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More "Herculean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where, "towards the close of the year 17——," several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at hand now. The foremost one, a man of Herculean build, jumped his mount across the brook, and leaped off while he hauled the horse to a stop. The second rider came close behind him; the others approached leisurely, with the gait of ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... by their consent and influence had been handed down, and declared to have been evidenced by all the miracles recorded in the four Evangelists, do you not see that your first proposition would be of Herculean strength against this religion? On the contrary, it being well established, from unquestionable authority, that as St. Paul observed, Christ crucified was a stumbling block to the Jews, and to the Greeks foolishness, the whole force of Jewish and Greek superstition, as it opposed, serves ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... emperors, set to the task of stealing a dog—for that is what I should have to do—from an unscrupulous gang of thieves whose identity, abode and methods were alike unknown to me. Truly, Sir, you will own that this was a herculean task. ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... scarcely any writer, however inconsiderable, who does not aim, in some degree, at the same species of excellence. But let us not ungratefully undervalue that beautiful style, which has pleasingly conveyed to us much instruction and entertainment. Though comparatively weak, opposed to Johnson's Herculean vigour, let us not call it positively feeble. Let us remember the character of his style, as given by Johnson himself[662]: 'What he attempted, he performed; he is never feeble, and he did not wish to be energetick; he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... complete breakdown, pitiful from its contrast with the man's herculean physique and fine, if contracted, features. If the end, it was a sad end, and Mr. Gryce, whose forehead had taken on a deep line between the eyebrows, slowly rose and took his stand by the young man, who looked ready to fall. The inspector, ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... never once looked at me. He stood with his back to the fire, which set off the herculean breadth of his shoulders. His face was dark and expressive; his under jaw squarely formed, and remarkably heavy. I was struck with his ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... writing in the Gazetteer, in which I never had the honour of inserting a single Word." What can have occurred, in the bewildering turmoil of that eighteenth-century party strife, that the author of Pasquin, the possessor of "Captain Vinegar's" Herculean Club, should have to vindicate himself from a charge of writing in the columns of Walpole's Gazetteer. During these last months of Sir Robert's power his Cabinet was much divided, and two of his Ministers were in active revolt; possibly rumour assigned the services of the witty pen of Counsellor ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... revealed that during his time as a lawyer he was unable for a period of months to buy a dinner on half the days and lay ill for weeks from hunger and exhaustion by reason of having assumed the debts of a relative." His was the Herculean task of revising and regenerating the school system of Massachusetts, and by so doing the whole U. S. The influence was not confined to this country alone, but ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... ardent, and to triumph shy, Fair Victory named him from the polar sky. Fanes to the gods, to men he manners gave; Rest to the sword, and respite to the brave; So high could ne'er Herculean power aspire: The god should bend his looks to the Tarpeian fire." [Footnote: Book ix. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... but it was lodged in a powerful, herculean body, and carnal imaginings began to disturb his sleep and his vigils. He drove them away; they came back again; and he murmured from time to time, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... was such neither could doubt. The guide, gifted with herculean strength, had tried to move the stone on discovering how it lay. With his feet firmly planted in the projections below, and his shoulder to the rock above, he had given a heave that would have lifted a loaded ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... be dying. He thought he was getting weaker—but how could he tell for sure? He could feel nothing, there was no pain, no muscular failure, no falling weakly to the ground. There were no muscles left and he was on the ground already. It was a Herculean effort to keep his eyes open, to listen as he had vowed he would. But that might be only fatigue, the need for sleep. And shock! Of course. He had to be suffering from shock, and from exposure, too. ...
— A Choice of Miracles • James A. Cox
... shirt sleeve from his herculean arm and Szilard was astonished to see the half healed and cross-like scar—it ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... stay, Emma managed, little by little, to take the place of second mother in the household. She had tact and finesse and cleverness enough even for that herculean feat. Grace's pale cheeks and last year's wardrobe made her firm ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... majestic assemblage of rock shapes on the shores of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... observations. It is almost impossible to elevate the spirits of a man groaning under ideal calamities; but nothing is easier than to render him wretched, though on the pinnacle of felicity: as it would be an herculean task to hoist a man to the top of a steeple, though the merest child could topple him ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... of the herculean emperor had not disgusted him at first; it had merely displeased his taste. Now, it became suddenly an atrocious contrast to the secret loveliness of unveiled beauty. That was a manly instinct in him, ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Iron Horse were, like their Herculean child, men of mettle. They fought a gallant fight for their darling's freedom, and came ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... are not by any means the most difficult to clear, though to a "new chum" the work will appear at first of a Herculean character. Brushing the dense undergrowth and then felling the timber at a face costs from L1 10s. to L2 per acre, according to density, size of timber, and proportion of hardwood trees contained in it, and once this is done the fallen ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... were clouded and obscured for the greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian novel—moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuzzlewit, Pendennis, and Middlemarch. But they received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put all these elaborate properties and conventions reverently ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the fate of the short-lived republics whose wrecks lay along the pathway of history, and from the unwritten Constitution of the mother country, as their only guides, the leaders of the Convention were at once in the difficult role of constructive statesmen. The Herculean task to which with unwearied effort they now addressed themselves was that of "builders" of the Constitution; the establishers, for the ages, of the fundamental law for ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... for the sand-bars and shallows of the upper river, and that a monotonous but very musical cadence was being repeated at intervals, in muffled tones, somewhere on board. I went down to the cargo department of the lower deck and found the singers,—the herculean porters. One after another they bent their backs, and two mates hoisted the huge bales, chanting a refrain which enabled them to move and lift in unison. The words were to the following effect: "If all don't grasp together, we cannot lift the weight." The music was ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... interrupted the performance of Charles VI. with most unseemly cries. After the customary medical and legal proceedings, he was ordered to be sent to the Charenton Hospital. But opposite the porte Saint-Martin, taking advantage of a lock among the vehicles, and of the Herculean strength with which he is endowed, he wrested his hands from his keeper, threw him down, beat him, leaped at a bound into the street, and disappeared in the crowd. The most active search was immediately set on foot, and we have it from ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... spirit once had was gone. He moved wearily, automatically doing his work and doing it ill. The very movements of his hands, slack and fumbling, were an exasperation to the other men, setting their strength to a herculean measure, and giving of it without begrudgment. David saw their anger and did not care. Fatigue made him indifferent, ate into his pride, brought down his self-respect. He plodded on doggedly, the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... rescue. Though he was advised of the danger of such an attempt, his spirit and determination made him invincible. He proceeded to a place where some colored men were working. With a firm and determined look, and a herculean shout, he called out to them, "To arms, to arms! boys, we must rescue this man; I shall lead if you will follow." "We will," was the immediate response. And they went and overtook them, and dispersed his claimants. They brought Dorsey ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the evening before. He has spent the night drinking, gambling, and though he looks heated, there is no sign of fatigue. Nature, in wasting on this man many of her most glorious elements of happiness, had not forgotten an herculean constitution,—always restless and never tired, always drinking and never drunk. Certainly it is some consolation to delicate invalids that it seldom happens that the sickly are very wicked. Criminals are generally athletic; constitution ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... word of this there had been condemnation. It was as though Mr Apjohn were devoting him to infernal torture, telling him that his only escape would be by the exercise of some herculean power which was notoriously beyond his reach. It was evident to him that Mr Apjohn had come there under the guise of his advisor and friend, but was in fact leagued with all the others around him to drive him to his ruin. Of that ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... So soon as he discovered Capt. Gibson, he raised the war whoop and fired [61] his rifle—the ball passed through Gibson's hunting shirt and wounded a soldier just behind him. Gibson sprang forward, and swinging his sword with herculean force, severed the head of the Little Eagle from his body—two other Indians were shot down, and the remainder escaped ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... occurred in the action of a drama in order to allow him as spectator, to thoroughly master the meaning of one special scene. Therefore he took the opportunity offered, and, looking full at Zephoranim, thought he had never beheld so magnificent a man. Of stately height and herculean build, he was most truly royal in outward bearing,—though a physiognomist judging him from the expression of his countenance would at once have given him all the worst vices of a reckless voluptuary and utterly selfish sensualist. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... them to make war upon other parties of the whites. Eleven volunteers were selected for the expedition, and the young and fragile Kit Carson was entrusted with the command. In manners he was gentle as a girl, with a voice as soft as that of a woman. He had no herculean powers of muscle, but he had mind, mental powers which had been developed in a hundred emergencies. And these stout, hardy veterans of the wilderness seem with one accord to have decided that he was the fitting one to lead them into battle, where they were to encounter perhaps hundreds ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... with the Gallipoli Expeditionary Force. I have stated that there are eighty-two signs in Grade II Braille; but Braille shorthand contains six hundred and eighty word and letter signs that have to be committed to memory. A herculean task was before me, but by dogged effort on my part and patience on the part of my instructor, I succeeded so well that in a few weeks I was able to take shorthand notes as speedily as the average sighted stenographer. Meanwhile, I had been diligently at work at my typewriting, and under ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... to vigorous athletic pastimes, and to fierce brawls among themselves, were generally overmatches for the Indians in hand-to-hand struggles. One such fight, that took place some years before this time, deserves mention. A man of herculean strength and of fierce, bold nature, named Bingaman, lived on the frontier in a lonely log-house. The cabin had but a single room below, in which Bingaman slept, as well as his mother, wife, and child; a hired man slept in the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... still stronger force of the enemy under Baraguay d'Hilliers a second time against Botzen called Chasteler in person into the field, and the French, after a smart engagement near Volano, where the Herculean Passeyrers carried the artillery on their shoulders, were forced to retreat. It was on this occasion that Leiningen, who had hastily pushed too far forward, was rescued from captivity by Hofer.[5] The Vorarlberg had, meanwhile, also been raised by Teimer. A Dr. Schneider ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... to do, miss," replied Sam, exerting his Herculean strength in vain. With the aid of a hammer and the kitchen-poker, however, he at last succeeded in forcing it open. We all pressed forward eagerly to peer inside. There was something in it certainly, but we none of us could determine what, until Sam, who was the ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... powerful a man to be allowed to live, and that he must die. He was accordingly led out to execution, but without any of the ordinary accompaniments of torture. His hands were bound behind him, he was laid upon the ground, and his head was placed upon a stone. An Indian warrior of herculean strength stood by, with a massive club, to give the death blow by crushing in the skull. Just as the fatal stroke was about to descend, a beautiful Indian girl, Pocahontas, the daughter of the king, rushed forward and throwing ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... had scarcely passed his lips, when he was stretched at his full length upon the ground. Nor did Glanville stop there. With all the strength of his nervous and Herculean frame, fully requited for the debility of disease by the fury of the moment, he seized the gamester as if he had been an infant, and dragged him to the door: the next moment I heard his heavy frame rolling down the stairs with no decorous ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... desirable,—so that a month or two of the spring need not be consumed on that preliminary question. But this period had not as yet been reached, and it was thought by the entire City that Mr. Palliser was much too sanguine. It was so probable, many said, that he might kill himself by labour which would be Herculean in all but success, and that no financier after him would venture to face the task. It behoved Lady Glencora to see that her Hercules ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him, revive him, and make it possible for him to bestir himself and undress and go to bed. But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the whisky out, he shrank from that effort as from an Herculean labour; no—he was too tired. Then his mind went back to the friends he had left in Chelsea half an hour ago; it seemed an indefinably long time ago, years and years ago; they were like blurred phantoms, dimly ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... at all in the year and a quarter, and with his herculean shoulders and powerful head, his fair hair, blushed into a great tuft above his forehead, only just beginning to turn gray, he was still the very type and picture of ripe manhood ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... bitterness and fury, echoed through the dell; morning broke more and more, ill accordant in its celestial beauty with our brute and noisy contest. I and my enemy were still struggling, when the wounded man exclaimed, "The Earl!" I sprang out of the herculean hold of the keeper, panting from my exertions; I cast furious glances on my persecutors, and placing myself with my back to a tree, resolved to defend myself to the last. My garments were torn, and they, as well as my hands, were stained with the blood of the man I had wounded; one hand ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... that I learned the stuff of which my three comrades were composed. They were grave, it is true, and thoughtful, but of an invincible serenity. For the moment we could only sit among the bushes in patience and wait the coming of Zambo. Presently his honest black face topped the rocks and his Herculean figure emerged upon the top of ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... compass." Yet Chatham, just before the recess, put a bold front upon his affairs in the house. He proclaimed a war against party cabals, and asserted that his great point was to destroy faction, and that he could face and dare the greatest and proudest connexions. But this was an Herculean task which neither Chatham nor any other minister has yet been able to accomplish. Faction is an hydra-headed monster, which no man can destroy, either by the charms of his eloquence or the terror ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... be the oldest of the sisterhood, holds the book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of sight, which fact, contradicted as it is by a frame of obviously Herculean strength, gives a mysterious intentness ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the vehicle too. The huge domestic, descending from his perch, gave a rap at the door which almost drove in the building. All the heads were out; the sun was shining; the very organ-boy paused; the footman, the coach, and Goldmore's red face and white waistcoat were blazing in splendour. The herculean plushed one went back ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were yet alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of which his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills, which had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of sixty-seven the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous Borgia's poison had undermined his system. For ten whole years he had supported his wife, and now he inherited nothing! The innkeeper was a second ruin of Heidelberg, repaired ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the very great pleasure of presenting you with the last remaining stolen heirloom of the ancient House of Puddingham, thus recovering all the articles stolen from you on Easter Sunday night and throughout Easter Monday, which recovery is due to my herculean efforts, ably assisted from time to time by my old side-kicker, Doctor Watson. The only thing now remaining to be done is to seize Billie Budd when he comes up here in disguise to-morrow morning, and ship him into London with a ball and chain ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... because he was practically the senior officer available, and because he had gained experience in both regimental and staff duties, having filled with great credit the high office of Commander-in-Chief at Bombay. Herculean Mr. Allan, of Gateshead, sought for information how many months the Duke of Connaught was absent from his duties when he commanded at Portsmouth. Young Mr. Dalziel also came forward, wanting to know whether the Duke would receive the salary of a General or a Lieutenant-General. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... reader, I behold Before me, as in days of old, Bold Paddy Whelan, Wexford Paddy Surely of noisy men the daddy; A man of most Herculean form, Who roamed through sunshine and through storm, And sounded loud in other days His notes in Hamnett Pinhey's praise— And well he might sing with loud swell, "The Lamb of March" deserved it well! A man of learning, ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear!—for I must tell you the truth—the result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better. I will tell you the tale of my wanderings and of the 'Herculean' labours, as I may call them, which I endured only to find at last the oracle irrefutable. After the politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you will be instantly ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... high tide kindled fresh hopes as "Little Mack" steeled himself for a last try with the Dewey's hardworked engines. Jack and Ted had spent the long evening in the wireless room with Sammy Smith, hearing not so much as a trace of a passing vessel. Eagerly they awaited the last herculean effort for freedom. At ten minutes to one the engines were set in motion again and the signal given to back away as before. Lieutenant McClure had resorted to the expedient of shifting everything movable within the Dewey ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... the value of his experience as a fisherman on the coast of Greenland, and of the usefulness of his dog Kaas, who could be used as a leader of the dogs which would be necessary to draw the sledges. Otto had only his good health, his herculean strength, and his devotion to the cause to recommend him. Thanks to the influence of the doctor and Mr. Bredejord, they were all three engaged ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... had been hurled right and left by his herculean effort, closed upon him promptly, and, with very little ceremony, hauled him off with violence, hurling him to the deck and themselves falling on the top of him and holding him down with their weight. Yet once again he succeeded in wrenching himself free from the men's clutches and, staggering ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... wounded. The foresight of Napoleon extended even to sending, at the very last moment, to the convent upon the summit, an immense quantity of bread, cheese, and wine. Each soldier, to his surprise, was to find, as he arrived at the summit, exhausted with Herculean toil, a generous slice of bread and cheese with a refreshing cup of wine, presented to him by the monks. All these minute details Napoleon arranged, while at the same time he was doing the work of a dozen energetic men, in reorganizing ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... replied the man, addressing him with dry, parched lips, whilst his Herculean breast heaved up and down with agitation; "I didn't intend to do it, or to break in upon it, but now I must, for it's life or death with the three that's left me; and I durstn't go into the town to ask it there. I have lost four already. Maybe, sir, you could change this ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... populousness of a country have been considered as nearly connected with each other. And, as a rule, for the purpose intended, numbers, in the view of simplicity and certainty, are entitled to a preference. In every country it is a herculean task to obtain a valuation of the land; in a country imperfectly settled and progressive in improvement, the difficulties are increased almost to impracticability. The expense of an accurate valuation is, in all situations, a formidable objection. ...
— The Federalist Papers
... unsuccessful were received at the Rock, as if they had returned from a victory. The garrison beheld with admiration the wonderful efforts which were made to meet a still more formidable foe. Every day marked the progress of the Herculean labours in preparation for that event; the exertions, zeal, and intrepidity of Sir James's officers and crews increased in proportion to the multiplied force of the enemy, which, to men of any other cast, would have ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... the proximity of our meeting-place to the bank—"in case some of the day louts should be fooling about," as Warminster explained. Thereupon, with herculean efforts, we shoved out the stern across stream, the prow being still tethered; and catching on to a stake, we had the satisfaction not only of feeling ourselves in an unassailable position, but of knowing that we were effectually blocking ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... tall figure, herculean in size, loomed out of the night and advanced hastily. The man's head was bent forward against the storm. Virginia caught a glimpse of his face as he passed in the streak of light thrown ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... never ceases to be himself, it certainly seems as if the genius of Michelangelo had had some effect. From what we know of the altarpiece, which perished by fire in 1867, but of which a good copy by Cigoli remains, Titian embarked suddenly upon forms of Herculean strength in violent action, but there his likeness to the Florentine ended; the figures were, indeed, drawn with a deep, though not altogether successful, attention to anatomy and foreshortening, but the picture obtained its effect and derived its impressiveness from the setting in which the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... once, the herculean savage was seen to make a motion of his arm, and before the act could be understood, the terrified Bippo called out that he was about to throw his javelin. At the same instant he and his two companions cowered in the bottom of the boat, where they ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... was a saint, a miscreant, a disguised prince, and an escaped convict, according to the state of the reporter's imagination or his digestion; while the stories told of Sleeny varied from cannibalism to feats of herculean goodness. They all agreed reasonably well, however, as to the personal appearance of the two men, and from this fact it came about that, in the course of the morning, evidence was brought forward, from a totally unexpected quarter, which ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... in such a result of the Herculean labours of Scott to found and endow a new branch of the clan of Scott. When fifteen years after his death the estate was at length freed from debt, all his own children and the eldest of his grandchildren were dead; and now forty-six ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... abreast. In the van were a number of big, square-headed fellows, who seemed to possess the herculean strength and naive confidence of giants. They would doubtless prove blind, intrepid defenders of the Republic. On their shoulders they carried large axes, whose edges, freshly ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... AUGUST 4TH.—Lee is making herculean efforts for an "on to Washington," while the enemy think he merely designs a defense of Richmond. Troops are on the move, all the ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... father's sword, put on his helmet, and talked of the best method of killing all the rebel generals. The plans he laid for terminating the contest appeared so feasible to Constantia, that at length (though not without tears) she consented that he should enter on the Herculean labour of destroying the many-headed monster, Rebellion. Isabel thought that her father and uncle were likely to know what was best to be done, but as often as she ventured to hint that he might be too sanguine, Eustace reminded her, that girls knew nothing ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... no chance of rigging up a cable-way, while the incline was so steep and rough that it was out of the question to try to drag it up with ropes. Just as we were on the verge of giving up in despair, one of the Alpini—a man of Herculean frame who had made his living in peace-time by breaking chains on his chest and performing other feats of strength—came and suggested that he be allowed to carry the gun up on his shoulders. Grasping at a straw, I let him indulge in a few 'practice man[oe]uvres'; but these only showed that, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... superhuman efforts of the firemen, the fire was extinguished, leaving only the bare and blackened walls standing as monuments of the destruction that had been wrought. Foremost among the brave fellows who were performing their self-appointed and herculean duty was a man about thirty-five years of age, stout and muscular in form, and with a good-humored, honest face, that would attract your friendly regard at a glance. He was the most active and energetic man upon the ground, and it ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... medal with a Herculean figure on the reverse, confining the head of the English leopard between his knees, whilst preparing a cord to strangle him, inscribed En l'An XII. 2000 barques sont construites;—this was in condemnation of the invasion and ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... during his middle life was spent at Paris, where he was busily engaged in the herculean task of issuing his splendid books. He varied his work, however, so that several hours daily were devoted to study and scientific research; and from time to time he made ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the Rue Pigalle. He was a big fellow of fifty with broad shoulders and a full, bearded face. His most disagreeable characteristic was the narrow dogmatic pedantry which he had acquired at the Ecole Normale, and had never since been able to shake off. All his herculean efforts to be sceptical and frivolous, and the twenty years he had spent in Paris mingling with every section of society, had failed to rid him of it. Magister he was, and magister he remained, even in his most strenuous flights ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... second in which the athletic baronet stood, as it were breathless and incredulous, and then his Herculean fist whirled in the air with a most unseemly oath: the girl screamed, and a crash of glass and crockery, whisked away by their coats, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... other men of Herculean power, he was not eager to exhibit his strength; but on one occasion he gave proof of it in the following circumstances. Mr. Murray had asked him to accompany him to the Coronation of George IV. They had tickets of admittance to Westminster Hall, but on arriving there they found that ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... materials are enough to keep it in check. In another, it may be a raging torrent, and he may slave night and day, gathering stone and sand, and sealing them with his very blood. But suppose in the end the torrent gets away from him! He fails, you say. Yet is he weaker after that herculean task than the other chap who dammed up his stream of tendency with the side of his boot? He publicly goes under,—yes! But may he not still be finer than his two-by-four brother whose temperament ran ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... once more grasps the tree. The enormous hind-quarters, the limbs and the loins, the broad pelvis and thick spinal cord, supplying abundant nervous energy to the swelling muscles inserted in the ridged and keeled bones, all come into play as a point d'appui for the Herculean effort." ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the winning pugilist; when he saw the man's face, scarred with the wounds of many battles, and imbruted by ferocious passions; when he surveyed the fellow's naked limbs, very marvels of exercise and training, and his shoulders of Herculean breadth, a thought of personal danger started a chill along every vein. A sure instinct warned him that the opportunity for murder was too perfect to have come by chance; and here now were the myrmidons, and their business was with him. He turned an anxious eye ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... endowed with that admirable love of industry which is characteristic of the Pennsylvania Dutch. In accordance with her acceptance of the command, "Six days shalt thou labor," she swept, scrubbed, and toiled from early morning to evening with Herculean persistence. The farmhouse was spotless from cellar to attic, the wooden walks and porches scrubbed clean and smooth. Flower beds, vegetable gardens and lawns were kept neat and without weeds. Aunt Maria was, as she expressed ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... ten paces, in the same manner as he had previously done; all of a sudden he turned, and taking the bridle of the burra gently in his hand, stopped her. I had now a full view of his face and figure, and those huge features and Herculean form still occasionally revisit me in my dreams. I see him standing in the moonshine, staring me in the face with his deep calm eyes. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... in Florence in 1509. In her fatherland she left a son of the same mettle as herself, Giovanni Medici, the last of the great condottieri of the country, who became famous as leader of the Black Bands. There is a seated figure in marble of this captain, of herculean strength, with the neck of a centaur, near the church ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... longing to "answer back," or, as the children put it, to "get even with" the man or woman whose speech offends us. The apostle showed marvelous knowledge of the weakness of sinful mortals when he affirmed that the tongue was an unruly member, for it is easier to perform a herculean feat, to strain physical strength and muscle to the utmost, than to bite back the sharp retort, or repress the acrid reply. And there is such a hopelessness in the sentence once uttered! It is gone from us forever. We may regret it and show our repentance ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... most placid fortune—when the dismal emergencies which checkered his life arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigor as if he had never penned a stanza nor taken a glass too much, or was strung with herculean sinews. None of those temptations, in which misery is the most potent, to hazard a lavish expenditure for an enjoyment to be secured against fate and fortune, ever tempted him to exceed his income, when ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... the men who climbed over the gangway—just as the boats were being hoisted up—was a sailor of gigantic height, of colossal proportions, and Herculean vigour. He was a Canadian by birth. He carried in his arms a young child that was cold and motionless, as if dead. A slight trembling in its limbs, however, proclaimed that there was still ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... I think, more rationalistic still, and decidedly inclined to treat it as an excellence pre-existing in the man and explanatory of the herculean performances of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... and go. Conditions remain and work. From this on revolutionary socialism will be working, night and day, with might and main, here and there, everywhen and everywhere, and its three herculean tasks are: (1) to dethrone the great imperialist, competitive capitalism; (2) to enthrone the great democrat, co-operative industrialism; and (3) to make the world safe ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... a fusilade that ought to have mown down every blade of halfa-grass near. But Maxwell's men seemed not quite to get the range. The flag and flagstaff were riddled with bullet holes, and the dead were being piled around. Still, dervish after dervish sprang to uphold the black banner of Mahdism. A herculean black grasped the staff in one hand, and leaned negligently against it for what appeared to be the space of five or ten minutes,—probably less than one minute,—ere the soldiers managed to give him his final quietus. Then it was that the remnant of the army of the Khalifa began to melt away. It ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... persevered in his Herculean task. Having presented and spoken upon others in the interval, he presented another monster petition to the House on the 5th of February. It was signed, he said, by twenty-four thousand inhabitants of London and the neighbourhood. It complained of the unbearable weight ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... nation, and indicate in this case an antiquity of at least 5760 years. The monuments of Ake are peculiar, and the only specimens of their kind to be found among these ruined cities. They are evidently the handiwork of a herculean and uncouth race—the enormous height of each step in the staircase proves it—of that race of giants whose great bones and large skulls are now and then disinterred, and whose towering forms, surmounted by heads disproportionately small, we have seen pictured on ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... connected. Ten minutes a day for the rest of the week and you will have them at your fingers' ends. It is no trick at all. It is as easy as learning the names of the more important parts of the mechanism of your motor. There is nothing impossible or difficult, or even tedious, about it; but it seems Herculean because you have never taken the trouble to try to remember anything. It is the same attitude that renders it almost physically painful for one of us to read over the scenario of an opera or a column biography ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... the cliffs which overlooked the cove, he calculated the distance it would be necessary to take the schooner through the ice by sawing and cutting, and that through a field known to be some four feet thick, at five good miles at least. So Herculean did this task appear to be, that he even thought of abandoning his vessel altogether, and of setting out in the boats, as soon as the summer was fairly commenced. On reflection, however, this last ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Congress of Women, meeting in New York and sponsored by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Maria Mitchell. This drawing away of women hurt her far more than newspaper gibes. In fact she was sadly disappointed in women's response to the herculean effort she was making ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... thither presently came Captain Lyon himself. Virginia tingled with antagonism when she saw this man who had made the city tremble, who had set an iron heel on the flaming brand of her Cause. He, too, showed the marks of his Herculean labors, but only on his clothes and person. His long red hair was unbrushed, his boots covered with black mud, and his coat unbuttoned. His face was ruddy, and his eye as clear as though he had arisen from twelve hours' sleep. He bowed to Virginia (not too politely, to be ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his herculean labor in concocting this extraordinary playbill, he leaned back in his chair and read and reread it over and over again, to assure himself it was all right. Then with the consciousness that he had done his duty, he lay down to rest for a few hours to recuperate before he ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... wondered, in one who from his face appeared to be old? Was there perchance, after all, some truth in the legend of Samson and did it dwell in that gigantic beard and those long locks of his? It was impossible to say and probably the man was but a Herculean freak, for that he was as strong as Hercules all the stories that I heard afterwards of his feats, left little room ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Moffat the labour had been of a herculean character. He had spared himself no labour or drudgery which its prosecution involved. To accomplish it he had left his home and lived a semi-savage life for nearly three months, that he might perfect himself in the language. Without any special training for the important undertaking, and under the ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... an effort so sudden and unexpected, that he freed Rashleigh from my hold, and securing me, notwithstanding my struggles, in his own Herculean gripe, he called out—"Take the bent, Mr. Rashleigh—Make ae pair o' legs worth twa pair o' hands; ye ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... colossal!" he exclaimed. "Think of it! a whole city wiped out." I lowered my eyes to the goat nibbling beside us. "The courage and energy that rebuilt it is herculean." His enthusiasm was cumulative. "And rebuilt it in practically three years! No wonder you date all things ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... not know that this excess of slavery is increasing, and will continue to increase in a ratio which is alarming in the extreme, and must overwhelm our descendants in ruin? Why then should we shut our eyes and turn our backs upon the evil? Will delay render it less gigantic, or give us more Herculean strength to meet and subdue it at a future time? Oh, no—delay breeds danger—procrastination is the thief of time, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... which hung everlasting things. Each time there was the same growth in enthusiasm which began in decorous applause and ended in cheers and shouts as the artist came back after the performance of a herculean task, and added piece after piece to a programme which had been laid down on generous lines from the beginning. The careless saw the spectacle with simple amazement, but for the judicious ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... back to the blaze, his feet spread apart, and his hands deep in his pockets, stood the owner of the ranche—Swanson. Cast in a Herculean mold, he stood over six feet tall, his broad shoulders surmounted by a neck like a bull, and his red, cunning face, almost hid from sight by the thick, bushy whiskers ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... a length behind the Regent, whose hoofs as they dashed the ground up sounded like thunder, and for whose herculean strength the plough has no terrors; it was more than the lead to keep now, there was ground to cover, and the King was losing like Wild Geranium. Cecil felt drunk with that strong, keen, west wind that blew so strongly in his teeth, a passionate excitation was in him, every breath of winter ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... that mental aberration which ended his life, and does not hesitate to attribute the final catastrophe to the overworking of his powers in the service of pretentious and unsanctified science. Noble and true-hearted son of the Church though he was, and though laboring with herculean strength to set the Bible and science in harmony, he has not escaped the envenomed shafts of a portion of the religious press. By some he has been openly branded as a traitor in ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... he was not satisfied with the civility of a salute, nor even with the rudest attack he could make on her lips, but caught her in his arms, and endeavoured to kiss her breasts, which with all her strength she resisted, and, as our spark was not of the Herculean race, with some difficulty prevented. The young gentleman, being soon out of breath in the struggle, quitted her, and, remounting his horse, called one of his servants to him, whom he ordered to stay behind with her, and make her any offers whatever to prevail on her to return home with ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... had to climb as best they could the stubborn slope to the summit. But the fatigue which was thus imposed upon the tender limbs of women, upon the ancient frames of ecclesiastics, was not to be borne by the new King of Sicily. He was carried up the incline in a chair by two herculean Moorish slaves, so strong and surefooted that the stubborn ascent could be made with the least possible discomfort to his royal body. While the others had groaned and sweated as they scuffled up the hill—that they might reach the goal in time to receive ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... health of Mr. Pease began to fail under his herculean labors. He had carried his enterprise to a successful issue, however. He had done good to thousands, and had won friends for the institution, who were resolved, and possessed of the means, to carry it on. A Society was incorporated for the conduct of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... to him. He flung up his cap in the air, with a burst of laughter. "So much the better!" he exclaimed; "the closer the preserve, the thicker the game." I had now a complete view of this hero of democracy. His figure was herculean; his countenance, which possibly, in his younger days, had been handsome, was now marked with the lines of every passion and profligacy, but it was still commanding. His costume was one which he had chosen for himself, and which was worn by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... respect, I throw canons to the winds—it sounds a herculean feat—wash out the printed red of the rubric, and call, perhaps the saddest story ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... himself was often ignorant of it. He took office (he was the third War Minister in fifty days) without any knowledge whatever of the imperial plan of campaign, or the steps to be adopted in the event of further French reverses, and a herculean task lay before this septuagenarian officer, who by experience knew right well how to deal with Arabs and Chinamen, but had never had to contend with European troops. Nevertheless, he displayed zeal and activity in his new semi-political and semi-military position. He greatly ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... this herculean undertaking, and were now being cut up—the reward of many who attempt such ambitious tasks. In reality, though, this charnel-house was the sculptors' studio, in which were modelled the gigantic figures which were to be placed on the buildings ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... short, and may be quickly told. M. Roussillon had taken advantage of the first moment when he and Hamilton were left alone. One herculean buffet, a swinging smash of his enormous fist on the point of the Governors jaw, and then he walked out of the fort unchallenged, doubtless on account of ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Haldimar was particularly struck by the air of bold daring and almost insolent recklessness pervading every movement of this man; and it was difficult to say whether the haughtiness of bearing peculiar to Ponteac himself, was not exceeded by that of this herculean warrior. ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... comic poet. Feeling stronger, Alberti returned at the age of twenty to his law studies, and pursued them in the teeth of disadvantages. His health was still uncertain, and the fortune of an exile reduced him to the utmost want. It was no wonder that under these untoward circumstances even his Herculean strength gave way. Emaciated and exhausted, he lost the clearness of his eyesight, and became subject to arterial disturbances, which filled his ears with painful sounds. This nervous illness is not dissimilar to that which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... at short distances from the cabins, but for these weak, starving creatures to obtain it was a herculean task. To go out when the storms were raging, would be almost impossible for a well, strong man. To struggle through the deep, loose drifts, reaching frequently to the waist, required, at any time, fearful exertion. The numb, fleshless fingers could hardly guide, or even wield the ax. Near ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and though you throw it with more than herculean force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... moment and had passed as quickly as a flitting cloud—Stafford was by her side, and at work extricating woman from horse. It was not an easy task, for though Adonis was now dead, a part of Maude's body lay under his shoulder; but with utmost herculean strength Stafford succeeded in getting her clear, and lifted her out of the hole on to the grass. Kneeling beside him, Ida, calm now, but trembling, raised Maude's head on her knee and wiped the blood ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... smiled faintly; for a month past she had been unconsciously striving to live up to Mrs. Wiggs's opinion of her, and the constant praise and commendation of that "courageous captain of compliment" had moved her to herculean effort. ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... mends; But this is not the best:—look, pr'ythee, Charmian, How this Herculean Roman does become ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the roof after the model of his vaulting in the second bay from the west end, or would he have diminished the number of piers so as to give a distance between them equal to the space between the west wall and the first pier he erected? It is difficult to realise how such a herculean task would have been carried out with safety to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... and the prospect clear, From the smirch'd scullion to the embroider'd peer. The ambitious drudge preferr'd, postilion rides, Advanced again, the chair benighted guides; Here doom'd, if Nature strung his sinewy frame, The slave, perhaps, of some insatiate dame; But if, exempted from the Herculean toil, A fairer field awaits him, rich with spoil, There shall he shine, with mingling honours bright, His master's pathic, pimp, and parasite; 80 Then strut a captain, if his wish be war, And grasp, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the Duke had not been difficult, but this letter seemed to be an Herculean task. It was made infinitely more difficult by the fact that Lady Cantrip had not seemed to think that this marriage was impossible. "Young people when they have set their minds upon it do so generally prevail at last!" These had been her words, and they discomforted him greatly. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... to a parson in Edinburgh, one of the Smythe-Smythes of London. She made a doormat of herself, loving the herculean minister, and, though longing to stay at home and get married, had, at her lover's earnest request, consented to accompany her mother and sister ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... classical example of these stories is an old Roman tale told by Petronius. It is put in the mouth of one Niceros. Late at night he left the town to visit a friend of his, a widow, who lived at a farm five miles down the road. He was accompanied by a soldier, who lodged in the same house, a man of Herculean build. When they set out it was near dawn, but the moon shone as bright as day. Passing through the outskirts of the town, they came amongst the tombs, which lined the highroad for some distance. There the soldier made an excuse for retiring behind a monument, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... was President of the Parliament of Bordeaux. He was a voluminous writer, his most celebrated work being his "L'Esprit des Lois." Burke described him as "A genius not born in every country, or every time: with a Herculean robustness of mind; and nerves not to be ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the very poorest, however, being without a cottage, plot of ground, a cow and of poultry their own. Many of their interiors are far neater and cleaner than those of the farm-houses, their occupants not being so tied to the soil from morning to night, not, in fact, incited to Herculean labours by the spur of larger possession. We visited one of the poorest villages hereabouts, of not quite a hundred souls, but of course, provided with church, school and Mairie. Many a group of potato diggers we saw in the exquisite twilight, suggestive ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... notions of a few, who are always ready to join, but never willing to march to action, and must not be taken as a specimen of South Carolina bravery. The Federal Government has become vicious and even puerile toward South Carolina; and since the Herculean power of the great Calhoun is gone, it treats us like a semi-barbarous and secluded people, mistaking our character. But we'll learn the Federal ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... father, endowed with herculean strength, the Tsarevich Alexis, thin, pale, and delicate, makes a sad figure. Most historians, following the example of Voltaire, have represented this prince as a narrow-minded person, a victim of the bigoted and intolerant education of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... destitution in Santiago with characteristic promptness and energy. To feed twenty or thirty thousand people at once, with the limited facilities and the small working force at her command, and to do it systematically and economically, without wastefulness and without confusion, was a herculean task; but it was a task with which experience and training in many fields had made her familiar, and she set about it intelligently and met the difficulties of the situation with admirable tact and judgment. Her first step was to ask the ablest, most influential, and most respected citizens ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... man endowed with herculean strength who is compelled by circumstances to follow a sedentary occupation, some minute exquisite work of the hands, for example, or to engage in study and mental labor demanding quite other powers, and just those which ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... busy to-day with ropes and axe, pick and shovel. But the task is vast, it is herculean, like unto the cleaning ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... reverent enough to them, because we possess too much of them. That sketch of four cherub heads from and English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, is an incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks did. Ineffably tender in the touch, yet Herculean in power; innocent, yet exalted in feeling; pure in color as a pearl; reserved and decisive in design, as this Lion crest, —if it alone existed of such,—if it were a picture by Zeuxis, the only one left ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... those tongues had, after a while, been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of Christminster. To acquire languages, departed or living in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was a herculean performance which gradually led him on to a greater interest in it than in the presupposed patent process. The mountain-weight of material under which the ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the classics ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... pervades most of Ossian's poems he is seldom introduced in propria persona. Even when attention is directed to him the poet merely and meagerly sketches the herculean outline, and leaves our imagination ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... Samson Hat never let a year pass without having a personal battle with some young, willing, and powerful negro. His physical and mental system seemed to require some such periodical indulgence, and he measured every negro who came to town solely in the light of his prowess. At the appearance of some Herculean or clean-chested athlete, Samson's eye would kindle, his smile start up, and his friendly salutation would be: "You're a good man! 'Most as good as me!" He was never whipped, rumor said, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... now stands is generally received as the statue of Ilissus, who was the Athenian god of the river Ilissus, which watered the southern side of the Athenian plain. Others have declared it to be Theseus reposing after his herculean labours, and contemplating the contest between the two deities. Having fully examined this fine sculpture, the visitor should turn to the fragments of the Minerva. A small fragment of the upper part of a face (101) is all that remains of Minerva's head, the holes being still visible by which ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... simplicity of Goldsmith: his opening eyes and unclosing lips; the "harsh thunder" of his articulation, and the horrisonous stamp of his ample foot, impress us with the same reverence which was felt by his literary visitants. It was here, doubtless, where the Herculean task of compiling his dictionary was achieved; the monotony of which was relieved by writing the periodical papers of his Guardian, and the more flowery composition of poetry and biography. But he is gone, and though the mist of years may obscure his personal history, and vicissitudes annihilate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... that these terrible injuries, the traces of which had disappeared so miraculously, were inflicted by the prisoner Byron, a young gentleman tenderly nurtured, and visibly inferior in strength and hardihood to his herculean opponent. Doubtless Byron had been emboldened by his skill in mimic combat to try conclusions, under the very different conditions of real fighting, with a man whose massive shoulders and determined cast of features ought to have convinced him that such an enterprise was ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... hideousness till this trip. I got you now, though; I got you all added up and subtracted and I'll tell you the answer. It's my opinion, backed by figgers, that you're a dam'—" He hesitated, then with a herculean effort be managed to gulp the remainder of his sentence. In a changed voice he said: "Oh, what's the use? I s'pose you've got feelin's. Come on, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the labour had been of a herculean character. He had spared himself no labour or drudgery which its prosecution involved. To accomplish it he had left his home and lived a semi-savage life for nearly three months, that he might perfect himself ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... ends. It is no trick at all. It is as easy as learning the names of the more important parts of the mechanism of your motor. There is nothing impossible or difficult, or even tedious, about it; but it seems Herculean because you have never taken the trouble to try to remember anything. It is the same attitude that renders it almost physically painful for one of us to read over the scenario of an opera or a column ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... and I believed there must be something wrong with a fellow who could conceive such a stupendous undertaking. Surely no one would think for a moment of putting it into execution! I also read with stolid indifference of the Herculean feats of labor performed by men known to history. For example, Demosthenes copied in his own handwriting Thucydides' History eight times, merely to make himself familiar with the style of that great man. An incident that appealed to me in a ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... herculean labor in concocting this extraordinary playbill, he leaned back in his chair and read and reread it over and over again, to assure himself it was all right. Then with the consciousness that he had done his duty, he lay down to rest for a few hours ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... they had thrown old coffee-bags, which, resting on their foreheads, passed behind their ears and hung loosely down their backs. It was in fact the haik or bag-cloak of the East, and it made a wonderfully effective Arab costume. One of them was half leaning, half sitting, on a pile of bags; his Herculean arms were folded, and he had unconsciously assumed an air of dignity and defiance. He might have passed for an African chief. When we see such men in Egypt or other sunny countries outre mer, we become artistically eloquent; but it rarely occurs to sketchers and word-painters ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... to the very prison from which a few months before I had made my escape. With a bursting heart I entered those walls, compelled to feel that all my more than Herculean labours served for my own torture, and for no other end. Since my escape from prison I had acquired some knowledge of the world; I had learned by bitter experience, by how many links society had a hold upon me, and how closely the snares of despotism beset ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... was one of the herculean artists, working, in Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and the energy of a volcano. Of his Les Miserables—perhaps the greatest novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest—he said, "it takes ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... nation had been gloriously maintained, the unsuccessful were received at the Rock, as if they had returned from a victory. The garrison beheld with admiration the wonderful efforts which were made to meet a still more formidable foe. Every day marked the progress of the Herculean labours in preparation for that event; the exertions, zeal, and intrepidity of Sir James's officers and crews increased in proportion to the multiplied force of the enemy, which, to men of any other cast, ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... Claude, throwing himself into his father's arm-chair, ''tis a Herculean labour! It seems I ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be tamed and used in the redemption of mankind by man; and mankind is no longer a mob of blind victims to panic and passion, but a more or less orderly host marching on to more or less definite goals. The individual, however, can do little by himself; he needs the strength of union for his herculean tasks; and he has found that union in the state. It is not an engine of tyranny, but the lever of social morality; and the function of English government is not merely to embody the organized might and the executive brain of England, but also to enforce its collective ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... but little. In the sixteenth century they ranked, as they still rank, among the proudest nobles of the Eternal City. Lelio, the head of the house, had six stalwart sons by his first wife, Girolama Savelli. They were conspicuous for their gigantic stature and herculean strength. After their mother's death in 1571, their father became enamoured of a woman inferior at all points, in birth, breeding, and antecedents, to a person of his quality. She was a certain Eufrosina, who had been married to a man called Corberio. The great Marc Antonio ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... peaceful, majestic, irresistible America,"—this was the vision that nerved King to herculean labor, to a most real martyrdom. Condemned to the slow suicide of over-work, he gave his life a conscious offering to freedom. "What a year to live in," he writes, "worth all other times ever known in our history or any other." Again,—"I should ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... said Bailey, a herculean creature of 6 ft. 6 in., and stepping into "Wreck House" he brought out a chair, seated Lucy on it, and amidst applause and laughter, lifted it up on his mighty shoulders as if she was no more ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... will not quietly submit to neglect its current acquisitions, but will go on improving as long as means and opportunities offer; while he who finds himself ignorant of most things, is only too apt to shrink from a labour which becomes Herculean. In this manner ambition is stifled, the mind gets to be inactive, and finally sinks into unresisting apathy. Such is the case with a large portion of the European peasantry. The multitude of objects that surround ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in the port of Stockholm, when a number of Herculean women came and offered us their services as porters. They were Delekarliers, {52} who frequently come to Stockholm to earn a livelihood as porters, water-carriers, boatwomen, &c. They easily find employment, because they possess two excellent ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... himself, if the fiend incarnate before him carried out his intention of firing the place it would be all over with him. The horrible smoke would assuredly suffocate him ere he could, even by exerting the most Herculean strength, succeed ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... a country have been considered as nearly connected with each other. And, as a rule, for the purpose intended, numbers, in the view of simplicity and certainty, are entitled to a preference. In every country it is a herculean task to obtain a valuation of the land; in a country imperfectly settled and progressive in improvement, the difficulties are increased almost to impracticability. The expense of an accurate valuation ...
— The Federalist Papers
... insolent, and encourage them to make war upon other parties of the whites. Eleven volunteers were selected for the expedition, and the young and fragile Kit Carson was entrusted with the command. In manners he was gentle as a girl, with a voice as soft as that of a woman. He had no herculean powers of muscle, but he had mind, mental powers which had been developed in a hundred emergencies. And these stout, hardy veterans of the wilderness seem with one accord to have decided that he was the fitting one to lead them into battle, where ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... my child! Your stalwart limbs, Herculean in might, now rival mine; The starry light upon your forehead dims The lustre of my crown—distasteful sign. Contract thy wishes, boy! Do not insist Too much on what's thine own—thou art too new! Bend and curtail thy stature! As I list, It is my glorious privilege ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... new University of Chicago. It is not strange that, in 1889, three years before he became a member of the university's first faculty, President Harper's attention was attracted to him, and he brought the early drafts of his plan for a herculean university to Professor Judson for criticism. When the inner history of that university is written, in my opinion, the world will be surprised to learn of the contribution of Professor Judson, who was Dr. Harper's Secretary of the Interior from ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... he and I were engaged in mortal combat, and our prisoner was all but my conqueror. Grappling with Cambaceres, whom I knocked from his horse, and was about to despatch, I felt a lunge behind, which luckily was parried by my sabretache; a herculean grasp was at the next instant at my throat—I was on the ground—my prisoner had escaped, and a gigantic warrior in the uniform of a colonel of the regiment of Artois glaring ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... out if hand immediately; the great thing is not to let it acquire bad habits that must afterward be broken. Any child can be taught to be beautifully behaved with no effort greater than quiet patience and perseverance, whereas to break bad habits once they are acquired is a Herculean task. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... about ten paces, in the same manner as he had previously done; all of a sudden he turned, and taking the bridle of the burra gently in his hand, stopped her. I had now a full view of his face and figure, and those huge features and Herculean form still occasionally revisit me in my dreams. I see him standing in the moonshine, staring me in the face with his deep calm eyes. At last ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... National War Work Council of the Y. M. C. A. at New York, was asked to take part in the creation of the machinery necessary for the gigantic piece of work that the organization had been called upon by the President of the United States to do. It was a herculean task; practically impossible with any large degree of efficiency in view of the almost insurmountable obstacles to be contended with. But step by step the imperfect machinery was set up, and it began ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ... which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of the day, we drew together and debated on ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... unlike as possible. Douglas was short, not much more than five feet high, with a large head, massive brain, broad shoulders, a wide, deep chest, and features strongly marked. He impressed every one, at first sight, as a strong, sturdy, resolute, fearless man. Lincoln's herculean stature has already been described. A stranger who listened to him for five minutes would say: 'This is a kind, genial, sincere, genuine man; a man you can trust, plain, straightforward, honest, and true.' If this stranger were to hear him ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... and women came the same cry, and so she did gird on her armor and go forth. The latter part of February she took up her abode with Mrs. Stanton in New York. Herculean efforts were being made at this time by the Republicans, under the leadership of Charles Sumner, to secure congressional action in regard to emancipation. A widespread fear existed that the President's proclamation might not prove sufficient, that some way of overriding ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... assemblage of rock shapes on the shores of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... that he has departed from his favorite theories, in wedding a yeoman's daughter. On the contrary, he believes he has acted on a system, and crossed the breed so judiciously as to attain greater physical perfection by means of a herculean dam, yet retain that avitam fidem, or traditional loyalty, which (to use his own words) "is born both in Rabys and Dences, as surely as a high-bred setter comes into the world with a nose ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... uttered a cry of terror. Lazet's violence of character, his herculean strength and undaunted courage, were well known. He sprang across the table between them, and seized Gaston by the throat. Then arose a scene of excitement and confusion. Clameran's friend, attempting to assist him, ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... innocence, that as a veile Had shadow'd them from knowing ill, was gon, Just confidence, and native righteousness, And honour from about them, naked left To guiltie shame hee cover'd, but his Robe Uncover'd more. So rose the Danite strong Herculean Samson from the Harlot-lap 1060 Of Philistean Dalilah, and wak'd Shorn of his strength, They destitute and bare Of all thir vertue: silent, and in face Confounded long they sate, as struck'n mute, Till Adam, though not less then Eve abasht, At length gave utterance to these words ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the way blocked by jammed and distorted rock. For two days they labored to tear a way through to their imprisoned friends; but when, after Herculean efforts, they had unearthed but a few yards of the choked passage, and discovered the mangled remains of one of their fellows they were forced to the conclusion that Tarzan and the second Waziri also lay dead beneath ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... although the idea of the denial of self is an entire and absolute one, yet the thing has to be done daily: we must keep on denying. It is a deeper and harder thing than any sole effort of most herculean will may finally effect. For indeed the will itself is not pure, is not free, until the Self is absolutely denied. It takes long for the water of life that flows from the well within us, to permeate every outlying portion of our spiritual ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... fact that she was snubbed by the Congress of Women, meeting in New York and sponsored by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Maria Mitchell. This drawing away of women hurt her far more than newspaper gibes. In fact she was sadly disappointed in women's response to the herculean effort she ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... prime, Bismarck was of massive proportions in mind and body; but of his moral nature both friends and enemies had often been in doubt for many years. Now, even that was revealed to be in concord with his herculean bulk. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better. I will tell you the tale of my wanderings and of the 'Herculean' labours, as I may call them, which I endured only to find at last the oracle irrefutable. After the politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... remarkable difference between the two men thus claiming ownership in the body of Old Bill. One was a little wizen-faced individual, whose yellow complexion and sharp, angular features proclaimed him of the Arab stock, while his competitor showed a skin of almost ebon blackness—a frame of herculean development—a broad face, with flat nose and thick lubberly lips—a head of enormous circumference, surmounted by a mop of woolly hair, standing erect several inches above ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... vortex of the fire, where he was killed. The soldiers considered their success on the first day as a foretaste of victory to follow on the morrow; but while Abercrombie delayed his advance for various reasons, Montcalm and his men did herculean work by felling a forest of trees and constructing an impenetrable abatis in front of ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... societies and the rallying-point of infidelity. He would reach it by a circuitous route. From Paris to the historic old capital of Switzerland, in the centre of mountains and the heart of Europe, was a herculean journey ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... electric shock, the man jumped up, and, throwing one single glance at the sailor, he gave a yell and leaped right in the midst of the vagabonds, and with herculean power he knocked down all who were ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... saying about Piero de' Medici and small wits, Messer Niccolo?" said Nello, whose light figure was at that moment predominating over the Herculean ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... this an exaggeration. Deep as science and research have explored, extensive as is the field which genius and art have occupied, they have an Herculean labor yet to perform before India will have yielded up all her opulence of learning. The literature of the world in all ages has been richly furnished, if not actually inspired, from that fountain. The Wisdom of the Ancients, so much lauded in the earlier ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... fatigue killed more German soldiers than fell to British bullets; and the fact may well be believed when we consider the herculean task General von Fuechter had accomplished in one week. His plan of campaign was to strike his hardest, and to keep on striking his hardest, without pause, till he had the British Government on its knees before him; till he had the British public—maddened by sudden ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... little theatre in the Rue Pigalle. He was a big fellow of fifty with broad shoulders and a full, bearded face. His most disagreeable characteristic was the narrow dogmatic pedantry which he had acquired at the Ecole Normale, and had never since been able to shake off. All his herculean efforts to be sceptical and frivolous, and the twenty years he had spent in Paris mingling with every section of society, had failed to rid him of it. Magister he was, and magister he remained, even in his most ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... going off in a barge with the sophomore decorating committee, who wanted a good chance to congratulate and condole with one another over their Herculean labors and ultimate triumph of the day before. The Rich sisters had decided to spend the holiday with an aunt who lived twenty miles down the river; Eleanor had promised early in the fall to go out with a ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... the Fourth. There was a great hulking fellow named Gardiner, who was boasting one day that he could carry twice his own weight He was told that he could not so much as lift his own, and was persuaded into a two-handled hamper, in which he made herculean efforts to lift himself. There was another man who received with perfect gravity the chaffing statement of a comrade, to the effect that he had shot a wood-pigeon at the North Pole, and that the bird had fallen on the needle on the top of the Pole, and had frozen so hard ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... up the wide shirt sleeve from his herculean arm and Szilard was astonished to see the half healed and cross-like scar—it had been ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... Chasteler. The advance of a still stronger force of the enemy under Baraguay d'Hilliers a second time against Botzen called Chasteler in person into the field, and the French, after a smart engagement near Volano, where the Herculean Passeyrers carried the artillery on their shoulders, were forced to retreat. It was on this occasion that Leiningen, who had hastily pushed too far forward, was rescued from captivity by Hofer.[5] The Vorarlberg had, meanwhile, also ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... a Herculean struggle. There was still a ponderous weight of water in the boat. The slight frame sagged and the flexible siding bulged. Glover with difficulty kept his feet, and he could only lift the stern ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... The launch was a Herculean task, as I had built her too high above high water-mark, and it took me nearly a day to get her down and afloat. Finding I could not move her with my own bodily strength, I had to carry an anchor out and attach a block-tackle ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... live with his sister, Mrs. Craigie, and her son, Tom, who had agreed to keep on the lodgings in Guilford Terrace, while for himself he had mapped out such a programme of work as could only have been undertaken by a man of "Titanic energy" and "Herculean strength," epithets which even the hostile press invariably bestowed on him. How great the sacrifice was to him few people knew. As we have said before, the world regarded him as a target, and would hardly have believed that he was in reality a man of the gentlest ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... elements, the last form of external force that is brought against him. And here once more the artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour" in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... part of the symphony is a scherzo which represents the child at play; there are terribly noisy games, games of Herculean gaiety, and you can hear the parents talking all over the house. How far we seem from Schumann's good little children and their simple-hearted families! At last the child is put to bed; they rock him to sleep, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... never to destroy papers of any sort. Every letter that he ever received was classified and filed, envelope and all. The thing to do, then, was manifestly to run over the files and find the letter, if indeed it was in or on a letter that the seal had first come to his attention. It was a herculean job, but that never feazed Sherlock Holmes, and he went at it tooth and nail. Finally his effort was rewarded. Under 'Applications for Autograph' he found a daintily-scented little missive from a young girl ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... favorable opportunity. Tea really was ready below, and was soon brought up. Mitya at first refused the glass that Nikolay Parfenovitch politely offered him, but afterwards he asked for it himself and drank it greedily. He looked surprisingly exhausted. It might have been supposed from his Herculean strength that one night of carousing, even accompanied by the most violent emotions, could have had little effect on him. But he felt that he could hardly hold his head up, and from time to time all the objects about him seemed heaving ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... as the year advanced towards the sere and yellow leaf, that in opposing her wayward will in single combat against a simple little association in the public mind she was undertaking a somewhat herculean task. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... was at all practicable, straight in the teeth of the gap, and as it proceeded to widen, we shot through it, with the surf leaping and tossing on either hand high above our heads. This stroke could have been possible only to a steersman possessed of herculean strength, combined with the rarest daring and coolness; and, as the result of these qualities, it was exceedingly effective. It lessened the danger of our being capsized almost entirely. Indeed, the sole mishap that was threatened by so doing, was the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... front upon his affairs in the house. He proclaimed a war against party cabals, and asserted that his great point was to destroy faction, and that he could face and dare the greatest and proudest connexions. But this was an Herculean task which neither Chatham nor any other minister has yet been able to accomplish. Faction is an hydra-headed monster, which no man can destroy, either by the charms of his eloquence or ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a great natural waterway around three sides of the city. Back of these rivers, again, was a second chain of forts completely encircling the city on a five-mile radius. The moment that the first German soldier set his foot on Belgian soil the military authorities began the herculean task of clearing of trees and buildings a great zone lying between this inner circle of forts and the city ramparts in order that an investing force might have no cover. It is estimated that within a fortnight the Belgian ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... curiosities, both of Nepaulese men and manners, in their native country, and we looked with no little interest upon the first specimens we had seen of the Newar race—the aborigines of Nepaul. Short and compact, the full development of their muscle bore evidence to their almost Herculean strength. Their flat noses, high cheek-bones, small eyes, and copper-coloured complexion are unequivocal signs of a Mongolian origin, whilst the calves of their legs, which I never saw equalled in size, indicate the mountainous ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... right," he murmured, as he wended his way out of the deserted quarter; "it will be a herculean task to alienate the Jews from their faith and bring them into the fold of the Russian church; but I shall ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... welfare of the citizens, it will be readily seen how women engaged in reforms, public charities, social enterprises, are hampered and trammeled in their progress without the ballot. Women have beheld their plans frustrated, their Herculean labor undone, their lives wasted, for want of legislative power through ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... a cowboy, and his Herculean frame well suited the picturesque Western dress. And Charlie Roland flattered himself that arrayed as a Chinaman he was ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... of which one chair had been broken. Young Tom thought it was time to fight the railroad, and perceived in Austen the elements of a rebel leader. Austen had undertaken to throw young Tom out of a front window, which was a large, old-fashioned one,—and after Herculean efforts had actually got him on the ledge, when something in the street caught his eye and made him desist abruptly. The something was the vision of a young woman in a brown linen suit seated in a runabout and driving a horse ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the Ister, and the lake Maeotis; and from thence descended to Greece. Here he built Mycene, and Tiryns, said by many to have been the work of the Cyclopians. He established a seminary at Helicon: and was the founder of those families, which were styled Dorian, and Herculean. It is a doubt among writers, whether he came into Italy. Some of his family were there; who defeated the giant race in Campania, and who afterwards built Argiletum, and Ardea in Latium. Virgil supposes it to have been effected by Danae, the ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... seared off the imprisoning tentacles, knowing that it would take far more than a heat-bolt to damage the well-nigh impregnable creature. He swooped the dog up under his good arm and fled from the madly-pursuing spheres, thanking nameless deities that the gravity here permitted such herculean feats. The spheres rolled faster, he soon found, than he could jump; so long as he was above them, all was well, but by the time the weak gravity permitted him to land, they were waiting for him. He tried zig-zagging. Good! It worked. He eluded them up to the mouth of the cave, ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... organizer of untiring energy and illimitable patience could have performed so herculean a labor. Balthazar was all this, and more. He knew how to rule men despotically yet secure their love. The Indians did his bidding without hesitation and wrought for him without pay. In the absence of this quality his task had never been done. On the other ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... anxious, facing privation here in Richmond with the knowledge that things were going badly at home, sitting long hours in Congress, in the Hall of Delegates, in courts or offices, struggling there with Herculean difficulties, rising to go out and listen to telegrams or to read bulletins. Sons, brothers, kinsmen, and friends ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... on this volume, cannot fail to bring to mind the nurse-tales of his childhood—the savage deeds of the outlaw Doones in the depth of Bagworthy Forest, the beauty of the hapless maid brought up in the midst of them, the plain John Ridd's Herculean power, and (memory's too congenial food) the exploits ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... is said to have been so deeply impressed by the young man's kindness that he heeded the temperance lecture and never again risked his life as he had done that night. When the old man told John Hanks of Abe's Herculean effort ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... of women—how Tommy had fought for it since first he drank of them in Pym's sparkling pages! To some it seems to be easy, but to him it was a labour of Sisyphus. Everything had been against him. But he concentrated. No labour was too Herculean; he was prepared, if necessary, to walk round the world to get to the other side of the wall across which some men can step. And he did take a roundabout way. It is my opinion, for instance, that he wrote his book in order to make a ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... of gout were beginning to tell upon that herculean form, sapping and undermining it; and in 1865, while playing Damon at the Holiday Street Theatre, in Baltimore, the weather being very cold and the theatre open to draughts, he was seized with a sudden ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... his associates, to which was added their sympathy, caused by his physical condition. Possessed of an extraordinary physique and an iron constitution, he gradually lost the use of his lower limbs without a murmur, and after he was hopelessly crippled he moved about on his canes with a herculean effort. He spoke with great power, his penetrating eyes flashing with patriotism as he plead the cause of the emancipated, or flashing with anger as with withering denunciation and sarcasm he denounced their oppressors. His mind was especially ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... of poultry their own. Many of their interiors are far neater and cleaner than those of the farm-houses, their occupants not being so tied to the soil from morning to night, not, in fact, incited to Herculean labours by the spur of larger possession. We visited one of the poorest villages hereabouts, of not quite a hundred souls, but of course, provided with church, school and Mairie. Many a group of potato diggers we saw ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, and made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian novel—moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions, and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of Chuzzlewit, Pendennis, and Middlemarch. But they received the legacy in a totally different spirit. Mark Rutherford, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the movement, and his exertions to defeat its object became, considering the loss of blood he had sustained from his wounds, almost Herculean. He now stood on the extreme verge of the precipice, where he paused for a moment as if utterly exhausted with his previous efforts. De Courcy was now within a few feet of his unhappy friend, who still struggled ineffectually to free ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... no finer or braver men in the room than Jackson and Jem Belcher, the one with his magnificent figure, his small waist and Herculean shoulders; the other as graceful as an old Grecian statue, with a head whose beauty many a sculptor had wished to copy, and with those long, delicate lines in shoulder and loins and limbs, which gave him the litheness and ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lifted it one inch off his head, and replaced it, desiring the marine officer to dismiss the guard. I had now an opportunity, as he paced to and fro with the first lieutenant, to examine his appearance. He was a tall, very large-boned, gaunt man, with an enormous breadth of shoulders, displaying Herculean strength (and this we found he eminently possessed). His face was of a size corresponding to his large frame; his features were harsh, his eye piercing, but his nose, although bold, was handsome, and his capacious mouth was furnished with the most splendid row of large teeth that I ever ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... I were soon dressed in these diving suits, as were Captain Nemo and one of his companions—a herculean type who must have been prodigiously strong. All that remained was to encase one's head in its metal sphere. But before proceeding with this operation, I asked the captain for permission to examine the rifles ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... that he must die. He was accordingly led out to execution, but without any of the ordinary accompaniments of torture. His hands were bound behind him, he was laid upon the ground, and his head was placed upon a stone. An Indian warrior of herculean strength stood by, with a massive club, to give the death blow by crushing in the skull. Just as the fatal stroke was about to descend, a beautiful Indian girl, Pocahontas, the daughter of the king, rushed forward and throwing ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... thought over it, and then decided that Charles must give up smoking. She had discussed the matter with her favourite sister, and that was the only thing the girls could think of. Charles's face fell. He suggested some more Herculean labour, some sacrifice more worthy to lay at Mivanway's feet. But Mivanway had spoken. She might think of some other task, but the smoking prohibition would, in any case, remain. She dismissed the subject with a pretty hauteur that ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... it's like this—as far as I'm concerned, I'd just put a postage-stamp on you and ship you off by yourselves—I'd know you'd turn up all right of yourselves at the other end! That's me; but of course, we has to foller the regulations; so there you are!" And the ruddy youngster stretched his herculean limbs and grinned, as who should say, "Cuffs! Hell! What d'yer know about that? Ain't I ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... that ought to have mown down every blade of halfa-grass near. But Maxwell's men seemed not quite to get the range. The flag and flagstaff were riddled with bullet holes, and the dead were being piled around. Still, dervish after dervish sprang to uphold the black banner of Mahdism. A herculean black grasped the staff in one hand, and leaned negligently against it for what appeared to be the space of five or ten minutes,—probably less than one minute,—ere the soldiers managed to give him his final quietus. ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... with mighty exultation; my brain seemed to swim in a sea of delight. I laughed with mad glee to think of the superb vengeance I was about to wreak on my enemies; then I raised the corpse of Lagrange with Herculean strength, thrust it into the cask, and pressed it into the smallest possible compass; but found to my inexpressible chagrin, that it would be absolutely impossible to re-adjust the head of the cask, unless the body was in some ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... daring and almost insolent recklessness pervading every movement of this man; and it was difficult to say whether the haughtiness of bearing peculiar to Ponteac himself, was not exceeded by that of this herculean warrior. ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... became general. The Indians attacked furiously, and for a few moments those five men bore the brunt of the assault. With his own hand Robert Edmiston slew six of the more forward of the enemy, Morrison nearly as many, and then Moore became engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand fight with an herculean chieftain of the Cherokees. They were a few paces in advance of the main body, and, as if by common consent, the firing was partly suspended on both sides to await the issue of the conflict. "Moore had shot the chief, wounding him in the knee, but not so badly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... absolutely new silk hat—for it was Friday, and Mr Levi purchased a new hat every Friday of his life, holiday times only excepted. He breathed heavily and sniffed through his nose a good deal, as though he had just performed some Herculean physical labour. He glanced at the American millionaire with an expression in which a slight embarrassment might have been detected, but at the same time his round, red face disclosed a certain frank ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... dissimilar, discordant, suspicious, antipathetic racial elements and blend them into unity and brotherhood. The first Christians had a task of this nature on their hands; they had to bring together in one fellowship Jews and Gentiles. But that was a pastime compared with the herculean labor intrusted to us,—the bringing together of whites and blacks, of Caucasians and Mongolians, of scores of groups divided by the barriers of language, of religion, of custom, and fusing them into one nationality. No task of the same dimensions ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... Persica, supposed to be the oldest of the sisterhood, holds the book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of sight, which fact, contradicted as it is by a frame of obviously Herculean strength, gives a mysterious intentness to ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Elector. "You have now read the outlines of my Herculean task, you now know who I am. A Prince of long titles, not one of which has its foundation in truth and reality. And this is my Herculean task, to make these titles real, and to give a good kernel to these empty nut ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... into amazement when he thought of the Herculean labors those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted, the children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had worn out, the mountains of food they had ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... river; Straight and swift is her flight o'er the meads, but she hardly outstrips the canoemen. See! the voyageurs bend to their oars till the blue veins swell out on their foreheads; And the sweat from their brawny breasts pours; but in vain their Herculean labor; For the oars of Tamdoka are ten, and but six are the oars of the Frenchmen, And the red warriors' burden of men is matched by the voyageur's luggage. Side by side, neck and neck, for a mile, still they strain their strong arms to the utmost, Till rounding a willowy isle, now ahead ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... futurity! A single drop in the boundless deep of eternity! Oh Time! thou greatest of all anomalies! Friend yet foe, "preserver and yet destroyer!" Whence art thou, great immemorial? When shall thy wondrous mechanism be dissolved? When shall the "pall of obscurity" descend on thy Herculean net-work? Voices of the past echo through thy deserted temples, and shriek along ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... nicely—well, she was lying face downwards on a rock and gazing into a little pool which the tide had forgotten about and left behind. I sat beside her and annoyed a limpet. Three minutes ago I had taken it suddenly by surprise and with an Herculean effort moved it an eighteenth of a millimetre westwards. My silence since then was lulling it into a false security, and in another two minutes I hoped to get a move ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... his neighbour, pointing to a frame shanty on the shore, which did not look to me like the abode of that amphibious and carnivorous creature. "Well, old alligator, what's the time o' day?" asked another man, bringing down a brawny paw, with a resounding thump, upon the Herculean shoulders of the first querist, thereby giving me the information that in the West alligator is a designation of the genus homo; in fact, that it is customary for a man to address his fellow-man as "old ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... specimen of an Arab that I have ever seen. Although upwards of eighty years of age, he was as erect as a lance, and did not appear more than between fifty and sixty; he was of Herculean stature, about six feet three inches high, with immensely broad shoulders and chest; a remarkably arched nose; eyes like an eagle, beneath large, shaggy, but perfectly white eyebrows; a snow-white beard of great thickness descended below the middle of his breast. He wore a large white turban, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... perhaps cross the continent from New York to San Francisco without meeting a single one of the original denizens of mountain, vale, prairie, or table land. Great thanks are due to M. Bierstadt for the almost herculean labors he must have undergone in presenting to us these living fossils. Keeping them in a good humor must have been one of his most serious tasks, as they doubtless encountered many contrarieties calculated to chafe hot blood and annoy ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... crowd; however, the bold and well-concerted efforts of the poet were crowned with success: his piece gained the prize. He was proud of this feat of theatrical heroism, and often alludes with a feeling of satisfaction to the Herculean valour with which he first combated the mighty monster. No one of his plays, perhaps, is more historical and political; and its rhetorical power in exciting our indignation is almost irresistible: it is a true dramatic Philippic. However, in point ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of these Herculean Efforts to vaporize his Income, he found himself at the age of 40 afflicted with Social Gastritis. He had gorged himself with the Pleasures of this World until the sight of a Menu Card gave him the Willies and the mere mention of Musical Comedy would cause him to break ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an incapable in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to maintain such a position—to keep the bailiffs from the door from year's end to year's end—was a truly Herculean task in days when a newspaper "rate" of remuneration or a well-wearing copyright did not so much as exist, and when Reviews sweated their writers at the rate of a guinea per sheet of thirty-two pages. Smollett was continually ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... to light one of his Herculean cigars, employing his hat as a wind-shield, and rapidly continued: "It's very curious and strange, and all that, but there it is. A month or so ago the Gazette announced that Stanhope was coming back to Hunston. Last night you were seen on the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... chalky-white, Of Phaestus, of Miletus, with the youth Of Rhytius him obey'd; nor these were all, But others from her hundred cities Crete 795 Sent forth, all whom Idomeneus the brave Commanded, with Meriones in arms Dread as the God of battles blood-imbrued. Nine ships Tlepolemus, Herculean-born, For courage famed and for superior size, 800 Fill'd with his haughty Rhodians. They, in tribes Divided, dwelt distinct. Jelyssus these, Those Lindus, and the rest the shining soil Of white Camirus occupied. Him bore To Hercules, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... however, that the Science of Society shall be, at some time in the future, completed, and in such form as shall give to the world the fruits of Professor Sumner's intellectual power, clarity of vision, and truly herculean industry. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Quadrangle, as a matter of mystery and defiance. And there were other like exploits; as the immersion of that leaden Mercury into its own pond; and town and gown rows, wherein I remember to have seen the herculean Lord Hillsborough on one side of High Street, and Peard (afterwards Garibaldi's Englishman) on the other, clear away the crowd of roughs with their fists, scattering them like duplicates ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... at dusk on Wednesday evening, Tom and I took leave of her in the hall, she was trembling like a person with a chill. Her eyes glowed upon us beseechingly, as if she implored our Herculean endeavours in the ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... his dead. And as the second Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were yet alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of which his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills, which had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of sixty-seven the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous Borgia's poison had undermined his system. For ten whole years he had supported his wife, and now he inherited nothing! ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... stoop to a narrow balcony running along the front windows of the first story, had smashed the glass into splinters with a heavy object which he had carried concealed under his coat, and was engaged in a herculean effort to wrench apart some iron bars which had been carefully concealed ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... sixty years subsequent to Chaucer, were not so modern in their language as their celebrated predecessor. Having, in few words, prove'd (it is presume'd) this Sonnet to be spurious, an apology may be thought necessary for not saying a great deal more;—but this Herculean task is left, in deference, to the disputants on Vortigern; who will, doubtless, engage in it, as a matter of great importance, and, once more, lay the world under very heavy obligations, with various Pamphlets in folio, upon the ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... fires are not lit, if the will to live ceases,—that will which we maintain resolutely and without pause, and which enables us to perform the tasks which otherwise would fill us with dismay, as, for instance, the momently drawing in and giving out of the breath. Such herculean efforts as this we carry on without complaint, and indeed with pleasure, in order that we may exist in the ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... it was you, Dutocq!" [Dutocq made a vehement gesture of denial.] "Oh! very good, then it was nobody. Every one in this office knew his intellect was herculean. Well, you were right. He ended, as I have said, like the great ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... out on their backs below the bridge. As soon as they had closed their eyes they seemed dead. Three others, however, were quarrelling barbarously away forward; and one big fellow, half naked, with herculean shoulders, was hanging limply over a winch; another, sitting on the deck, his knees up and his head drooping sideways in a girlish attitude, was plaiting his pigtail with infinite languor depicted in his whole person and in the very ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... yet too recent to allow of such exertion. D'Artagnan remained, therefore, alone; and as he declared he was too ignorant of the game to play it regularly they only continued giving balls to one another without counting. But one of these balls, launched by Porthos' herculean hand, passed so close to d'Artagnan's face that he thought that if, instead of passing near, it had hit him, his audience would have been probably lost, as it would have been impossible for him to present himself before the king. Now, as upon this audience, in his Gascon imagination, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... out of a crater. "A moi, a moi!" was the cry, from old men, young women, soldiers, shopkeepers, and pretres, scuffling and shoving together. Careless at once of grammar and of grace, I pulled and shouted with the best, till at length our plunder was caught, corded and poised on an herculean neck. We followed in the wake, H. trembling lest the cord should break, and we experience a pre-Alpine avalanche. At length, however, we breathed more freely in rooms au quatrieme of Hotel ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fact, a Herculean task to perform—a double task—viz., to amalgamate two nations, and also to fuse and merge two languages into one. He was absolutely compelled, by the circumstances under which he was placed, to grapple with both ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... is subject to occasional outbreaks of dissipation. They don't last long, and they seem to leave not the faintest impression upon his herculean constitution; but of course that sort of thing does more or less injury to a man's mind, however comparatively harmless the form of his dissipation may be. There are very few men whom John Saltram cannot drink under the table, and rise ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... teeth were of a brilliancy uncommon even amongst these people, who have all fine teeth. He was dressed in a coarse waggoner's slop, which, however, was unable to conceal altogether the proportions of his noble and Herculean figure. He might be about twenty-eight. His companion and his captain, Gypsy Will, was, I think, fifty when he was hanged, ten years subsequently (for I never afterwards lost sight of him), in the front of the jail of Bury St. Edmunds. I have still present ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... Potato Famine with anything like complete success, would have been a Herculean task for any government. The total failure of the food of a nation was, as Mr. Monsell said, a fact new in history; such being the case, no machinery existed extensive enough to neutralize its effects, nor was there extant any plan upon which such machinery could be modelled. Great allowance ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... to him on his first visit to the office by Mr. Secretary Oldeschole, that the Internal Navigation was a place of herculean labours, had long before this time become matter to him of delightful ridicule. He had found himself to be one of six young men, who habitually spent about five hours a day together in the same room, and whose chief employment was ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... scarcely passed his lips, when he was stretched at his full length upon the ground. Nor did Glanville stop there. With all the strength of his nervous and Herculean frame, fully requited for the debility of disease by the fury of the moment, he seized the gamester as if he had been an infant, and dragged him to the door: the next moment I heard his heavy frame rolling down the stairs with no ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the others, aiming their muskets at him. Three shots were fired. The brave Prussian still kept the saddle, but his hand dropped the bridle, and the horse stood still. The Dutch chasseurs surrounded and cut him. He lay helpless on the ground—that herculean man. He was still alive; his eyes, that had so beamed with courage, cast their last glance toward heaven, and his lips, that smiled so sweetly, murmured, "Tod du suesser fuer das Vaterland!" A powerful sabre-stroke at last ended his life. His enemies despoiled his body, tearing off ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... silently held out his hand for the other file, and Jim selected a fellow of herculean proportions to take first turn with him. In a few seconds the low rasping sound of the rapidly moving files broke the stillness of the night, and seemed preternaturally loud by comparison with ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... years the robust constitution and herculean frame of Agassiz showed the effects of his extraordinary and multifarious labors, for it must be confessed that he was not careful of his bodily welfare. In the year 1869 he suffered a temporary breakdown of a very threatening sort, and for months was in seclusion, ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... that of Herbert Glendinning, as Sir Walter Scott has depicted it in "The Monastery"; his stature was above six feet; full of grace and easy movement, he yet seemed gifted with herculean strength; a face embrowned by the sun; eyes keen and black; a natural air of daring courage; in fine, something sound, solid, and reliable in his entire person, spoke, at first glance, in ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... trap to drive him to the halting station, situated at the farther end of the village, but Nekhludoff preferred to walk. A young labourer, a broad-shouldered young fellow of herculean dimensions, with enormous top-boots freshly blackened with strongly smelling tar, offered himself ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... piper calls the tune," and in this I am not only speaking literally of shekels of gold and silver, but of the power incorporated in certain personalities; and man, if he chose to exert it, has always force majeure at his command in the last extremity, although in these days of Herculean young women he may lose even ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... moment and that when death called to us out of the night, I have the haziest recollections. An excellent dinner was served in the bleak and gloomy dining-room by the mulatto, and the crippled author was carried to the head of the table by this same Herculean attendant, as lightly as though he had but ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... falling body. He entered quickly; and Simon, who had gone to bed, distinguished the sound of a kiss and some words that his mother murmured softly. Then, all at once, he found himself lifted up by the hands of his friend, who, holding him at the length of his herculean ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... who does not aim, in some degree, at the same species of excellence. But let us not ungratefully undervalue that beautiful style, which has pleasingly conveyed to us much instruction and entertainment. Though comparatively weak, opposed to Johnson's Herculean vigour, let us not call it positively feeble. Let us remember the character of his style, as given by Johnson himself[662]: 'What he attempted, he performed; he is never feeble, and he did not wish to be energetick; he is never rapid, and he never stagnates. His sentences have neither ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... fine feelings will not allow him to accept an extra "tip," is, you may be sure, a humbug. I never believed in such a one. Labor can always command its price, and what so laborious in this age as to be honest? What so difficult as to keep silence on other people's affairs? Such herculean tasks deserve payment! A valet who is generously bribed, in addition to his wages, can be relied on; if underpaid, all heaven and earth will not persuade him to hold his tongue. Left alone at last in my sleeping chamber, I remained for some time before actually going to bed. I took off the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... enormous hind-quarters, the limbs and the loins, the broad pelvis and thick spinal cord, supplying abundant nervous energy to the swelling muscles inserted in the ridged and keeled bones, all come into play as a point d'appui for the Herculean effort." ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... meditate, knowing that all their researches but go to prove the fact that apart from all creed and all forms of creed, Crime carries Punishment as surely as the seed is born with the flower,—thinkers who are fully aware that not all the forces of all mankind, working with herculean insistence to support a Lie, can drive back the storm-cloud of the wrath of that "Unknown Quantity" called God, whose thunders do most terribly declare the truth "with power and great glory." "How long O Lord, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... saw a laborer chopping the branches off a poplar-tree which he had felled; and, when it was trimmed, he took up the large trunk on one of his shoulders and carried it off, seemingly with ease. He did not look like a particularly robust man; but I have never seen such an herculean feat attempted by an Englishman or American. It has frequently struck me that the Italians are able to put forth a great deal of strength in such insulated efforts as this; but I have been told that they are less capable of continued endurance and hardship than ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... when first this thunderclap of an intuition deafened her, and still reeling from the shock, she remembered that it was almost certainly Mrs. Poppit who was the cause of Mr. Wyse writing her that exquisitely delicate note with regard to Thursday. It was a herculean task, no doubt, to plug up all the fountains of talk in Tilling which were spouting so merrily at her expense, but a beginning must be made before she could arrive at the end. A short scurry of nimble steps brought ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... change—change, if not of scene, at least of occupation. Scarcely to be wondered at, Brooks thought to himself, with a faint smile, when he thought of the last twelve months, full to the brim of strenuous labour, of ceaseless striving within a herculean task. Well, he was in smoother waters now. He might withdraw his hand for a while, if necessary. He had gone his way, and held his own so far against all manner of onslaught. Just then he heard himself called ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the health of Mr. Pease began to fail under his herculean labors. He had carried his enterprise to a successful issue, however. He had done good to thousands, and had won friends for the institution, who were resolved, and possessed of the means, to carry it on. A Society was incorporated for the conduct of the Mission, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of dispatch increased with each succeeding train, until when it came to entraining reluctant horses and still more reluctant mules practically in the dark, for there was no other light but the dim glimmer of two candle-lamps, the task became herculean, and required an infinity of patience and tact. The General and his staff having gone by the first excursion, the task of bringing along the remainder of the column devolved on Colonel Hicks, with Captain Fetherstonhaugh as his staff officer. They ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... Rannage in such a parish as Rixton, living on a small salary, and trying to keep the Church life strong and healthy, at the same time combating the opposing influence of the Stubbles. And suppose he succeeded, by doing an herculean work, would he be rewarded in the same manner as if he were rector of St. Margaret's? He smiled grimly at the mere suggestion of the idea. Whoever heard of a poor country parson being singled out for such an honor, no matter how much he ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds lashed together, and all the dogs in a single team. It was awkward, and where the going was bad he was compelled to back-trip it sled by sled, though he managed most of the time, through herculean efforts, to bring all along on the one haul. He did not seem moved when the captain of police told him his man was hitting the high places for Dawson, and was by that time, probably, half-way between Selkirk and Stewart. Nor did he appear interested when informed that the police had broken ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... boat's crew dashed aboard the Leonora and took possession. The officer in command had a surprise in store for him, when, entering the brig's cabin, he saw seated at the table not the truculent, piratical ruffian he expected to see, but a quiet, stout man of herculean proportions, who bowed politely and said, "Welcome on board the Leonora, sir. Have you come to seize my ship and myself? Well now, don't apologise, but sit down a while until my steward brings you a glass of wine, and then ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... present to the craft an encyclopedia of jurisprudence, in which every question that can possibly arise, in the transactions of a Lodge, is decided with an especial reference to its particular circumstances. Were the accomplishment of such an herculean task possible, except after years of intense and unremitting labor, the unwieldy size of the book produced, and the heterogeneous nature of its contents, so far from inviting, would rather tend to distract ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
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