metal alone is estimated at 80,000 florins. The church itself is not spacious, but is built in the noble Gothic style; the lesser altars, however, with their innumerable gilded wooden figures, look by contrast extremely puny. In the chapel are many sarcophagi, on which repose bishops and knights hewn in stone, but so much damaged, that many are without hands and feet, while some lack heads. To the right, at the entrance of the church, is the celebrated chapel of St. Wenceslaus, with its walls ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... embroideries and figured stuffs, wherewith to enhance the comeliness of Melicent. It seemed an all-engulfing madness with this despot daily to aggravate his fierce desire of her, to nurture his obsession, so that he might glory in the consciousness of treading down no puny adversary. ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... and looking towards the bunk where the tiny little chap he had found was peacefully sleeping. The fire burned low in the chimney; the candle sank down in its socket. On the floor the pup was twitching in his dreams. Outside the peace, too vast to be ruffled by puny man, had settled on all ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... her see how much. Aunt Prudence, too, dear old soul, seemed sorry to have her go, but she had her own peculiar way of expressing it, namely, by getting crosser every day. She did not approve of so much "larnin'" for girls, especially when Beth was "goin' to be married to that puny Mayfair." Aunt Prudence always said her "say," as she expressed it, but she ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... and the country which has chosen him is to trust that he will do his best. I do not know that this matters much with reference to the legislature or governments of the different States, for their State legislatures and governments are but puny powers; but in the legislature and government at Washington it does matter very much. But I shall have another opportunity of speaking on ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... the officers that he seems to have enjoyed quite unlimited license. He went where he pleased and did what he would. Almost invariably at night, keeping pace with the army, he would bring in some small game, a bird or a squirrel, and frequently several of these puny animals. It was a rule, when night came, for all the hunters to throw down what they had killed in one pile. This was then divided among the messes as ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... and we notice with surprise that the seasoned Friscans, still clad in the muslins and linens that seemed suitable enough at high noon, seek by preference the open seats of the locomotive car, while we, puny visitors, turn up our coat-collars and flee to the shelter of the "trailer" or covered car. As we come over "Nob Hill" we take in the size of the houses of the Californian millionaires, note that they are of wood (on account of the earthquakes?), and bemoan the misdirected efforts of their architects, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... six vessels with which Dewey started for the Philippines was puny enough from the standpoint of today; yet it was strong enough to cope with the larger but more old-fashioned Spanish fleet, or with the harbor defenses unless these included mines—of whose absence Dewey was at the moment unaware. If, however, the Spanish commander could unite the strength ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... simple, like the annals of the poor," he replied. "From England in infancy, on a ranch in northern Alberta for ten years, a puny little wretch I was, terribly bothered with asthma, then"—the boy hesitated a moment—"my mother died, father moved to Edmonton, lived there for five years, thence to Wapiti, away northwest of Edmonton, our present home, prepared for college by my father, university course ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... in mock reverence to the spectators beneath him. He had not yet learned in a land of puny archers how sure and how strong is the English bow. Half a dozen men, old Wat amongst them, had run forward toward the wall. They were too late to save their comrades, but at least their deaths ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dangling chains, and head-dresses of gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high, free- stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some elder race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had passed away from our puny, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... and anarchy, exercised under different forms more or less sanguinary, produced no permanent result beyond an incontestible proof that the versatility of the French nation, and its puny suppleness of character, utterly incapacitate it for that energetic enterprise without which there can be no hope of permanent emancipation from national slavery. It is my unalterable conviction that the French will never know how ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... and her kind heart sank. She herself was no beauty; her round, fair face and honest blue eyes were pleasant to look at, and she had beautiful hair, but that was all; yet she could not help seeing that she was a very vision of loveliness beside the sallow, puny, almost deformed aspect of her poor little neighbour. She coloured deep with angry sympathy, but Lobelia only smiled, a ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... continue as long as the rain continues to fall, or as long as the sea continues to send its tax-gatherers to the land. In this great cycle of give and take of the elements, the affairs of men cut but a momentary figure; how puny they are, how transient! How the great changes, which in time amount to revolutions, go on over our heads and under our feet, and we rarely heed them, and are powerless to stay them! A summer shower carries the soil of my side-hill, which is mainly disintegrated ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... in Monmouth's Rebellion. Pitied by the planters, despised even by the negro slaves, this small colony held itself aloof, starved, and married none but members of their own colony. They are now mere shadows of men, with puny bodies and witless minds, living in brush or wooden hovels and eating nothing but a little ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... boat had not been far enough away from the turmoil of the water to be unaffected by it; and for a moment the puny craft had rolled and pitched as though it would toss its passengers into the bay. A skilful use of the oars had saved the boat from being upset, and Louis and Felix began to survey the scene of the uproar as soon as the waves ceased the violence of ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... better than to oppose her husband. She recognized her own weakness, and knew that against his fiat she could no more exercise her puny strength than a babbling stream can disturb a great rock. She used her drawing-room when Bo-peep was out, and regarded it with intense satisfaction. It is true that the colors were crude, for James Martin would have screamed at any Liberty ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... baby, the least, puny, little, pink creature, wrapped in flannel, there came up a dreadful storm, and a small London packet was wrecked on the coast, near her father's cottage. The passengers were all lost except a little boy, about three years of age, whom John Jenkins saved ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... dainties; of buffalo humps, and buffalo tongues; and roasted ribs, and broiled marrow-bones: all these were cooked in hunters' style; served up with a profusion known only on a plentiful hunting ground, and discussed with an appetite that would astonish the puny gourmands of the cities. But above all, and to give a bacchanalian grace to this truly masculine repast, the captain produced his mellifluous keg of home-brewed nectar, which had been so potent over the senses of the veteran of Hudson's ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... deep gloom, that wretch of wicked soul came upon Bhima of incomparable prowess, who had come a little before and who was waiting in a corner. And as an insect approacheth towards a flaming fire, or a puny animal towards a lion, Kichaka approached Bhima, lying down in a bed and burning in anger at the thought of the insult offered to Krishna, as if he were the Suta's Death. And having approached Bhima, Kichaka possessed by lust, and his heart and soul filled with ecstacy ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... or invent all kinds of methods to build health and to remain perfectly strong throughout our lives, and yet, despite it all, we are puny and sickly beings. In fact, I do not think there is such a thing as perfect health. What we may do to correct, insure or perfect our healthy tissues will have a detrimental effect upon some other part of our body. What we do to build up must ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... taken the year old infant from the basket. It was a pale, puny little creature, whose father had fallen in battle, and whose mother ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... reigns in majesty above,— Who bids for man all nature sweetly smile, And sends his rain upon the just and vile; His attribute is love; and shall ye dare To take the life mercy and love would spare? Shall ye destroy what he has formed to live, And take away what ye can never give? Shall puny mortal claim the right his own Belonging to Omnipotence alone? Rash man, forbear! and stay the ready dart That seeks to lodge within thy brother's heart. But, no; for mercy's voice, now hushed and still, No longer may the steel-clad bosom thrill; And hearts ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... stride; and speak of frays, Like a fine-bragging youth; and tell quaint lies, How honourable ladies sought my love, Which I denying, they fell sick and died,— I could not do withal;—then I'll repent, And wish, for all that, that I had not kill'd them: And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell; That men shall swear I've discontinu'd school Above a twelvemonth. I've within my mind A thousand raw tricks of these bragging ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... were punish-ed For every pun I've shed, I should not have a puny shed Wherein to ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only too mindful ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... my representative made a point of applying to him for permission, as he indeed was bound to do by the simplest rules of courtesy. Mr. Smalley replied at once, willingly granting the favour, as I can prove by the note still in my possession; and presently, frightened by the puny yelping of a few critical curs at home, he has the effrontery to deny ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... "Each puny brother of the rhyming trade At every turn implores the Painter's aid, And fondly enamoured of own foul brat Cries in an ecstacy, Paint ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... unions and making speeches about their rights. If, here and there, in some remote nooks we find an approximation to the coarse, hearty patriarchal mode of life, we regard it as a naturalist regards a puny modern reptile, the representative of gigantic lizards of old geological epochs. A sketch or two of its peculiarities, sufficiently softened and idealised to suit modern tastes, forms a picturesque background to a modern picture. Some of Miss Bronte's rough Yorkshiremen would have ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... when the world was young, and the dwarf-folk and the giants had a name and a place upon earth. And one night, as they thus sat, the master talked of Odin the All-Father, and of the gods who dwell with him in Asgard, and of the puny men-folk whom they protect and befriend, until his words grew full of bitterness, and his soul of a fierce longing for something he dared not name. And the lad's heart was stirred with a strange ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified; and therefore the costermongers "between the years 1790 and 1800" did more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... and gran'mudders,'most all born on de plantation, an' some on 'em livin' on it fur forty, fifty, sixty, an' seventy yar. Out ob dese, we hab only forty-two full hands, 'case some ob de wimmin dat come in de ages fur full wuck am sickly, puny tings, only fit fur house wuck or nussin'. From de whole I gits equal to fifty-four full hands. 'Cordin' to master Robert's direction, I gib 'em easy ten-hour tasks; but suffin' or anoder turn up 'most ebery day, so dat 'bout half on 'em don't do full wuck, an' I reckon ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... never failed to load them, that no mode of abjuring it seemed sufficiently emphatic to them hence it was that Addison, with a view to the interest of his party, thought fit when in Switzerland, to offer a puny insult to the memory of General Ludlow; hence it is that even in our own days, no writers have insulted Milton with so much bitterness and shameless irreverence as the Whigs; though it is true that some few Whigs, more however in their literary ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... us. Three of the brethren are Egyptians, and two are natives of Damascus. The rest are, like myself, descendants of a race supposed to have perished from off the face of the earth, yet still powerful to a degree undreamed of by the men of this puny age." ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to Deborah, with a low, bitter laugh, striking his puny chest savagely. "What am I worth, Deb? Is it my fault that I am no better? My fault? ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... than an hour. There was but one peculiarity or symptom upon which to base a prescription. It was this: It would lie a few moments apparently asleep, then it would give a start and begin to scream with all its puny power. This would last one or two minutes, when it would as suddenly fall asleep again. This, they assured me, was the way it had performed all through its illness, except when opiated. 'Pains come and go suddenly.' That was all I had to go on. I could not ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... eight children. I was urged to "set by," so I went inside the house. The mother was lying on a bed in the corner, and I said to her, "Are you sick?" (You must never ask a mountaineer if he is ill, that is equivalent to asking him if he is cross.) "Yes," she said, "I'm powerful puny." "Have you been sick long?" was my next question. "I've been punying around all winter." "Has it been cold here?" "Yes, mighty cold." "Have you had any snow?" "Yes, we've had a right smart of snow twicet, and oncet it was pretty nigh ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various
... learned contemporaries, has reported for us a conversation in the king's palace at Memphis. The verses about "the puny child of man," recited by Cleopatra in chapter X., are not genuinely antique; but Friedrich Ritschl—the Aristarchus of our own days, now dead—thought very highly of them and gave them to me, some years ago, with several variations which had been added ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... this trade too base, (Which seldom is the dunce's case,) Put on the critic's brow, and sit At Will's the puny judge of wit. A nod, a shrug, a scornful smile, With caution used, may serve a while. Proceed on further in your part, Before you learn the terms of art; For you can never be too far gone In all our modern critics' jargon; Then talk with more authentic face Of unities, in time, and place; Get scraps ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. "That is well enough for men like you," he would say, "silpnas, puny fellows—but my ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... members of which resembled one another so closely that all personal characteristics were obliterated in a general monotony. One woman was as good as another, although in all probability a healthy, youthful and strong individual would be preferred to a sickly, puny specimen. But apart from this, the wish to choose a partner instead of being content with the first comer, must have coincided historically with the outward, and later on with the inward differentiation of the race. I cannot prove my theory by quoting chapter and verse from ancient writers, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... are more rarely given to a similar failing. The cause of this may be pointed out without much difficulty. In democratic communities each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object, namely himself. If he ever raises his looks higher, he then perceives nothing but the immense form of society at large, or the still more imposing aspect of mankind. His ideas are all either extremely minute and clear, or extremely general and vague: what lies between is an open void. When ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... matter of the hair. When next the street-boy sorrowfully exclaims on your passing that 'it's no wonder the barbers all 'list for soldiers,' or some puny idiot at your club—a lilliputian model of popular 'manhood'—sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in: call to mind pictures of certain brave 'tailed men' of old, at the winking ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... four entries," Semi-Colon announced, purposely raising his rather puny voice so that every one within a radius of twenty feet might profit by his knowledge, "and they are Dolan, Wagner, Waterman, and Ackers. The last named is called the Mechanicsburg Wonder, and they all say he's going to win this Marathon in ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... new model for funny writers; and the fact is noticeable that, in various parts of this country as well as in his own, he has numerous puny imitators, who suppose that by simply adopting his comic spelling they can write quite as well as he can. Perhaps it would be as well if they remembered the joke of poor Thomas Hood, who said that he could write as well as Shakespere if he had the mind to, but the trouble was—he had ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... the cradle's side, and saw a pallid little creature, puny and feeble from neglect. Its mother paid no attention to its wailing, and when Amy asked if she might take it up, the woman's mumbled ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... sprang on the strapping servant like a wild-cat, and began to beat, cuff, and belabor him with all the strength of his puny limbs. ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... this kind the trouble of female labor lies. Nancy should save her vitality. She should store it up for wifehood and motherhood. She'll be a spent woman before she has a husband, and your grandchildren puny youngsters as a resulting. Think it over, John," he ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... surprised. Yes? I was suddenly ordered to sail in le Dauphin, and report to your good Governor, Bienville. A most sturdy soldier from all report. Heaven send us a sharp campaign, I am weary of these puny quarrels. We will have brave days in ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... he was small, thin, puny, and rather round-shouldered. No one knew exactly how old he was; he could not be more than forty, but he looked more than fifty. He had a little wrinkled face, with a pink complexion, and kind pale ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... disgrace. England, from being the umpire, was now become a party in all continental quarrels; and, instead of trimming the balance of Europe, lavished away her blood and treasure in supporting the interest and allies of a puny electorate in the north of Germany. The king of Prussia had been at variance with the elector of Hanover. The duchy of Mecklenburgh was the avowed subject of dispute; but his Prussian majesty is said ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... heat penetrates into the unprotected cells, and enrages the dwellers inside. They swarm out full of fight, like an army lusting for battle. Their home has been ravished of the protection they had raised with half a lifetime of labour, and in their puny way they want vengeance. They find a foe on top, a man ready to their wrath. They crawl into his scorched boots, over his baked feet, guiltless of stockings; they charge up the legs, on which the trousers hang ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... must have behind it a well-organized, coherent national government, able to protect it and to enforce its rights in foreign lands, it is the shipping interest. But American ships, after the Treaty of Paris, hailed from thirteen independent but puny States. They had behind them the shadow of a confederacy, but no substance. The flags they carried were not only not respected in foreign countries—they were not known. Moreover, the States were jealous of each ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... theatre, delight this dreamer: true, He lives but in imaginations: yet Suppose this aesthete made omnipotent, Feeling there is no bar he cannot break, Knowing there is no bound he cannot pass; Might he not then despise the written page, A petty music, and a puny scene? Conceive a spectacle not witnessed yet, When he, an artist in omnipotence, Uses for colour this red blood of ours, Composes music out of dreadful cries, His orchestra our human agonies, His rhythms lamentations ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... purposely misshapen in this direction and in that, to hide—it must be presumed— deficiencies of form. If that chignon and those heels had been taken off, the figure which would have remained would have been that too often of a puny girl of sixteen. And yet there was no doubt that these women were not only full grown, but some of them, alas! wives ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Sheba were celebrated in the days of Addison and Steele; the former of whom has composed a classical and sportive Latin poem on this very subject. But Quadrio might well rest satisfied that the nation which could boast of its Fantoccini, surpassed, and must ever surpass the puny ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... what lived on a nearby plantation an' we wus livin' on Marse Rufus' place wid pa an' ma. We moved ter Raleigh den an' atter seberal years mammy moved hear too. You can fin' her on Cannon Street, but I'll tell you dat she's pretty puny ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... with a scornful smile, "lion-whelps against me! Against me, your puny monsters! and at this time of day! By yon blessed sun! those who sent them hither shall see whether I am a man to be scared by lions. Alight, honest friend! and, since you are their keeper, open the cages and turn out your savages of the desert: for in the midst ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... calumniators that may never be extinct; for, by very antipathy of nature, the mean hate the magnanimous, the groveling them who soar. And thus, for many a year, we heard "souls ignoble born to be forgot" vehemently expostulating with some puny phantom of their own heated fancy, as if it were the majestic shade of Burns evoked from his Mausoleum ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... however, that the creative faculty in man has not ceased, nor has puny man drawn all there is to be drawn out of the eternal wisdom. We are probably only in the beginning of our evolution, and something new may always be expected, that is, new and fresh applications of universal law. The critic of literature needs to be in an expectant and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to turn his head. Had he chosen, I am sure he could have caught one or two of the most daring, and would soon with his powerful jaws have made an end of them; but he disdained to take offence at their puny efforts to annoy him, and continued to treat them with ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... same prismatical structure occur detached in the chalk. It were curious to let the imagination run over the fact that the hosts of these uncommended gems died ages before the advent of man. The best of modern prizes may be puny in comparison with those which caused distress to the giant molluscs of the age when the Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, and Pterodactylus were the aristocrats of the animal world. Such gems have gone for ever, and even during this age ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, 'What merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some previous state of existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?... Often as I (p. 090) have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... Toronto, according to the odd agreement by which that city was to alternate with Quebec as the seat of government. Every four years the government with all its impedimenta was to migrate from the one to the other. The Liberal party was soon to find that a crushing {138} victory at the polls and a puny opposition in the House were not unmixed blessings. It began to fall apart by its own sheer weight. A Radical wing, both English and French, soon developed. The 'Clear Grit' party in Upper Canada was moving straight towards republicanism, and so was Papineau's ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... appetite. Its subterranean excursions cannot cover a wide range, but they enable it to visit a few adjacent cells. I have mentioned how greatly the Tachytes' provision of Mantes varies.[4] The smaller rations certainly fall to the males, which are puny dwarfs compared with their companions; the more plentiful fall to the females. The parasitic grub to which fate has allotted the scanty masculine ration has not perhaps sufficient with this share; it wants an ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
