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More "Prodigious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... service, the mysteries of the dual existence, her new responsibilities,—they all seemed non-existent. Paul said approvingly that Madeleine knew how to get along with less fuss than any woman he ever saw. Her breezy high spirits were much admired in Endbury, and her good humor and prodigious satisfaction with life ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Abershaw's life shall appear before the public—and my publisher credibly informs me that it has not yet appeared—I beg and entreat the public to state which it likes best, the life of Abershaw, or that of Sell, for which latter work I am informed that during the last few months there has been a prodigious demand. My old friend, however, after talking of Abershaw, would frequently add that, good rider as Abershaw certainly was, he was decidedly inferior to Richard Ferguson, generally called Galloping Dick, who was a pal of Abershaw's, and had enjoyed a career as long, and nearly ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... it may, the chances were that the tarag alone would profit by the law of the arena. A few more of his long strides, a prodigious leap, and he would be upon the girl. I raised a revolver and fired. The bullet struck him in the left hind leg. It couldn't have damaged him much; but the report of the shot brought him around, ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at first reluctant to burthen himself with the bringing up of a child, who, from his foreign language and habits, could be of little use to him in his avocations; but I promised to teach him English, and all other learning of which he stood most in need, and assured my father, that in a prodigious short time I would make him a much abler assistant than he was likely to find among ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... ARTHUR had quite a time with him last night. He was, so to speak, the Boy left on the Burning Deck whence all but he Had Fled. Right Hon. Gentlemen on Front Opposition Bench, following example set in other parts of House, cleared out when ASHMEAD appeared at table with prodigious roll of manuscript in red right hand. PRINCE ARTHUR looked wistfully towards door, but, remembering leading precept of OLD MORALITY, determined to stay, and do duty to QUEEN and Country. So sat it out till midnight struck; Debate automatically closed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... tutor to Harry Bertram, son of the laird of Ellangowan. One of the best creations of romance. His favorite exclamation is "Prodigious!" Dominie Sampson is very learned, simple and green. Sir Walter describes him as "a poor, modest, humble scholar, who had won his way through the classics, but fallen to the leeward in the voyage of life."—Sir W. Scott, Guy Mannering (time, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... principles of the Reformation. Thus, by degrees, credit came to intervene in nearly every operation of commerce and of social exchange, from the small daily dealings of the mechanic at the shop, to the larger wholesale transactions of merchant with merchant, and to the prodigious expenditures and debts of imperial governments. Credit by note of hand, credit by book account, credit by mortgages and hypothecations, credit by bills of exchange, credit by certificates of stock, credit by bank-notes and post-notes, credit by exchequer and treasury drafts, credit, in short, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... and halls to keep them dry, and protect the young broods in the nests beneath them. One body of workers was employed in bringing the leaves which they cast down on the hillock, while another placed them so as to form the roof, covering them with a layer of earth brought up in single grains with prodigious labour from the soil below. There appeared to be three different classes of workers—some employed entirely below, others acting as masons or tilers, and others entirely engaged in bringing the materials from a distance. There were, besides, soldiers armed with powerful ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... the muscles. The affected were sometimes deaf, sometimes dumb, sometimes blind. Oftentimes, they were at once deaf, dumb, and blind. Their tongues were drawn down their throats, and then pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. Their mouths were forced open to such a wideness, that their jaws went out of joint, only to clap again together, with a force like that of a spring lock. Shoulder-blades, elbows, wrists, and knees were similarly affected. Sometimes the sufferer was ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... which that unnatural abomination is now extending its withering influence, is high treason against God and mankind. If American citizens and British Christians, after the appalling developments which have been made, permit the continuance of that prodigious wickedness which is inseparable from nunneries and the celibacy of popish priests, they will ere long experience that divine castigation which is justly due to transgressors, who wilfully trample upon all ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... rest of us spooks?" said Sir Wilfrid, smiling, as he seated himself beside his hostess. Montresor, whose information on most subjects was prodigious, laughed and adjusted his eye-glass. These battles royal on a date or a point of fact between him and Lady Henry were not uncommon. Lady Henry was rarely victorious. This time, however, she was confident, and she sat frowning and impatient for the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... turn in the rather bewildering labyrinth of arches and passages in the cathedral walls, and it was not without a feeling of relief that we reached the door we had so carefully locked behind us. We returned the key to the caretaker, and then went to our hotel, where we loaded ourselves with a prodigious breakfast, and afterwards proceeded to walk across the Mainland of the Orkneys, an ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... had killed her child, out of her life, but she had succeeded in saying to God, "Thy will be done!" She had said it at first as a mere formula, had repeated it obstinately again and again, without meaning it at all, but trying to mean it, meaning to mean it. She had made a prodigious, a truly heroic effort to conquer her powerfully rebellious nature, and, in this effort, she had been helped by Father Robertson. He knew of the anger which had overwhelmed her when her mother had died, of how she had wished to hurt God. He knew that, with bloody sweat, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... were fulfilled, the Dukes could not have been more surprised if Moses and the Prophets had dropt from the clouds to chide their unbelief. They made what amends they could for their former incivilities. They gathered with prodigious hum about the great man, overwhelmed him with disinterested plaudits, and settled down comfortably to the feast which his genius had spread. From that moment, so we are assured, decay set in. Aristocratic patronage soon ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... OR CARRICK. A large ship of burden, the same with those called galleons. Hippus, the Tyrian, is said to have first devised caracks, and onerary vessels of prodigious bulk for traffic ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... spectacle was presented wherever the eye turned. As in almost all other gatherings of the kind, the fair sex were greatly in the majority; and during the interval which elapsed between the opening of the doors and the beginning of business, the clatter of female tongues was prodigious. The sex generally are voluble when in crowds; but as for Welsh women, their loquacity was far beyond anything of the kind I had ever conceived of. And there were some wonderfully handsome specimens of girlhood, womanhood, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... six years in this literary tour, so he was occupied for a no less period of time in digesting and arranging the prodigious number of MSS. he had collected. But he sunk beneath the immensity of the task! The want of amanuenses, and of other attentions and comforts, seems to have deeply affected him; in this melancholy state, he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer a Latin epistle, in verse, of which the following ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... represented as a kind of rude justice, to which the people were driven in the long ages of misrule during which law was in abeyance or corruptly administered. There is, no doubt, much truth in this as applied to those times; but the prodigious amount of human slaughter shown in the statistics just quoted, as well as the continuance of this atrocious system to the present day, long after the slightest shadow of any pretence of legal injustice has vanished, seem to argue that the ferocity which has shed such rivers ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... or six. 'They looked,' he says, 'from outside exactly like a vast congeries of large, high carpenter's shops, with roofs of glaring red tiles, and surrounded by wooden palisades, very lofty and of prodigious strength.' ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... between the two Governments were perfectly friendly and satisfactory. The effect of the debate, reported Adams, was to quiet the panic[1282], yet at the same time England was now awake to and somewhat alarmed by, America's "prodigious development of physical power during the war." To quiet this, Adams recommended "prudence and moderation ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... construct a novel out of the impressions that Tolstoy pours forth from his prodigious hands? This is a kind of "creative reading" (the phrase is Emerson's) which comes instinctively to few of us. We know how to imagine a landscape or a conversation when he describes it, but to gather up all these sights and sounds into a compact fabric, round which the mind can ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... will be signed to-morrow. You can consider yourself decorated. I hope you feel a happy man," said the millionaire, rubbing his fat hands together with prodigious satisfaction. ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... to the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it, 'Cast thy eyes eastward,' said he, 'and tell me what thou seest.' 'I see,' said I, 'a huge valley, and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.' 'The valley that thou seest,' said he, 'is the Vale of Misery, and the Tide of Water that thou seest is part of the great Tide of Eternity,' 'What is the reason,' said I, 'that the tide I see rises out of a thick mist at one end, and again loses itself in ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... sight they made a prodigious clattering in their speech and held their arms over their heads. They spoke so quick that I could not catch one single word they uttered. We recollected one man whom we had formerly seen among the party of the natives that came to us in 1777, ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... in circumference than our little Earth. Nothing in nature is simpler or more orderly. The sovereign states of Germany or Italy, which one can traverse in a half hour, compared to the empires of Turkey, Moscow, or China, are only feeble reflections of the prodigious differences that nature has ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... most prolific of the ancient Greek writers. Diogenes calls him "a most voluminous writer," and estimates the number of works composed by him at no less than three hundred, the principal of which he enumerates.[764] But out of all this prodigious collection, not a single book has reached us in a complete, or at least an independent form. Three letters, which contain some outlines of his philosophy, are preserved by Diogenes, who has also embodied his "Fundamental ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... seen him but myself. I have faithfully followed your orders, and kept him like a rat in a trap. He takes to eating and sleeping prodigious kindly, and has shown no disposition to do any ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... of genius, the Scotchman John Law, had undertaken, with the eager support of the Regent Duke of Orleans, to deliver France from financial ruin through a prodigious system of credit, of which Louisiana, with its imaginary gold mines, was made the basis. The government used every means to keep up the stock of the Mississippi Company. It was ordered that the notes of the royal ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... by several disjointed scraps of Celtic verse, that in the times of old, when Fionn Mac Cumhaill, popularly styled Finn Mac Cool, wielded the sceptre of power and justice, we possessed a prodigious and courageous dog, used for hunting the deer and wild boar, and also the wolf, which ravaged the folds and slaughtered the herds of our ancestors. We learn from the same source that these dogs were also frequently employed as auxiliaries in war, and that they were 'mighty in combat, their ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... different habits to conform to or revolt against: people whose parents were nurtured in the sweated atmosphere of factories before the Factory Acts, and whose sons will be the people of 1913. He shows us a whole generation of persons who, living through these prodigious changes and being asked what has happened, reply, "Oh, nothing particular." But though the score of people in the Potteries with whom we are concerned are but individually selected from the swarm that is provincial England, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... of teams and men, the clergyman felt that he might reasonably calculate on a supply of corn and wheat, to which crops the ground had been devoted. And nowhere was there promise of a larger yield than on that quick and productive river bottom. The corn grew to a prodigious height, crowded with mammoth ears, and the wheat emulated the corn; while the squash and pumpkin vines conducted as if on a race to see which would beat in the number and size of their fruit; and Mr. Payson's pet sorghum—a ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... Lamarck attentively, and I had read the Vestiges with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing my negative and critical attitude. As for the Vestiges, I confess that the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all, it set me against evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery is one I wrote on the Vestiges while under ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... to a standstill before the door of the Whitmansworth Union. Jim, with a prodigious sigh, prepared to descend. The glorious adventure was over. Also he prepared to slip away to a more lowly entrance, but was ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law here to-day is not law even here to-morrow; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's. The old ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the enemy on the run, and broke through to Victory. It was in that last phase of open warfare that Rawlinson showed his qualities of generalship and once again that driving purpose which was his in the Somme battles, but achieved only by prodigious cost of life. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... before the fire, and singing to herself. Such a blithe, thriving, steady little Dot! The fairy figures turned upon him all at once, by one consent, with one prodigious concentrated stare, and seemed to say, 'Is this the light wife you ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... clambered 'round it cautiously, and, on the further side, came upon a mass of fallen stones and rubble. The ruin itself seemed to me, as I proceeded now to examine it minutely, to be a portion of the outer wall of some prodigious structure, it was so thick and substantially built; yet what it was doing in such a position I could by no means conjecture. Where was the rest of the house, or castle, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... added their father, "gives way continually under the bird's wing; and yet they have to pull themselves up by it. And this is very hard. They must either have very large wings, and prodigious strength to use them, so as to pull upon the air with very hard and heavy strokes, or else, if they have small wings, they must have strength to strike very quick and ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... here now, except in time of freshets, or during the spring and fall rains; and there was such a prodigious tangle of alder, willow, clematis and other vines that for years no one had penetrated it. From a fisherman's point of view there seemed no inducement to do so, since this secondary channel appeared to be dry for ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... introduce a couple of friends.—Mr. Dodge, Mr. John Effingham, Miss Effingham, Miss Van Cortlandt. I hope you may succeed in getting him a little to yourselves, ladies, for he can tell you all about Europe—saw the king of France riding out to Nully, and has a prodigious knowledge of things on the other ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Great Spy-Glass, I saw that there moved across the Land, from the direction of the Plain of Blue Fire, a mighty Hump, seeming of Black Mist, and came with prodigious swiftness. And I called to the Master Monstruwacan, that he come and look through one of the eye-pieces that were about the Great Spy-Glass; and he came quickly, and when he had looked a while, he called to the Monstruwacan ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... where the high quotations were entirely due to the competition of a so-called interloper, who bade, as he thought, on the judgment of the room, and was signally handicapped. Again, something has ere now been carried to a prodigious figure owing to an unlimited commission inadvertently given to two agents. The old Duke of Wellington once gave L105 in this way for a shilling pamphlet, and even then the bidding was only stopped by arrangement. However, of all the miraculous surprises, the most signal on record was one ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... appears to be a compact rock, exceedingly hard and ragged; but as the tide rises, and the waves begin to wash over it, the coral worms protrude themselves from holes which were before invisible. These animals are of a great variety of shapes and sizes, and in such prodigious numbers, that, in a short time, the whole surface of the rock appears to be alive and in motion. The most common worm is in the form of a star, with arms from four to six inches long, which are moved about with a rapid motion in all directions, probably to catch food. Others are so ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... spread That war and various; sometimes on firm ground A standing fight, then, soaring on main wing, Tormented all the air; all air seemed then Conflicting fire. Long time in even scale The battle hung; till Satan, who that day Prodigious power had shown, and met in arms No equal, ranging through the dire attack Of fighting Seraphim confused, at length Saw where the sword of Michael smote, and felled Squadrons at once; with huge two-handed sway Brandished aloft, the horrid edge came down Wide-wasting; ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... Tretherick with an embarrassed voice and a prodigious blush, looking down, and addressing the fiery curls just visible in the folds of her dress—"do you think you will be 'dood' if I let you stay in ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... two and three pounds had been scraped out of the rectum. Cases are reported by Dr. Graves of Dublin, which he saw in women, where from the great distentions in certain directions of the abdomen, the one was considered to be owing to a prodigious hypertrophy of the liver, and the other of the ovary; in the latter of which he removed a bucket-full of feces in two days. Mr. Wilmot of London has recently given a case where a gallon of matter was lodged in the caecum, and ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... on Tuesday night, August the 6th, he had felt the grittiness in his mouth again, and that the burning and pricking in his tongue, throat, stomach, and bowels had returned with double violence, and had been aggravated by a prodigious swelling of his belly, and exquisite pains and prickings in every external as well as internal part of his body, which prickings he compared to an infinite number of needles darting into ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... of their panic, we (being by this time heartily sick of our venture, which at the best gave us but beggarly recompense) set about to retrace our steps with cheerful expectations of better times. But coming to Oxford, we there learned that a prodigious fire had burnt all London down, from the Tower to Ludgate, so that if we were there, we should find no house to play in. This lay us flat in our hopes, and set us again to our vagabond enterprise; and so for six months more ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... how the smallest incident, the most unimportant circumstance, will recall old friends and old associations. An old gentleman, who is noted far and near for his prodigious memory of dates and events, once told me that his memory, so astonishing to his friends and acquaintances, consisted not so much in remembering names and dates and facts, as in associating each of these with some special group of facts and events; so that he always had at command ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... Redriffe, and so home, and there came Mr. Creed and Shepley to me, and staid till night about my Lord's accounts, our proceeding to set them in order, and so parted and I to bed. Mr. Holliard had been with my wife to-day, and cured her of her pain in her ear by taking out a most prodigious quantity of hard wax that had hardened itself in the bottom of the ear, of which I am ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of playing "The Beggar's Opera" with "the characters reversed," as it was called; that is to say, the female characters were assumed by the actors, the male by the actresses. This was at the Haymarket Theatre, under George Colman's management. The foolish proceeding won prodigious applause. A prologue or preliminary act in three scenes was written for the occasion. The fun of this introduction seems now gross and flat enough. Towards the conclusion of it, we read, a stage-carpenter ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... immensity of space, puts forward his view thus: "If advancing with the velocity of light we could traverse from century to century the unlimited number of suns and spheres without ever meeting any limit to the prodigious immensity where God brings forth his worlds, and looking behind, knowing not in what part of the infinite was the little grain of dust called the earth, we would be compelled to unite our voices with that universal nature and exclaim—'Almighty God, how senseless ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... tortured soul toiled sturdily on through the anguish of its self-created hells, the mind crazed and shattered, the heart hungry for peace, the will resolute that it should have no peace until it found peace in truth. Yet, our of this prodigious mental and moral anarchy, with its devil's dance of dogmas and delusions, the young Luther organized, before he was thirty, the broadest, raciest, and strongest character that ever put on the armor and hurled the bolts of the Church ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... staring. Here, you will say, is a prodigious quantity of theory to our halfpenny-worth of police novel; and withal not a shadow of an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on myself to pass over this subject without paying my humble tribute to the memory of Sir W. Jones, who has laboured so successfully in Oriental literature, whose fine genius, pure taste, unwearied industry, unrivalled and almost prodigious variety of acquirements, not to speak of his amiable manners and spotless integrity, must fill every one who cultivates or admires letters with reverence, tinged with a melancholy which the recollection of his recent death is so well adapted ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... not remember, that our want of halfpence was either affirmed, or denied in any of our addresses or declarations, against those of Wood: We alleged, the fraudulent obtaining and executing his patent, the baseness of his metal, the prodigious sum to be coined, which might be increased by stealth, from foreign importation and his own counterfeits, as well as those at home; whereby we must infallibly lose all our little gold and silver, and all our poor remainder of a very limited and discouraged trade: We urged, that the patent ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... The prodigious development of the new port was accompanied by a growing civic pride and the demand for better public buildings. A story-and-a-half brick town hall was erected in 1759 by funds raised by lottery, tickets selling at ten shillings each, the trustees making ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... to the gale. All hands were kept on deck to watch the effect of the change. It was as much as she could well carry, and with a heavy sea astern, it took two men at the wheel to steer her. She flung the foam from her bows; the spray breaking aft as far as the gangway. She was going at a prodigious rate. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... progressed all the more rapidly for this. Over its making presided Filmer, always a little slow and very careful in his manner, always with a growing preoccupation in his mind. His care over the strength and soundness of the apparatus was prodigious. The slightest doubt, and he delayed everything until the doubtful part could be replaced. Wilkinson, his senior assistant, fumed at some of these delays, which, he insisted, were for the most part unnecessary. Banghurst magnified the patient certitude of Filmer ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... basket three ready-made pin-cushions, four ink-wipers, seven paper matches, and a paste-board watch-case; these are welcomed with acclamations, and the youngest lady present deposits them carefully on shelves, amid a prodigious quantity of similar articles. She then produces her thimble, and asks for work; it is presented to her, and the eight ladies all stitch together for some hours. Their talk is of priests and of missions; of the profits of their last sale, of their hopes from the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... stirred. I felt myself masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting male. And, best of all, I felt myself the protector of my loved one. She leaned against me, so light and lily-frail, and as her trembling eased away it seemed as though I became aware of prodigious strength. I felt myself a match for the most ferocious bull in the herd, and I know, had such a bull charged upon me, that I should have met it unflinchingly and quite coolly, and I know that ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... of mules, the neighing of the horses, the commands of the officers engaged in drilling the men, the incessant hum and buzz of the camps, the blare of bugles, and the roll of drums,—all these made up a prodigious volume of sound that lasted from the coming-up to the going-down of the sun. But this morning was strangely still. The wagons were silent, the mules were peacefully munching their hay, and the army teamsters were giving us a rest. I listened with delight to the plaintive, ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... hundred. The cause of political journalism not interfering with the pre-accepted cause of life insurance, the bargain was struck; although Gaudissart demanded an indemnity from the Saint-Simonians for the eight days he was forced to spend in studying the doctrines of their apostle, asserting that a prodigious effort of memory and intellect was necessary to get to the bottom of that "article" and to reason upon it suitably. He asked nothing, however, from the republicans. In the first place, he inclined in republican ideas,—the ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... memory, without referring to the register, and merely from having heard the names as they were recorded, he proceeded to make out the roll, giving the names in full and giving them in their alphabetical order. This was a prodigious feat of pure memory; for in order to make the alphabetical arrangement in his mind, before committing it to paper, he must have had the entire mass of names present in his mind by a single act of the will. Some of the wonderful games of chess performed by Paul ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... gateway closed with a gate of bars strongly locked and bolted. Thor, after trying in vain to open it, crept with his companions through the bars, and thus succeeded in gaining admission into the city. Seeing a large palace before them, with the door wide open, they went in and found a number of men of prodigious stature sitting on benches in the hall. Going further, they came before the king, Utgard-Loki, whom they saluted with great respect. Their salutations were however returned by a contemptuous look from the king, who, after ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... be so," said Sir Dugald Dalgetty, who came up to them at that moment with a prodigious addition of acquired importance, "since he shot my good horse at the time that I was offering him honourable quarter, which, I must needs say, was done more like an ignorant Highland cateran, who has not sense ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... stones to make a public toilet before entering! It was perhaps an air wafted from Glasgow; or perhaps it marked a stage of that dizziness of gratified vanity, in which the instinctive act passed unperceived. He was looking after! She unloaded her bosom of a prodigious sigh that was all pleasure, and betook herself to run. When she had overtaken the stragglers of her family, she caught up the niece whom she had so recently repulsed, and kissed and slapped her, and drove her away again, and ran after her with pretty cries and laughter. Perhaps she thought the laird ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... light of the west windows. It was globular in form, and represented, Simeon explained, the "War of Light and Darkness." One-half of the globe was darkly shaded, curiously fretted by the lighter half. Above sat a snow-white eagle. Beneath, with prodigious wings outspread, and eyes gleaming like points of fire, hovered a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... de ——, quickly. prision, f., prison, imprisonment. prisionero,-a, m. and f., prisoner. privacion, f., privation. probar, (ue), to try, prove. proclamar, to proclaim. procurar, to try. prodigioso,-a, prodigious, wonderful. produccion, f., production, performance. producir, (pres. produzco, past abs. produje), to produce, yield, cause. producto, m., product. productor,-ra, productive. profanar, to profane, desecrate. profano,-a, profane, irreverent. profesor, ...
— A First Spanish Reader • Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy
... up with the announcement that the Viscount de Coralth was in the sitting-room and wished to speak with him on very important business. It was not usually an easy task to entice M. Wilkie from his bed, but the name his servant mentioned seemed to have a prodigious effect upon him. He bounded on to the floor, and as he hastily dressed himself, he muttered: "The viscount here, at this hour! It's astonishing! What if he's going to fight a duel and wishes me to be his second? That ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... point where the analogy fails. We may regard our race as composed of all the nations that have been and will be—and assign to it different ages. For instance, when the race is ten thousand years old a century will be what a single year is in the life of a centenarian. But there is this prodigious difference. The mortal man grows old and loses his reason and happiness through the enfeeblement of his bodily machine; whereas the human race, by the perpetual and infinite succession of generations, will find itself at ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... o'clock that evening, monsieur Tricotrin, with a prodigious appetite, sat in the Cafe du Bel Avenir, awaiting the arrival of his host. When impatience was mastering him, there arrived, instead, a petit bleu. The impecunious poet took it from the proprietress, paling, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... the crew, he made his way in the boat forward along the side of the pirate vessel and clambered up by the bowsprit shrouds. Some of the men in the other boats, seeing what he was doing, followed his example. They were unnoticed. A fierce fight was raging on the quarter-deck, and the shouting was prodigious. When some thirty men were gathered Will led the way aft. Their arrival was opportune, for the attacking party, under the lieutenant, had been vastly outnumbered by the pirates, and although fighting stoutly, had been penned against ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... essayed. Bayne lounged for hours with a book in a swing on the veranda. Briscoe, his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his head, his cigar cocked between his teeth—house-bound, he smoked a prodigious number of them for sheer occupation—strolled aimlessly in and out, now in the stables, now listening and commenting as Gladys at the piano played the music of his choice. Lillian had a score of letters to write. Her mind, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... perused articles on good salesmanship. Mornings I was up with the birds (the pigeons, that is) and half-way to my place of business by eight o'clock. It agreed with me. I grew fat on it. I regained the pounds of flesh that I had lost at the hospital with prodigious speed. Color came back to my cheeks, song to ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... like in Cheret's picture, and about a dozen yards apart, and an electric light was thrown on to the youngest, who was leaning against a large white target, and very slowly the other traced his living outline with bullet after bullet. He aimed with prodigious skill, and the black dots showed on the cardboard, and marked the shape of his body. The applause drowned the orchestra, and increased continually, when suddenly a shrill cry of horror resounded from one end of the hall to the other. The women fainted, the violins stopped, and the spectators ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... scorpions. Of tame fowl, they have only ducks and hens; but have plenty of wild birds, as pigeons, parrots, parrakeets, turtle-doves, bats as large as our kites, and an infinite number and variety of small birds. Their wild hogs feed in the woods in prodigious herds, and have thick knobs growing over their eyes. There are mountains in the interior of this island, which afford considerable quantities of gold. Their chief fish are bonitos, snooks, cavallies, breams, and mullets; and they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... that when duty is interpreted as enlightenment, life must lose its romantic flavor and cease to require the old high-spirited virtues. It is this very linking of life to life, this abandonment of one's self to the prodigious of the whole, that provides the true object of reverence, and permits the sense of mystery to remain even after the light has come. Although the way of morality is evident and well-proved in direction, being plain to whomever will look at life with a fair and commanding eye, achievement ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity: which circumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the annoyance of shepherd-boys, who are ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... him and assured him that he had "la veine." At first I am inclined to believe that he thought she was talking of something varicose, but when he understood what she meant he was at her mercy. In short he tried his luck, to the dismay of his conscience but with prodigious benefit to his pocket. His return to Brasted is described ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... their conversion, upon discovery of the Impostures which perverted them; and the signal indignation of God, upon the several periods which your eyes have lately beheld, of the bloudiest Tyrannies, and most prodigious oppressors that ever any age of the world produc'd, I see you still persist in your course, and that you have turn'd about with every revolution which has hapned: when I consider, what contradictions you have swallowed, how deeply ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... but his coming spoilt all Conway's plan? The King must take his counsel, choose his friends, Be wholly ruled by him! What's the result? The North that was to rise, Ireland to help,— What came of it? In my poor mind, a fright Is no prodigious punishment. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... within the thickness of the wall, that extended far along the castle, finally opened in an obscure corner of the eastern rampart. I have since been informed, that there are many passages of the same kind concealed within the prodigious walls of that edifice, and which were, undoubtedly, contrived for the purpose of facilitating escapes in time of war. Through this avenue, at the dead of night, I often stole to the terrace, where ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... were put to flight around him, for Patroclus caused fear to them all, having slain their leader, who was very brave to fight. And he drove them from the ships, and extinguished the blazing fire. But the ship was left there half-burnt, whilst the Trojans were routed with a prodigious tumult: and the Greeks were poured forth amongst the hollow ships; and mighty confusion was created. And as when, from the lofty summit of a great mountain,[516] lightning-driving Jove dislodges a dense cloud, and all ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... have torn his hair. Those massive blocks of red-veined marble lining the hall—emulating in their surface-glitter the Escalier de Marbre at Versailles—were cunning imitations in paint and plaster by workmen brought from afar for the purpose, at a prodigious expense, by the present viscount's father, and recently repaired and re- varnished. The dark green columns and pilasters corresponding were brick at the core. Nay, the external walls, apparently of massive and solid freestone, were ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... the very moment that the interview was over, started off to his lawyer. Considering how very little had been given to him the sum he was to pay was prodigious. In his desire to get rid of the bore of these appeals, he had allowed himself to be foolishly generous. He certainly never would kiss a young lady in a carriage again,—nor even lend a horse to a young lady till he was better ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... knowledge, but particularly in that one single point of the safe and expeditious extraction of the foetus,—which has received such lights, that, for my part (holding up his hand) I declare I wonder how the world has—I wish, quoth my uncle Toby, you had seen what prodigious armies ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... was compelled to take a side opposite to that on which the pursued passed. The scout and his companions did not neglect this advantage, but the instant they were hid from observation by the bushes, they redoubled efforts that before had seemed prodigious. The two canoes came round the last low point, like two coursers at the top of their speed, the fugitives taking the lead. This change had brought them nigher to each other, however, while it altered their ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... impersonal system wherein the workman has become something less than a person—a mere part of the system. No one believes, of course, that this dehumanizing process was deliberately invented. It just grew. It was latent in the whole early system, but no one saw it and no one could foresee it. Only prodigious and unheard-of development ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... was to the last degree astonishing. He has leaped through a window on the stage, when pursued by the clown, full thirteen feet high. Whenever he was in the play-bills in Dublin, he attracted crowded houses. One night, when he had a prodigious leap to perform, the persons behind the scenes who were to have received him in a blanket, were not prepared in time, and of course he fell on the boards, and was miserably bruised. He then took a most solemn ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... house, but were unable to discover the cause. I then took a candle, and went with the girl into the cellar—there the knocking also continued; but as we were ascending the stairs to return, I heard a prodigious rapping on each side, which alarmed me very much. I stood still some time looking around with amazement, when I beheld some lumber, which lay at the head of the stairs, shake considerably. About eight or ten days after, we visited ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... long, Announced as in a thousand silences An end of preparation, I began The coming work of death which is to be, That life may be. There is no other way Than the old way of war for a new land That will not know itself and is tonight A stranger to itself, and to the world A more prodigious upstart among states Than I was among men, and so shall be Till they are told and told, and told again; For men are children, waiting to be told, And most of them are children all their lives. The good God in his wisdom had them so, That now and then a madman or a ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... his lifetime. But as it cannot be suggested that in, say, 1600 it was generally known that Shakespeare was not the author of these plays, it is hard to see how his contemporaries can be acquitted of indifference to his prodigious superiority over themselves. Authors, however, never take this view. Shakespeare's contemporaries thought him a mighty clever fellow and no more. Why, even Wordsworth was well persuaded he could write like Shakespeare had he been so minded. Mr. Arnold remained all his life honestly ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... her—but you shall not see her— No, you shall write, and not to her, but me: And you shall say that having spoken with me, And after look'd into yourself, you find That you meant nothing—as indeed you know That you meant nothing. Such as match as this! Impossible, prodigious!' These were words, As meted by his measure of himself, Arguing boundless forbearance: after which, And Leolin's horror-stricken answer, 'I So foul a traitor to myself and her, Never oh never,' for about as long As the wind-hover hangs in the balance, paused Sir Aylmer reddening from the ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... with small appetite, but the captain, urging on his young companion the necessity of "filling his hold," devoured prodigious quantities of food, and then, arising, suggested that the time had come to "pipe all ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... her sentence of excommunication should no longer have any strength. What! Shall the church draw and put up again the spiritual sword at the pleasure of princes? Or because princes will perhaps cast holy things to dogs, must others do so likewise? O prodigious licentiousness, and hellish misorder, worthy to be drowned in the lake of Lethe! But what, then, is the part of the prince, after that the church hath given judgment? Surely, whensoever need is, he ought, by the private judgment of Christian discretion, to try and examine whether this ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... thing about the business was that Jim was procuring a prodigious supply of excellent whiskey without any expense to himself, and without any cause existing ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... not far distant; but they were prevented by the appearance of the Baron of Bradwardine in person, who, summoned by David Gellatley, now appeared, 'on hospitable thoughts intent,' clearing the ground at a prodigious rate with swift and long strides, which reminded Waverley of the seven-league boots of the nursery fable. He was a tall, thin, athletic figure, old indeed and grey-haired, but with every muscle rendered as tough as whip-cord by constant exercise. He was dressed ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... quiddities. They could have taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn that the sun does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun. But they were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious difficulties of moral and social direction. This function, so immeasurably more important than the mere discovery of any number of physical relations, it was the glory of the Church to have discharged for some centuries with as much success as the conditions permitted. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... extracted by Tartars from mare's milk not particularly fresh. Hard by we find a decent matron super-intending her tea-table at the lamp-post, and tendering to a remarkably select company little, blue, delft cups of bohea, filled from time to time from a prodigious kettle, that simmers unceasingly on its charcoal tripod, though the refractory cad often protests that the fuel fails before the boiling stage is consummated by an ebullition. Hither approaches perhaps an interesting youth from Magherastaphena, who, ere night-fall, is destined to figure in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... during four of which he was alone, all his companions being dead. He had added largely to what was previously known of Egypt; had made scientific observations of great value in the deserts of Arabia, and undergone prodigious hardships; but the most remarkable thing was, that his eagerness to fulfil in some measure the purposes of the expedition, made the whole journey a work of preparation and study, as well as of actual exploration. In 1773, being then ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... of the United States, without regard to racial origin, are of one mind in hoping that mankind may gain out of this prodigious physical combat, which uses for purposes of destruction and death all the new forces of nineteenth-century applied science, some new liberties and new securities in the pursuit of happiness; but at this moment they can cherish only a remote hope of such ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... edifice are on a commensurate scale. The ninety-three windows of stained glass fill the interior with a soft and richly-tinted light, mellower and more gentle than the sombre twilight of the Gothic Cathedrals of Europe. The wealth lavished on the smaller chapels and shrines is prodigious, and the high altar, inclosed within a gilded railing fifty feet high, is probably the most enormous mass of wood-carving in existence. The Cathedral, in fact, is encumbered with its riches. While they bewilder you as monuments of human labor and patience, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... furnace, in which there is an apparently inexhaustible supply of red oxide and brown specular. This ore yields 60 per cent of pure metal. The erection of mills for making wrought iron is contemplated, and the high quality and prodigious quantity of the raw material will justify and reward any outlay of capital ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... possesses great power of prolonged mental application. And being also endowed with a most remarkably retentive memory, his mind is stored with a very comprehensive knowledge of law. And if there be one faculty of his mind more than another, that gives character to the man, it is his prodigious memory of facts. In a case that recently came under our notice, Judge Bishop gave evidence pertaining to a matter that occurred some twenty years since, with apparently as much precision as if the events occurred ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... she was out of sight, he sank back upon his rustic bench, like a man exhausted, and breathed a prodigious sigh. He was absurdly pale. All the same, clenching his fists, and softly pounding the table with them, he muttered exultantly, between his teeth, "What luck! What incredible luck! It's she—it's she, as I 'm a heathen. Oh, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... settled down on the grass very near them. Lannes saluted and presented a note to General Vaugirard, who started and then expelled the breath from his lungs in two or three prodigious puffs. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was delivered with such prodigious fire and rapidity that nobody was self-possessed enough to stop it in time. It was like a furious gust of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... acting his part with prodigious boldness and impiety, told the king that there was a private and a public conscience; that his public conscience as a king might not only dispense with, but oblige him to do that which was against his private conscience as a man; and that the question was not whether he should ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... home the giant immediately hung up Master No-book by the hair of his head, on a prodigious hook in the larder, having first taken some large lumps of nasty suet, forcing them down his throat to make him become still fatter, and then stirring the fire, that he might be almost melted with heat, to make his ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... such he was not: nay, he was the opposite of this. Never did Marshal of France make more careful dispositions for a battle—albeit once in it he bore himself like any captain of horse—nor ever did Du Mornay himself sit down to a conference with a more accurate knowledge of affairs. His prodigious wit and the affability of his manners, while they endeared him to his servants, again and again blinded his adversaries; who, thinking that so much brilliance could arise only from a shallow nature, found when it was too late that they had been outwitted ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... breathed the peculiar, tropical dampness that fills every greenhouse. All about them were green things growing. To the right of them, prodigious potato plants thrived in beds of rich earth; to the left were beds of radishes, head lettuce and onions. Over their heads, suspended in cleverly woven baskets of leather, huge cucumbers swung aloft, their vines casting a greenish light over all. Far down the narrow aisle, numerous ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... It was a prodigious gathering, and a great affair for the mountain-desert. They knew this even before they had ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... he actually addressed himself to the task. But his inspiration flagged, and it was not till the beginning of 1774 that a new experience supplied a fresh impulse constraining him to complete the "prodigious little work" which was to take his contemporaries ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... fault, or of detecting little lapses from accuracy of drawing, or harmony of composition—I do not hesitate one moment to pronounce the series of embellishments, which they contain, perfectly unrivalled—as the production of the same pencil. Their great merit consists in a prodigious freedom of touch and boldness of composition. The colouring seems to be purposely made subordinate. Figures the most minute, and actions the most difficult to express, are executed in a ready, off-hand manner, strongly indicative, of the masterly powers of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... city in this nation So grand a reputation could boast before, As Limerick prodigious, That stands with quays and bridges, And the ships up to the ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... idealistic philosophy—that is, of all philosophy which believes that ideas govern the world, and that the world is progressing towards a perfection which is somewhere and which directs and attracts it. For those even who are not of his school, Plato is the most prodigious of all the thinkers who have united psychological wisdom, dialectical strength, the power of abstraction and creative imagination, which last in him attains ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Butcher, and I hear he has a prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set- offs. But they cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that Professor Kelland is dead. No man's education is complete or truly ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dimmed and ultimately sealed that inner eye which Mr. Jennings had inadvertently opened. The same senses are opened in delirium tremens, and entirely shut up again when the overaction of the cerebral heart, and the prodigious nervous congestions that attend it, are terminated by a decided change in the state of the body. It is by acting steadily upon the body, by a simple process, that this result is produced—and inevitably produced—I ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... fortune a servant employed in the diamond mines of the Great Mogul found means to secrete about his person a diamond of prodigious size, and what is more marvellous, to gain the seashore and embark without being subjected to the rigid and not very delicate ordeal, that all persons not above suspicion by their name or their occupation, are compelled ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... as a disappointed burglar whose cue it is to congratulate the rescuing policeman. "My dear Lieutenant! You are heaven's own messenger. You have saved us from a horrible night. But it is prodigious; it is incredible. You must have come here by enchantment. How in God's name could you find your way ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... terrific and beautiful sight cannot be conceived; but we were not quite enough at our ease to enjoy it. The shells flew up in the air to a prodigious height, some bursting as they rose, and others as they descended. The shower fell about us, but we escaped without injury. We made but little progress against the wind and tide; and we had the pleasure to run the gauntlet among all the other fire-ships, which had been ignited, and ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Pythias. On the distaff side, the thing is too obvious to need exposition. The patriotic societies among women are all machines for the resuscitation of lost superiorities. The plutocracy has shouldered out the old gentry from actual social leadership—that gentry, indeed, presents a prodigious clinical picture of the insecurity of social rank in America—but there remains at least the possibility of insisting upon a dignity which plutocrats cannot boast and may not even buy. Thus the county judge's wife in Smithville or the Methodist pastor's daughter in Jonestown ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... of our young gentlemen took a prodigious leap upward as their bodies became used to the crazy pace of our ship, whose gait I can compare only to the bouncings of loose timber in a heavy sea. North of Newfoundland we were blanketed in a dirty fog. That gave our fine gentlemen a chance ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... she could never perceive the prodigious improbability of the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly to say nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... at the play last night, for the first time. The acclamations, as I am told, were prodigious. Tears of joy were shed in abundance. Nous savons ce que c'est que la populace, et combien peu il en coute a leurs caprices, ou de pleurer, on de massacrer, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the conviction for slave-trading was the first under the special law in any part of the land. The object of the unique process was William Gordon. Sentenced to be hanged like a pirate, the most prodigious effort was made to have the penalty relaxed with a prospect that the term of imprisonment would be curtailed as soon as decent. It would seem that merchant princes were connected with the lucrative, if nefarious, traffic in which he was a ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... book, but his best friends will learn with pain that he seems at this hour to have deserted the more serious studies of the morning. When last observed, he was studying with apparent zest the exploits of one Rocambole by the late Viscomte Ponson du Terrail. This work, originally of prodigious dimensions, he had cut into liths or thicknesses apparently for ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inadvertently drop a word in your praise, will immediately take alarm, and fearing your being more in favour than themselves, will seldom stick at trifles to prevent it, by pretending to take a prodigious liking to you, and poisoning your mind in such a manner as to destroy all your confidence, &c. in your employers; and if they do not immediately succeed in worrying you away, will take care you have no comfort while you stay: ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... the whys and wherefores to yon gentlemen of the black robe!" answered Sir Richard, laughing. "By the way, talking of prices, have you heard the prodigious price Sir Nathaniel Fowler hath given for his seat in the Commons? Six thousand pounds, 'pon ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... thus expanding her borders, the internal revolution matured rapidly. The last years of Francis and the reign of Henry II saw a prodigious growth of Protestantism. What had begun as a sect now became, by an evolution similar to that experienced in Germany, a powerful political party. It is the general fate of new causes to meet at first with opposition due to habit and the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to be hospitable, as it was a prime necessity to be in society.[2181] Their luxury, indeed, differs from ours. With the exception of a few princely establishments it is not great in the matter of country furniture; a display of this description is left to the financiers. "But it is prodigious in all things which can minister to the enjoyment of others, in horses, carriages, and in an open table, in accommodations given even to people not belonging to the house, in boxes at the play which are lent to friends, and lastly, in servants, much ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... respective crafts; and in every seventh year we had a resuscitation of King Crispianus in all his glory and regality, with the man in the coat-of-mail, of bell-metal, and the dukes, and lord mayor of London, at the which, the influx of lads and lasses from the country was just prodigious, and the rioting and rampaging at night, the brulies and the dancing, was worse than Vanity Fair in the ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... travel. The air was clear, bright, and exhilarating; the long days spent in the saddle, and the excitement of the chase, seemed to quicken his pulse and to fill him with a new feeling of strength and life. His appetite was prodigious, and he enjoyed the roughly cooked meals round the blazing fire of an evening, as he had never enjoyed food before. The country was, it is true, for the most part monotonous, with its long low undulations, and the bare sweeps, ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... is well known, the main currency is supplied by the Reichsbank, covered by at least 33-1/3 per cent. in gold or silver, and the remaining two-thirds by commercial paper. Immediately after the outbreak of war there was a prodigious increase of loans at the Reichsbank, in consequence of which borrowers received notes or deposit accounts. Usually transactions are carried through by use of notes, and not by checks, as with us. On July 23, 1914, the notes stood ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of whose colossal work, "Die Kleider, Ihr Werden und Wirken" (On Clothes: Their Origin and Influence), he represents himself as being only the student and interpreter. With infinite humour he explains how this prodigious volume came into his hands; how he was struck with amazement by its encyclopaedic learning, and the depth and suggestiveness of its thought; and how he determined that it was his special mission to introduce its ideas to the British public. But how was this to be done? As a mere bald ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Hindoo sculptures, and such as you may see in any street in a British town. And when the Greek ladies of the neighbourhood found her out, they sent for her from house to house, to behold, with astonishment and laughter, this new and prodigious waist, with which it seemed to them it was impossible for a human being to breathe or live; and they petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or a giantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Novel, What will He do with It? and A Strange Story. As a playwright he was equally successful; he was the author of The Lady of Lyons—the most popular play of modern days;—Richelieu, Not so Bad as we Seem, the admirable comedy of Money, etc. A man of prodigious industry he showed himself equal to the highest efforts of literature; fiction, poetry, the drama, all were enriched by his labours. As a politician he was not quite so successful. In 1866 he was raised to the peerage ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... she leads has aroused her. She is no longer the impassive Silence; she has found her fire. I hear of her as the charm of a brilliant court, as the soul of a nation of intrigue. Of her beauty one does not speak, but her talent is called prodigious. What impels me to ask the idle question, If it were well to save her life for this? Undoubtedly she fills a station which, in that empire, must be the summit of a woman's ambition. Delphine's Liberty was not a principle, but a dissatisfaction. The Baroness Stahl is vehement, is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... light we have little more than conjectures. It is considered by most philosophers as a real substance, immediately emanating from the sun, and from all luminous bodies, from which it is projected in right lines with prodigious velocity. Light, however, being imponderable, it cannot be confined and examined by itself; and therefore it is to the effects it produces on other bodies, rather than to its immediate nature, that ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... Lord Bishop's ape appeared to him in a dream, not a mere mannikin as he was in reality, but as tall as Monte San Gemignano, cocking up a prodigious tail and tickling the moon. He was squatted in an olive wood among the farms and oil-presses, while betwixt his legs a narrow road ran alongside a row of flourishing vineyards. Now the said road was thronged with a ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... perfect torrent of a sermon, a wild gush of words, shouted at the topmost stress of a remarkably lusty voice, arresting for a minute or two by reason of the sheer physical energy it represented, and then for a long half hour exquisitely tiresome. But on week-days he maintained a prodigious silence, and this (as, though fierce-looking, he wasn't in the least really fierce) it would often be John's malicious study to tempt him to break. Besides, to-day, John was honestly concerned with the pursuit ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... Freyr, and observes that the magic mill is only another form of the fire-churn, or chark. According to another version the quern is still grinding away and keeping the sea salt, and over the place where it lies there is a prodigious whirlpool or maelstrom which ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... had evidently received the astonishment of his life. He pictured to me the whole affair—Bellett, up at the chancel gate, going for the prayer book, and absolutely alone; and then the blow, out of the Void, he described it; and the force prodigious—the old man being driven headlong into the body of the Chapel. Like the kick of a great horse, the Rector said, his benevolent old eyes bright and intense with the effort he had actually witnessed, in defiance of all that he had ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... up-stairs and look after that poor child, there's a good soul—she trusts you while she is gone, and so do I. There, there! another time. I'll take the responsibility of satisfying you, Mrs Smith," said the doctor, in a prodigious hurry, ready to promise anything in this incautious moment, and bolting out of their little dark back-room, which the local architect's mullions had converted into a kind of condemned cell. Nettie stood at the door, all ready for her expedition to Carlingford, ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... his arrival? Where was the baby's mother? Where was their luggage? Why, in the name of reason, had George vanished so swiftly into the Tiger, and what in the name of decency and sobriety was he doing in the Tiger such a prodigious time? ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... quarter of a century ago, when electric light was still a very new thing to Londoners, an American casually told myself and three or four others that the small town from which he came in the far Northwest of America was lighted entirely by a coronal of electric lights of some prodigious candle-power on the top of a mast, erected in the centre of the town, of a, to us, incredible height. It was, at the time, quite unbelievable; but in less than a year chance took me all the way to that identical little town in the far Northwest, and ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... first came in sight they made a prodigious clattering in their speech and held their arms over their heads. They spoke so quick that I could not catch one single word they uttered. We recollected one man whom we had formerly seen among the ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... lives, has revealed men and nations to themselves. It has shown us the nation's manhood suddenly stripped of the conventionalities, the restraints, and the outward respectability of civil life, subjected to the trial and testing of a prodigious strain. It has shown us the real stuff of which men are made. It is like the X-ray photographs now constantly used in all the military hospitals, and placed in the windows of the operating rooms, to guide the surgeon in discovering the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... man whose turn certainly was not flattery, nor his talent adapted to look on vanity without a sneer. Yet his facility in catching a likeness, and the methods he chose of painting families and conversations in small, then a novelty, drew him prodigious business for some time. It did not last: either from his applying to the real bent of his disposition, or from his customers apprehending that a satirist was too formidable a confessor for the devotees of self-love. He had already ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... charging the boat is apt to be discredited by fishermen. But it certainly is not doubted by the few who know. I have seen two swordfish threaten my boat, and one charge it. Walker, an Avalon boatman, tells of a prodigious battle his angler had with a broadbill giant calculated to weigh five hundred pounds. This fight lasted eight hours. Many times the swordfish charged the boat and lost his nerve. If that propeller had stopped he would have gone through the ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... prodigious yawn, dragged himself up out of his chair, and the two went off together. As they left the room the only other man present looked up from his newspaper, following ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... gluttony to a heavy test. Many a scandal came to light in the Roman community. The Elect made themselves sick by devouring the prodigious quantity of good cheer brought to them with a view to purification. As it was a sacrilege to let any be lost, the unhappy people forced themselves to get down the lot. There were even victims: children, gorged with delicacies, died of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... fruit-trees in it. The ripeness of this place, mossed and leafy, was gratifying to my senses, on which the rawness of our own bald garden jarred. There was an old brick wall between the two divisions, upon which it was possible for us to climb up, and from this we gained Pisgah-views which were a prodigious pleasure. But I had not the faintest idea how to 'play'; I had never learned, had never heard of any 'games'. I think Benny must have lacked initiative almost as much as I did. We walked about, and shook the bushes, and climbed along the wall; I think that ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... a prodigious yawn. "And now, Mr Carter, with your kind permission I will go below and lie down, for I feel ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... all men of mighty deeds after Julius Caesar had the greatest intellect, was a tireless reader, and since he needed only four or five hours' sleep in twenty-four he found time to read in the midst of his prodigious activities. Nowadays those of us who are preparing to conquer the world are taught to strengthen ourselves for the task by getting plenty of sleep. Napoleon's devouring eyes read far into the night; when he was in the field his secretaries forwarded ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... we were looping our way up the breast of Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun, lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding swiftly ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... persons of the town came out to meet us, and conducted us to our quarters, where they gave us a very poor entertainment. After supper, Cortes inquired respecting the military power of Montezuma, and was told that he was able to bring prodigious armies into the field. The city of Mexico was represented as of uncommon strength, being built on the water, with no communication between the houses, houses, except by means of boats or bridges, each house being terraced, and only needing the addition of a parapet to become a fortress. The only ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... attended with much inconvenience and difficulty, Gonzalo used every proper precaution that his troops might be supplied abundantly with water and other necessaries. For this purpose all the neighbouring Indians were ordered to bring a prodigious quantity of jars and other vessels calculated to contain water. The soldiers were ordered to leave at Motupe all their clothes and baggage of which they were not in immediate want, which were to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... does not apply to his writings, for his ideas lost much of their force in the process of getting into print. Like all natural orators his chief quality was a power of drawing and persuading, which, to use an expression often applied to Pere Lacordaire, had something magnetic about it. He had a prodigious gift of showing his Protestant or infidel hearers that their own hearts and their own reason aspired by instinct towards the Catholic truth which he was teaching them. In that way he drew his hearers to discover the truth in their own minds ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... to the English host. Great numbers were killed; others were driven headlong across the bridge or were drowned in the stream, which is said to have been literally choked with dead. But for a time the advance of the English was stayed; for one Norseman, a man of great stature and prodigious strength, took post in the middle of the narrow bridge and barred the way to the English host. But one foe could attack him at a time, and so great was his strength and prowess that it is said forty Englishmen fell under the mighty blows ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... Mr. Poynter had found a neatly indited ode to a wild geranium written in a flowing foreign hand, his literary output had been prodigious. Dirges, odes, sonnets and elegies frequently appeared in spectacular places about the camp and as Mr. Poynter's highly sympathetic nature led him to eulogize the lowlier and less poetic life of the woodland, the result was frequently of ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... about the construction of an extemporaneous bed in the easy-chair, with the addition of the next easy one for her feet. Having formed the best couch that the circumstances admitted of, she took out of her bundle a yellow night-cap, of prodigious size, in shape resembling a cabbage; which article of dress she fixed and tied on with the utmost care, previously divesting herself of a row of bald old curls that could scarcely be called false, they were so ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... in his advice to his son with reference to time. "Every moment you now lose, is so much character and advantage lost; as, on the other hand, every moment you now employ usefully, is so much time wisely laid out, at prodigious interest." ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... French poetry, tormented himself by a prodigious slowness; and was employed rather in perfecting than in forming works. His muse is compared to a fine woman in the pangs of delivery. He exulted in his tardiness, and, after finishing a poem of one hundred verses, or a discourse of ten pages, he used to say ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... or given, since each side was determined to exterminate the other. Flights of arrows were stopped in mid-air by flights of arrows from the other side. Great maces were cut in pieces by well-directed darts. Bhima, wielding his great club with his prodigious strength, wiped out thousands of the enemy at one stroke, and Arjuna did the same with his swift arrows. Nor were the Kauravas to be despised. Hundreds of thousands of the Pandavas' followers fell, and the heroic brothers were themselves struck ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... in the wheel for so vast a change as war dethroned, viz., that you see no cause, though you should travel round the whole horizon, adequate to so prodigious an effect. What could do it? Why, Christianity could do it. Aye, true; but man disarms Christianity. And no mock Christianity, no lip ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... in print: yet it would seem something more than strange that one such play, written simply for the study, should have been the extra-professional work of Shakespeare: and yet again it would seem stranger that he should have designed this prodigious nondescript or portent of supreme genius for the public stage: and strangest of all, if so, that he should have so designed it in vain. Perhaps after all a better than any German or Germanising commentary ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... up the Nile to join the Mamelukes, who were enjoying one of their seasonal rebellions against constituted authority, Eaton plunged into the desert and finally brought back the astonished and somewhat reluctant heir to the throne. With prodigious energy Eaton then organized an expedition which was to march overland toward Derne, meet the squadron at the Bay of Bomba, and descend vi et armis upon the unsuspecting pretender at Tripoli. He even made a covenant with Hamet promising with altogether unwarranted explicitness ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... stanza." Sachs states, as Walther pauses. "Take careful heed now that the one following must be exactly like it."—"Why exactly alike?" the free-born asks, ready to chafe at the shadow of a restriction. Sachs, indulgent, makes play for this prodigious child's sake of the to him so grave business of song-making: "That one may see that you have selected ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... and was seen hanging in the horizon: such was the popular notion. The Hy-Brasail of the Irish is evidently a part of the Atlantis of Plato; who, in his 'Timaeus,' says that that island was totally swallowed up by a prodigious earthquake." (O'Flaherty's "Discourse on the History and Antiquities of the Southern Islands of Aran, lying off the West Coast of Ireland," ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... distinct profession. George Ferrers, formerly commemorated as master of the pastimes to Edward VI., one Goldingham, and Churchyard, author of "the Worthiness of Wales," of some legends in the "Mirror for Magistrates," and of a prodigious quantity of verse on various subjects, were the most celebrated proficients in this branch; all three are handed down to posterity as contributors to "the princely pleasures of Kennelworth," and the two latter as managers of the Norwich entertainments. They vied with ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... now face will test us to the uttermost. Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... population—in terrible numbers and increasing. Practically all this is pure waste of money—to say nothing of the loss and suffering to humanity. Prisons, hospitals, insane asylums, poor houses, and the like cost the community a prodigious amount. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... pleasure in the society of her fellow writers. This was largely because she loved, beyond everything else, the business side of her profession. There was nothing at all that she did not know about the publishing and distribution of a novel. Her capacity for remembering other people's prices was prodigious and she managed her agent and her publisher with a deftness that left them gasping. There were very few persons in her world who had not, at one time or another, poured their troubles into her ear. She had that gift, valuable in life beyond ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... wall, on which are painted the coats of arms of all the families with whom the Fairfaxes have intermarried, ascending to very great antiquity; besides, every pane of glass in a very large bay window in the same room is stained with one of these coats of arms. Every morning after breakfast a prodigious flock of pea-fowl came from the woods around ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... this time a pleasant girl of thirteen or fourteen. Lady Shelburne had also two half-sisters, daughters of her mother's second marriage to Richard Vernon. Lady Shelburne took a fancy to Bentham, and gave him the 'prodigious privilege' of admission to her dressing-room. Though haughty in manner, she was mild in reality, and after a time she and her sister indulged in 'innocent gambols.' In her last illness, Bentham was one of the only two men ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... that consciousness, memory—all the faculties grow, and the experience of sense is so novel, crowded, and astounding. It is this beginning at a point, and expanding to the immense disk of our present range of sensuous experience, that gives to them so prodigious an illusory perspective, and makes us in childhood, measuring futurity by them, form so wild and exaggerated an estimate of the duration of human life. But, I beg ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... well remember when all these older rocks were called grau-wacke, and nobody dreamed of classing them; and now we have three azoic formations pretty well made out beneath the Cambrian! But the most striking step has been the discovery of the Glacial period: you are too young to remember the prodigious effect this produced about the year 1840 (?) on all our minds. Elie de Beaumont never believed in it to the day of his death! the study of the glacial deposits led to the study of the superficial drift, which ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... as I did this, Flatter poor enemies, entreat their servants, Stoop, court, and catch at the benevolence Of creatures, unto whom, within this hour, I would not have vouchsafed a quarter-look, Or piece of face! By you that fools call gods, Hang all the sky with your prodigious signs, Fill earth with monsters, drop the scorpion down, Out of the zodiac, or the fiercer lion, Shake off the loosen'd globe from her long hinge, Roll all the world in darkness, and let loose The enraged winds to turn up groves and towns! When I do fear again, let me be struck With forked ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... spirit of art. It was a house in which Pugin would have torn his hair. Those massive blocks of red-veined marble lining the hall—emulating in their surface-glitter the Escalier de Marbre at Versailles—were cunning imitations in paint and plaster by workmen brought from afar for the purpose, at a prodigious expense, by the present viscount's father, and recently repaired and re- varnished. The dark green columns and pilasters corresponding were brick at the core. Nay, the external walls, apparently of massive and solid freestone, were ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... cold increased as they rose; and Odo, though he had often wished to see the mountains, was yet dismayed at the gloomy and menacing aspect of the region on which they were entering. Leafless woods, prodigious boulders and white torrents foaming and roaring seemed a poor exchange for the pleasantly-ordered gardens of Pianura. Here were no violets and cowslips in bloom; hardly a green blade pierced the sodden roadside, and snowdrifts lingered ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... has aroused her. She is no longer the impassive Silence; she has found her fire. I hear of her as the charm of a brilliant court, as the soul of a nation of intrigue. Of her beauty one does not speak, but her talent is called prodigious. What impels me to ask the idle question, If it were well to save her life for this? Undoubtedly she fills a station which, in that empire, must be the summit of a woman's ambition. Delphine's Liberty ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that colours and forms had a significance for Strickland that was peculiar to himself. He ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... reader some idea of the character of this prodigious mine, and of the profits arising from it, to know, that during the four months preceding the 23rd October, 1847, the directors declared and paid three dividends, amounting to 200 per cent. on the subscribed capital, and that ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... jest;" if it is encomiastic, the same ruthless and ungrateful critic is but too likely to take it as an involuntary confession of folly and vanity. But when Fielding, in one of his serio-comic introductions to Tom Jones, described it as "this prodigious work," he all unintentionally (for he was the least pretentious of men) anticipated the verdict which posterity almost at once, and with ever-increasing suffrage of the best judges as time went on, was about to pass not merely upon this particular book, but upon his whole genius ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... please your Honour, I have been at my Lord's, and his Lordship thanks you for the Favour you have offer'd of reading your Play to him; but he has such a prodigious deal of Business he begs to be excus'd. I have been with Mr Keyber too: he made ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... assumes a position which, in virtue either of an imposing military force on the Oxus, or of a dominant political influence in Afghanistan, entitles her, in Native estimation, to challenge our Asiatic supremacy, the disquieting effect will be prodigious.' ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Ruth. Then, too, he was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of experience with girls and women who had been absolutely different from her. They had known about love and life and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things. Her prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness. Also he was handicapped in another way. He had himself never been in love before. He had liked ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... them!'[FN200] Then said her father Es Shisban to her, 'What is this laughing?' So she bespoke him in a tongue none understood but they [two] and acquainted him with that which Tuhfeh had said; whereat he laughed a prodigious laugh, as it were the ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... was the Queen mothers panegyrick or funebre oraison made at St. Pierre in a prodigious confluence of peeple of al ranks; the Intendant, the President and the Conseillers, the Mair, the Eschiwines,[340] and the Maison de Ville assisting; also many of the religious orders. The Cordelier ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... Mrs. Tretherick with an embarrassed voice and a prodigious blush, looking down, and addressing the fiery curls just visible in the folds of her dress,—"do you think you will be 'dood,' if I let you stay in here and sit ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... them then, ether to forewarne them of the death of their friend; or else to discouer vnto them, the will of the defunct, or what was the way of his slauchter, as is written in the booke of the histories Prodigious. And this way hee easelie deceiued the Gentiles, because they knew not God: And to that same effect is it, that he now appeares in that maner to some ignorant Christians. For he dare not so illude anie that knoweth that, neither can the spirite of the defunct returne to his friend, ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... to the satisfaction of his time that women have fewer teeth than men. Aristotle was a great man, and besides being a philosopher was the foremost scientist of his day. I cannot help thinking of this prodigious blunder. Perhaps (who knows?) the same famous fate which a sexual classification of teeth enjoys awaits a definition calling love ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... except possibly Peter the Great, ever gave so many ex cathedra opinions on so many different subjects in the same length of time, and of course it cannot be supposed that he has not made mistakes, but it shows that it is only by prodigious industry that he has been able to gather the materials on which these utterances are based. He is indeed the "first servant of the state," and long before his court or indeed many of the housemaids of Berlin are awake, he is up and attending ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... burghs stood in his hand; five-and-twenty years he was king here. He was mad, he was wild, he was cruel, he was bold; of all things he had his will, except the Peohtes were never still, but ever they advanced over the north end, and afflicted this kingdom with prodigious harm, and avenged their kin enow, ...
— Brut • Layamon
... in acting, I may avow, nothing but the immediate hand of the Almighty, (who favours the juster side, and is always ready for the support of those, who approach so near his own divinity; sacred and anointed heads) could have turned the fortune of the battle to the royal side: it was prodigious to consider the unequal numbers, and the advantage all on the Prince's part; it was miraculous to behold the order on his side, and surprise on the other, which of itself had been sufficient to have confounded them; yet notwithstanding all this unpreparedness ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... an unwillingness to leave the light, and a natural impulse into the Dominion of darkness, about this time our Hero's, shall I say, sally'd or slunk out of their Lodgings, and steer'd toward the great Palace, whither, before they were arrived, such a prodigious number of Torches were on fire, that the day, by help of these Auxiliary Forces, seem'd to continue its Dominion; the Owls and Bats apprehending their mistake, in counting the hours, retir'd again to ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... is primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a wonderful and a prodigious manner. How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs the head, is apparent to every one. How a faulty action of the liver disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial manner, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... the light properly distributed so that the rooms may be suffused with just the proper glow, but never a glare; so that the base outlets for reading-lamps shall be at convenient angles, so that the wall lights shall be beautifully balanced,—all this means prodigious thought and care before the actual placing of ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... name of heaven, can it be? ere the silvery tones of her sweet voice had reached the ears of the petrified Alonzo, the "iron tongue" of the cathedral clock announced the hour of midnight, and the solemn intonation of its prodigious bell instilled new horrors into the confused minds of the affrighted lovers. The brave, the royal Alonzo heard not the voice of his enchanting dulcinea; he, poor fellow, with difficulty supported his trembling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... silence, on Racine's part, had elapsed, when Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV., asked the unemployed poet to prepare a sacred play for the use of the high-born girls educated under her care at St. Cyr. Racine consented, and produced his "Esther." This achieved a prodigious success; for the court took it up, and an exercise written for a girls' school became the admiration of a kingdom. A second similar play followed, the "Athaliah,"—the last, and, by general agreement, the most perfect, work of its author. We thus reach that tragedy of Racine's which ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the detachment reached the scene of action. Folkmar, governor of Prague, had fallen, Henry had fled, and the Bohemians were routed with prodigious slaughter. The fugitives rallied under the walls of Wartburg. But they were speedily dispersed and pursued, until nightfall ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... suspecting that in so very eccentric, garrulous a person he was permitting a spy to encroach upon the secrets of the house, continued to make up sundry parcels of the new publication which had so enchanted his customer, while he expatiated on the prodigious sensation the book had created, and while the customer himself had already caught enough of the low conversation within the recess to be aware that the author of the book was the very person who had so roused ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... most remarkable circumstance attending the phenomenon was the appearance of three large protuberances apparently emanating from the circumference of the moon, but evidently forming a portion of the corona. They had the appearance of mountains of a prodigious elevation; their color was red tinged with lilac or purple; perhaps the color of the peach-blossom would more nearly represent it. They somewhat resembled the tops of the snowy Alpine mountains when colored by the rising or the setting sun. They resembled the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... it had been said to Betty during the night, and though Mr. Chenoweth's predecessors had revealed their desires in a guise lacking this prodigious artlessness, she already possessed no novel acquaintance with the exclamation. But she made no comment; her partner's style was not a stimulant to repartee. "It would be heaven," he amplified earnestly, "it would be heaven to dance with you forever—on a desert isle where the ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... voices sounding from their stomachs and entrails. Such reports, bruited through the world by the foreign ambassadors at Smyrna, the clerks of the English and Dutch houses, the resident foreigners, and the Christian ministers, excited a prodigious sensation, thrilling civilized mankind. On the Exchanges of Europe men took the odds for and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... quarantine, no account being taken of the three weeks or a month that some of us had already spent in the German lines. The whole thing was a farce. We could then buy a change of underclothing, and daily consumed prodigious quantities of Dutch chocolate, also procurable from the canteen (which I afterwards bought in Holland for one-tenth of the price). Some of the British who had been in the camp for some time managed to get books and a little food ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... brothers, as a reward for delivering them from such monsters. Their residence was in the district called Whapaeenoo; and to this day there remains a bread-fruit tree, once the property of the Taheeais. They had also a woman, who lived with them, and had two teeth of a prodigious size. After they were killed, she lived at the island Otaha; and when dead, was ranked amongst their deities. She did not eat human flesh, as the men; but, from the size of her teeth, the natives still call any animal that has a fierce appearance, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... the doorway? Moreover, two of the holes open outwards, and not into the supposed store-chamber. It may be said that these were for hauling up the sacks of corn, but the incline on which they open is so steep, that it would be a prodigious waste of labour to drag the corn up under the cornice in which they are, whereas the other ascent is easy. The precautions taken to provide means of stabbing at an assailant point to this having been a fortress. My interpretation of the puzzle is this: ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... ignorant workers and stir their minds and their passions into swift and bitter revolt. Revolution! That was the thing. The world had come to a time, he said, when talking and writing weren't going to count. We were entering into an age of force—of "direct action"—strikes and the like—by prodigious masses of men. All I could ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... later he advanced into the space in the centre of his wari, where in the olden days the populace was wont to gather for its cannibal orgies; how he greeted his distinguished visitors with the most prodigious rubbing of noses seen in those parts for many a day; of the feast that followed; of the fowls and pigs that garnished the festive board, not omitting the keg of Three Star thoughtfully provided ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... but, being endued with an active fancy, he engendered on it theories so wild and chimerical, that they might be regarded with the same kind of wonder as the fictions of romance, if our pleasure were not continually checked by remembering the error in which they originate. What more prodigious transformation shall we read of in Ovid, than that which he supposes the organs of his strange ens to have undergone during the change of our globe ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... curly brown hair, silken young mustache, and firmly set mouth and chin well matched his stalwart, symmetrical form. He was not only handsome, he was brilliant in a way, and his memory was something prodigious. Unquestionably he would ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... see Leander's extraordinary exploit, whereat he is horrified and amazed. The valiant captain bellows like a bull, shrieks out the most frightful threats and curses, vowing all sorts of vengeance, and making prodigious efforts to draw his big sword, so that he may forthwith set about cutting up his unmannerly assailant into mince-meat. He tugs and strains until he is red in the face, but his "man-killer" cannot be ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... "you're a prodigious villain and imposter—a monstrous imposter, sir. I am told I am not to prosecute you. Well, then, I will not. But the dead men, sir, hang about ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'twill be this hour ere I have done weeping; all the kind of the Launces have this very fault. I have received my proportion, like the prodigious son, and am going with Sir Proteus to the Imperial's court. I think Crab my dog be the sourest-natured dog that lives: my mother 5 weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of scribbling which exists in Europe,' and they and the Germans are 'the two most gormandising races in Europe.' They display ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... man to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake, which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker—the Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Italian cultures—but there is hardly anything worth ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... also had been making prodigious strides during Caesar's stay in France, viz. the fortune of Gian Borgia, the pope's nephew, who had been one of the most devoted friends of the Duke of Gandia up to the time of his death. It was said in Rome, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... this journey, if I mistake not, that he encountered a prodigious giant, who was so wonderfully contrived by nature that, every time he touched the earth, he became ten times as strong as ever he had been before. His name was Antaeus. You may see, plainly enough, that it was a very difficult ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... answers spontaneously, that nothing but a clear necessity can justify any tax at all upon such subjects, and that the tax should be reduced, in all cases, to the very lowest practicable rate. The experience of the British government, the prodigious increase of correspondence produced by cheap postage, and the immense revenue accruing therefrom, demonstrate that TWO CENTS is not below the rate which the government can afford to receive. Let the people understand that all beyond this is a ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... zodiac; a library of thirty-six thousand five hundred volumes was open to their inquiries; and they could show an ancient manuscript of Homer, on a roll of parchment one hundred and twenty feet in length, the intestines, as it was fabled, of a prodigious serpent. [104] But the seventh and eight centuries were a period of discord and darkness: the library was burnt, the college was abolished, the Iconoclasts are represented as the foes of antiquity; and a savage ignorance and contempt of letters ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... but me: And you shall say that having spoken with me, And after look'd into yourself, you find That you meant nothing—as indeed you know That you meant nothing. Such as match as this! Impossible, prodigious!' These were words, As meted by his measure of himself, Arguing boundless forbearance: after which, And Leolin's horror-stricken answer, 'I So foul a traitor to myself and her, Never oh never,' for about as long As the wind-hover ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... too, the grizzly was a prodigious worker. No job was too big for him. Often he spent an hour or more in digging out a tiny titbit such as a chipmunk, and several times in his pursuit of a marmot he excavated in rockslides holes large enough for small basements. ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... eruptions, thirteen of which have been noted, are considered to have done more mischief than any others in the Island. Between the Myrdals and the 'Orœja Jökla' lies one of the most noted volcanoes of Iceland—the 'Skaptar-Jökull,' whose eruption in 1783 is chronicled in all works on Iceland, as the prodigious floods of lava it poured forth in that year were unparalleled in historic times. The molten streams rushing seaward, down the rivers and valleys, the glowing lava leaping over precipices and rocks, which in after ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... import the Anglo-Saxon man with the Anglo-Arabian horse if they would bring to a creditable conclusion the programme of 1833. And during all the long period that has since elapsed what courage and patience, what determined will, to say nothing of the prodigious expenditure of money, have been shown by the founders of the race-course in France and by their successors! Their perseverance has had its reward, indeed, in the brilliancy of the results obtained, but there is still due to them an ampler tribute of recognition ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... all those houses; never getting any nearer to the blazing fires that gleamed and shone upon the windows, or came puffing out of the chimney tops; and incapable of participation in any of the good things that were constantly being handled, through the street doors and the area railings, to prodigious cooks. Faces came and went at many windows: sometimes pretty faces, youthful faces, pleasant faces: sometimes the reverse: but Toby knew no more (though he often speculated on these trifles, standing ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... lady turned round, with a scream; her muslin dress, which she was holding up in front, dropped from her hand, and a prodigious lapful of flowers rolled out on ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... bow, and was taking my aim, when Gabriel, passing me, made a signal to forbear, and rushing upon the thief, he kicked him in the back, just as he was balancing the saddles upon his head. The thief fell down, and attempted to struggle, but the prodigious muscular strength of Gabriel was too much for him; in a moment he laid half strangled and motionless. We bound him firmly hand and foot, and carried him to his burrow; we laid the two bodies by his side, stowed our luggage in ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... sweetest bit of scenery imaginable. These cliffs have been for ages the admiration of all beholders, and though thousands of tons are taken from the quarries every year, yet the inhabitants say that no great change takes place in their appearance. The Avon has a prodigious rise of tide at Bristol, and at low water the bed of the river is a mere brook, with immense banks of mud. The country all around is exquisitely attractive, and affords us an idea of cultivation and adornment beyond what we are accustomed to at home. In these rocks are found fine ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... Indians bring away a great number of eggs to eat them dried in the sun; and they break a considerable number through carelessness during the gathering. The number of eggs that are hatched before the people can dig them up is so prodigious, that near the encampment of Uruana I saw the whole shore of the Orinoco swarming with little tortoises an inch in diameter, escaping with difficulty from the pursuit of the Indian children. If to these considerations be ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Niagara Falls—"a vast and prodigious Cadence of Water," he calls it—made a deep impression on the Father, and he proceeded to write in his journal this description, which, when it was printed, was the first published account of the cataract: "This wonderful Downfall is compounded of two great Cross-streams ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... make a prodigious effort of memory, seized his head between his hands, closed his eyes, and racked his brains: after quite a long silence, he declared emphatically ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... clouds of smoke and flame into the lurid sky all around the horizon. Up to the foot of the mountains the sea covered the vast plain; and the action of these waves of fire and steaming floods forms a natural epic of the grandest order. Prodigious quantities of ashes and cinders were discharged from the craters; and these, deposited and hardened by long pressure under water, formed the reddish-brown earthy rock called tufa, of which the seven hills of Rome ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... glory to be even briefly mentioned in an encyclopaedia. And there grew in me an enormous ambition that devoured all my other ambitions, which was no less than this: that I should live to know that after my death my name would surely be printed in the encyclopaedia. It was such a prodigious thing to expect that I kept the idea a secret even from myself, just letting it lie where it sprouted, in an unexplored corner of my busy brain. But it grew on me in spite of myself, till finally I could not resist the temptation to study out the exact place in the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... little doubt your power to make good your words unless you have the help of your brother Dionysodorus; then you may do it. Tell me now, both of you, for although in the main I cannot doubt that I really do know all things, when I am told so by men of your prodigious wisdom—how can I say that I know such things, Euthydemus, as that the good are unjust; come, do I know that ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... have been preserved with religious care. He was one of the most prolific of the ancient Greek writers. Diogenes calls him "a most voluminous writer," and estimates the number of works composed by him at no less than three hundred, the principal of which he enumerates.[764] But out of all this prodigious collection, not a single book has reached us in a complete, or at least an independent form. Three letters, which contain some outlines of his philosophy, are preserved by Diogenes, who has also embodied his "Fundamental Maxims"—forty-four propositions, containing ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to the highest Pinnacle of the Rock, and placing me on the Top of it, Cast thy Eyes Eastward, said he, and tell me what thou seest. I see, said I, a huge Valley, and a prodigious Tide of Water rolling through it. The Valley that thou seest, said he, is the Vale of Misery, and the Tide of Water that thou seest is part of the great Tide of Eternity. What is the Reason, said I, that the Tide I see rises out of a thick Mist ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... huge hemlock, luckily standing at no great distance on his right; a course which he thought would divert the monster from pursuit of the maiden, and, at the same time, best insure his own safety. But, so prodigious was the rushing speed of the foiled and now doubly exasperated moose, that the imperilled huntsman had barely time to reach the sheltering tree and dodge behind it, before the hotly pursuing foe was at his heels, rasping and tearing with ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... turned into the level, Stanley's musings were broken in upon by a sudden prodigious clatter. Looking up, he became aware of a terror, rolling portentous down the flinty ridge upon him; a whirlwind streak of billowed dust, shod with sparks, tipped by a hurtling color yet unknown to man; and from the whirlwind ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... could never perceive the prodigious improbability of the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly to say nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank from alarming her. Not feeling anything definite himself he could ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... soon fell in with their new scheme for preventing the peace. It was believed by many persons, that the ministers might, with little difficulty, have brought him over, if they had pleased to make a trial; for as he would probably have accepted any terms to continue in a station of such prodigious[77] profit, so there was sufficient room to work upon his fears, of which he is seldom unprovided[78] (I mean only in his political capacity) and his infirmity very much increased by his unmeasurable possessions, which have rendered him, ipsique[79] onerique ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... shall we represent a home? It is easy to represent a woman, but how shall we add the idea of wife? To do this we must pass from simple pictures to symbols. Chinese writing has never advanced beyond this stage. Its prodigious type-case of more than forty-two thousand characters contains, therefore, only a series of pictures, direct and symbolic, all highly conventionalized, but recognizable in their earlier forms. To represent "wife" the Chinaman combines the two signs for "woman" ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Madame Roussillon broke in contemptuously, "it's a piastre to a sou that you stood gawping in through a window while gentlemen and ladies did the dancing. I can imagine how you looked—I can!" and with this she took her prodigious bulk at a waddling gait out of the room. "I remember how you danced even when you were not clumsy as a pig on ice!" she shrieked back ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... scarcely consistent with healthy manhood of mind, and which seems growing, as is testified by the "Angel World"—that there is a great gulf between the powers it indicates, and the task of leading the age—and that, on the whole, it is rather a prodigious comet in the poetical heavens, than either a still, calm luminary, or even the curdling of a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... before the dawn, and when the sea was yet full of darkness, I was greatly startled to hear a prodigious splash amid the weed, mayhaps at a distance of some hundred yards from the boat. Then, as I stood full of alertness, and knowing not what the next moment might bring forth, there came to me across the immense waste of weed, a long, mournful ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... beginning to decline, or her flux of ill words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience. Francie bowed low, left the room, closed the door behind him: and then turned him about in the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a prodigious deal of sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one twenty times over, to the end of which, for the greater efficacy, he tacked on 'damnable' and 'hellish.' Fas est ab hoste doceri— disrespect is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt relieved, and went upstairs ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There was little doubt that one day—and that probably not many years distant—Max Wyndham would be a great man too. Even as it was, his grip upon all things that concerned the profession he had chosen was so prodigious that his patron would upon occasion consult with him as an equal, detecting in him that flare of genius which in itself is of more value than years of accumulated knowledge. He had the gift of magnetism to an extraordinary degree, and he coupled ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George! The prodigious effort ought to have kept the heart throb out of his voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took refuge in a truth that in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time; but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed, just close to my bed-room window is the club-room ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to sea, could be heard the Nibelungen! Wagner had, against his innermost conviction, consented to permit the use of the work by the larger theatres in the supposition that such personal experience of the "prodigious deed" would open heart and hand for a still grander one, the permanent establishment of a distinctive German art. Vienna came first. However excellent the performance of a few, for instance, Scaria as Wotan, Materna as Brunnhilde and the orchestra under Hans ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... race of South American birds, at once recognizable by the prodigious size of their beaks and by the richness of their plumage. "These birds are very common," says Prince Von Wied, "in all parts of the extensive forests of the Brazils and are killed for the table in large numbers during the cool seasons. Their eggs are deposited in the hollow limbs and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... to be married, and shall have many children by his wife. It lies not in our power to oppose this destiny; for it hath passed through the hands and spindles of the Fatal Sisters, necessity's inexorable daughters. Who knows but by his sons may be found out an herb of such another virtue and prodigious energy, as that by the aid thereof, in using it aright according to their father's skill, they may contrive a way for humankind to pierce into the high aerian clouds, get up unto the springhead of the hail, take an inspection of the snowy sources, and shut and open as they please ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... against France and Spain. The success of this war is worthy admiration [sic], and almost incredible. The conquest of the Spanish Guelderland, the Electorate of Cologn [sic], and the Bishopric of Liege; the prodigious victory over the French and Bavarians at Blenheim, under the surprising conduct of the Duke of Marlborough; the retaking of Landau; the conquering all the estates of the Duke of Bavaria in Germany; the forcing the French and Bavarians out of their ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... the French ambassador shaking his sides with laughter to see the women at battle. His Royal Highness, the Duke of York, got us access to present the furs. Egad, Ramsay, I am a rough man, but it seemed prodigious strange to see a king giving audience in the apartments of the French woman, and great men leering for a smile from that huzzy! The king lolls on a Persian couch with a litter of spaniel puppies on one side and the French woman on the other. And what do you think that black-eyed ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World- Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... as just described, our hero, as you may well imagine, must have been a man of prodigious bodily strength. To be sure, a tall, supple, well-knit, athletic white man like Simon Kenton, for example, might, in a wrestling-match and by some unexpected sleight of foot, have kicked his heels from under him and brought him flat on his back with ease. But keeping him there ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... further prosecution. Whether these will be enough to break the Peace upon, or no, he cannot tell; but I perceive the certainty of peace is blown over. To Charing Cross, there to see the great boy and girle that are lately come out of Ireland, the latter eight, the former but four years old, of most prodigious bigness for their age. I tried to weigh them in my arms, and and them twice as heavy as people almost twice their age; and yet I am apt to believe they are very young. Their father a little sorry fellow, and their mother an old Irish woman. They have ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... rob the house; but she was altogether astonished when she found he had made shift to elude the inquiry of her parents, because she could not conceive the possibility of his escaping by the window, which was in the third storey, at a prodigious distance from the ground; and how he should conceal himself in the apartment, was a mystery which she could by no means unfold. Before her father and mother retired, she lighted her lamp, on pretence of being ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... we went under our fore-sail and main-top-sail close-reefed: At day-light the next morning, added to them the fore and mizen top-sails. At four o'clock it fell calm; but a prodigious high sea from the N.E., and a complication of the worst of weather, viz. snow, sleet, and rain, continued, together with the calm, till nine o'clock in the evening. Then the weather cleared up, and we got a breeze at S.E. by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Julian Jones. I looked up, for he stood something like six feet four inches in height. His hair, a wispy, sandy yellow, seemed as dimmed and faded as his eyes. It may have been the sun which had washed out his colouring; at least his face bore the evidence of a prodigious and ardent sun-burn which had long since faded to yellow. As his eyes turned from the exhibit and focussed on mine I noted a queer look in them as of one who vainly tries to recall ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... she looked up, while I walked slowly over to her and took the garden chair beside her. That gave me a view of her sketch, which was a violent little "lay-in" of shrubbery, trees, and the sky-line of the inn. To my prodigious surprise (and, naturally enough, with a degree of pleasure) I perceived that it was not very bad, not bad at all, indeed. It displayed a sense of values, of placing, and even, in a young and frantic way, of colour. Here was a young woman of more ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... and again a year later, other meetings were held at Casco Bay with the chiefs of the various Abenaki tribes, in which, after prodigious circumlocution, the Boston treaty was ratified, and the war ended.[272] This time the Massachusetts Assembly, taught wisdom by experience, furnished a guarantee of peace by providing for government trading-houses in the Indian country, where goods ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... the last century the Baron de Beaurepaire lived in the chateau of that name in Brittany. His family was of prodigious antiquity; seven successive barons had already flourished on this spot when a younger son of the house accompanied his neighbor the Duke of Normandy in his descent on England, and was rewarded by a grant of English land, on which he dug a mote and built a chateau, ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... death lives, and nature breeds Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable!'" N. ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... sailors. The rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however, until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under canvas. Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail. For her there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the quarter-deck. Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then in seventy-nine—records ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... the place, with the exception of some resemblance in the exterior of the buildings. Here, it is said, the royal family used occasionally to meet, and pass an afternoon in a silly representation of rural life, that must have proved to be a prodigious caricature. The King (at least, so the guide affirmed), performed the part of the Seigneur, and occupied the proper abode; the Queen was the Dairy woman, and we were shown the marble tables that held her porcelain milk-pans; the present King, as became his ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that we are alone, we had better have an explanation. I don't know by what philter or incantation you have obtained such prodigious influence over my betrothed; but I know that I love her, that I have been loved by her more than four years, and that I will not stop at any means ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... the army then fell to work upon a great image of a horse. They built it of wood, fitted and carved, and with a door so cunningly concealed that none might notice it. When it was finished, the horse looked like a prodigious idol; but it was hollow, skilfully pierced here and there, and so spacious that a band of men could lie hidden within and take no harm. Into this hiding-place went Odysseus, Menelaus, and the other chiefs, fully armed, and ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... the laws which govern their existence, and the destinies to which they are moving on—is calculated to have a very momentous effect on the welfare of mankind. Great results ensue from small beginnings, and the seeds of knowledge now being sown in the world may ultimately bear prodigious harvest. We, who are present merely at the sowing, may not realize the magnitude and importance of the impulse we are concerned in giving, but that impulse will roll on, and a few generations hence will be productive of tremendous consequences ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the case with some members of the same order. Why Cercopithecus, considering its habits while young, has not become thus provided, it would be difficult to say. It is, however, possible that the long tail of this monkey may be of more service to it as a balancing organ in making its prodigious leaps, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... because we had spoke of it already in a former Conversation; by the same Token, that I told you then, that [5] the Word Honour, I mean, the Sence of it, was very whimsical, and the Difference in the Signification so prodigious, according as the Attribute was either applied to a Man, or to a Woman, that neither shall forfeit their Honour, tho' each should be guilty, and openly boast of what would ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude; that numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra. It is no breach of charity to call these Fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the base ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... through several passages, to a room, where, before a well-spread board, at which stood several flagons of wine, we found that functionary, seated in a well-stuffed high-back chair, a large napkin being placed under his chin, and fastened over his shoulders. His height was not great, but his size was prodigious; his cheeks swelling out on either side, scarcely allowed his small grey eyes to be visible. A large dish was on the table, from which he appeared to have helped himself abundantly. We stood before him with our hats in ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... sun had disappeared. A gigantic black shadow was approaching fast from the west, as if prodigious bare feet were rustling over the sand. And the chill breezes stole ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous academy in Milan, they placed in ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... permission, so often demanded before in vain, to penetrate into the Middle Empire. Their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy facilitated their settlement and enabled them to gather, as well from the ancient annals of the country, as during their journies, a prodigious quantity of most valuable information concerning the history, ethnography, and geography of the Celestial Empire. Fathers Mendoza, Ricci, Trigault, Visdelou, Lecomte, Verbiest, Navarrete, Schall, and Martini, deserve especial mention for having carried ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... not common with authors then]—TO INTERRUPT OR CHANGE OTHER MEN'S ARGUMENTS, WITH A MAGISTERIAL AUTHORITY, to protect oneself from the opposition of others, by a nod, a smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that trembles with reverence and respect. A man of a prodigious fortune, coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that was foolishly set on foot at his table, began in these words:—'It can only be a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than so and so.' 'Pursue this philosophical point with ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the year 1537, was reigning Duke of Bracciano. Among Italian princes he ranked at least upon a par with the Dukes of Urbino, and his family, by its alliances, was more illustrious than any of that time in Italy. He was a man of gigantic stature, prodigious corpulence, and marked personal daring; agreeable in manners, but subject to uncontrollable fits of passion, and incapable of self-restraint when crossed in any whim or fancy. Upon the habit of his body it is needful to insist, in order that the part he played in this tragedy of intrigue, crime, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... entirely to prehension and thus relieving the jaws of that part of their work, has cooeperated in producing that peculiar contour of head and face which is the chief distinguishing mark of physical Man. These slight anatomical changes derive their importance entirely from the prodigious intellectual changes in connection with which they have been produced; and these intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance, psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as to dwarf in ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... every thing the fancy conjures up as important to happiness. The vulgar mistake even what they have the means of knowing, or, which is the same thing, what they are least practised in they are dazzled with; they proclaim it, accordingly, marvellous, prodigious, extraordinary; it is a phenomenon. They neither admire nor respect much what is always visible to their eyes; but whatever strikes their imagination, whatever gives scope to the mind, becomes itself the fruitful source of other ideas far more extravagant. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... time, he said, when he did not rhyme, and his sister records that as a very little boy he used to walk around the table "spanning out on the smooth mahogany the scansion of verses he had composed." Some of these early lines he could recall and he could recall, too, the prodigious satisfaction with which he uttered them, especially the sentence he put into the mouth of a man who had just committed murder—"Now my soul is satisfied." At twelve he had a volume named Incondita ready for publication. To discerning ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... that an accurate account should be taken of their numbers; but the persons who were employed soon desisted, with amazement and dismay, from the prosecution of the endless and impracticable task: [67] and the principal historian of the age most seriously affirms, that the prodigious armies of Darius and Xerxes, which had so long been considered as the fables of vain and credulous antiquity, were now justified, in the eyes of mankind, by the evidence of fact and experience. A probable testimony has fixed the number of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... theme; and so pleasantly did he talk, illustrating his arguments with anecdotes so amusing and apposite, that I felt myself being perceptibly influenced by his views, and used to dream of climbing trees of prodigious height, and gathering nuggets from their branches as if they were apples. When lending an assisting hand at our farm labors, he would descant on the fertility of the soil on the Pacific Slope, saying that crops grew almost spontaneously, and related ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... every fraction of which the fugitive put forth his highest possible effort. Such a terrific strain cannot fail to tell upon the most highly trained animal, and so, despite all he could do, the buck found himself unable to keep up his prodigious tension. He was losing ground, and he could not fail to know that escape was out of the question: he was as much doomed as if surrounded and driven at bay by a dozen hunters and their hounds. He was still running at his highest bent, when he suddenly ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... their enemies, would unanimously fly to his standard, and would seat him on the vacant throne, to which he brought such plausible pretensions. His aspiring spirit, inflamed by the fervor of youth, and buoyed up by his natural courage, saw the glory alone of the enterprise, or regarded the prodigious difficulties which attended it as the source only of further glory. The miseries and oppressions which he had beheld his countrymen suffer in their unequal contest, the repeated defeats and misfortunes which they had undergone, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... point as to be able to perform very extraordinary feats. But on such feats he sets little value. The habits of his mind, he tells us, are such that he is not disposed to rate highly any accomplishment, however rare, which is of no practical use to mankind. As to these prodigious achievements of the memory, he ranks them with the exhibitions of rope-dancers and tumblers. "These two performances," he says, "are much of the same sort. The one is an abuse of the powers of the body; the other is an abuse of the powers of the mind. Both may perhaps excite our wonder; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to understand by it was, that she designed this Summer to shew her Son his Estate in a distant County, in which he has never yet been: But she soon took care to rob me of that agreeable Mistake, and let me into the whole Affair. She enlarged upon young Master's prodigious Improvements, and his comprehensive Knowledge of all Book-Learning; concluding, that it was now high time he should be made acquainted with Men and Things; that she had resolved he should make the Tour of France and Italy, but could not bear ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... they do not fly at all; but the membrane which unites their limbs acts like a parachute in keeping them up in the air, and materially assists them in some of their prodigious leaps." ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... tells us that Atahuallpa's envoy addressed the Spanish commander in the most humble and deprecatory manner, as Son of the Sun and of the great God Viracocha. He adds, that he was loaded with a prodigious present of all kinds of game, living and dead, gold and silver vases, emeralds, turquoises, &c., &c, enough to furnish out the finest chapter of the Arabian Nights. (Com. Real., Parte 2, lib. 1, cap. 19.) It is extraordinary that none of the Conquerors who had a quick eye for ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Nightingale as to what would come of young Nightingale's growing up to the acquisition of that art. Suspended was the interest of Nightingale, when his name was done—as if he thought the letters were only sown, to come up presently in some other form. Prodigious, and wrong-handed was the cross made by Nightingale on much encouragement—the strokes directed from him instead of towards him; and most patient and sweet-humoured was the smile of Nightingale as he stepped ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... ground every where around it threatened us with unhealthy situations; neither could the shipping have ridden in perfect security when the wind blew from the SE to which the bay lay much exposed, the sea at that time rolling in with a prodigious swell. A removal therefore to Port Jackson was highly applauded, and would have taken place the next morning, but at daylight we were surprised by the appearance of two strange sail in the offing. Of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... by a dozen? They haven't. There was good reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time who was competent—not a dozen, and not two. A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain—footprints that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and stronger than the townsmen, he assaulted the city on all sides at once with arms and engines. A battering-ram having been brought up, shattered a part of the wall that reached from one tower to another, and this falling with a prodigious noise and crash, left much of the town exposed. On this a Roman cohort made an assault through the breach, while at the same time the townsmen, quitting their several posts, ran together from all parts to the place, which was endangered ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... to the extensive inland bodies of fresh water in the Canadas. Of these, Lake Superior is upwards of 1500 miles in circuit, with a depth of 70 fathoms near the shores, while Michigan and Huron are almost as prodigious; even Erie is 600 miles round, and Ontario near 500, and Nepigon, the head of the system geographically, though the least important at present commercially, but just now partially explored, is fully 400. Their ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... accustomed to the sight of him; he would run over my bed, and come and take the precious morsels out of my hand. Would to heaven these had been the only insects which visited my abode. It was still summer, and the gnats had begun to multiply to a prodigious and alarming extent. The previous winter had been remarkably mild, and after the prevalence of the March winds followed extreme heat. It is impossible to convey an idea of the insufferable oppression of the air in the place I occupied. Opposed directly to a noontide sun, under a leaden roof, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... confidence in it; perhaps you have heard the name; it is known as Kitchens's Spiritual Elixir. The Elixir has enlightened millions; and, I will take on me to say, will convert you in twenty-four hours. Its operation is mild and pleasurable, and its effects are marvellous, prodigious, though it does not consist of more than eight duodecimo pages. Here's a list of testimonies to some of the most remarkable cases. I have known one hundred and two cases myself in which it effected a saving change in six hours; seventy-nine in which its operations took place ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
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