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His whole mental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery; wheel within wheel; plans of hugest mechanism; Brobdignagian steam-engines; Niagaras of water-power; wind-mills with "sail-broad vans," like those of Satan in chaos, by the proper application of which every valley was to be exalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy tops and uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternal ices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificial islands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosom of the deep.
The head raised itself, the blocks that formed its neck separating into open wedges like a Brobdignagian replica of those jointed, fantastic, little painted reptiles the Japanese toy-makers cut from wood. It seemed to regard us mockingly. The pointed head dropped past us streamed the body. Upon it other pyramids clustered like the spikes that guarded the back of the nightmare Brontosaurus.
As Professor Nichol very truly remarks, 'investigation regarding such aggregations is virtually a branch of atomic and molecular inquiry, with stars in place of atoms, mighty spheres in place of 'dust, 'the firmament above' instead of 'the firmament beneath. In fact, the astronomer, in sweeping with his telescopic eye the 'blue depths of ether, is, as it were, some Lilliputian inhabitant of an atom prying into the autumnal structure of some Brobdignagian world of saw-dust; organised into spiral and other elementary forms, of life, it may be, something like our own.
The mirror opposite which you brush your hair is enshrined in the heaviest of gilt frames and is large enough for a Brobdignagian, but the basin in which you wash your hands is little larger than a sugar-bowl; and when you emerge from your nine-times-summoned bath you find you have to dry your sacred person with six little towels, none larger than a snuff-taker's handkerchief.
And then, the unveiled wonders of that strange, new world of canvas and pasteboard and trap-doors, people, Nature, Art, and architecture, never before beheld, and but faintly conceived of, the magic of shifting scenes, the suddenness and awfulness of subterranean and aerial descents and ascents, the solemn stage-walk of the heroine, the majestic strut of the hero, the princely sweep of velvet, the illusive sparkle of paste, the rattle of Brobdignagian pearls, the saucy tossing of pages' plumes, the smiles, the wiles, the astonishing bounds and bewildering pirouettes of the dancing Houries, the great sobs and small shrieks of persecuted beauty, the blighting smile of the villain, the lofty indifference of supernumeraries!
Having gained the summit of the hill, and having stood and looked long over the cultured but lifeless campaign, I felt a wish to quit the high road, which I had hitherto followed, and get in among those tilled grounds fertile as the beds of a Brobdignagian kitchen-garden spreading far and wide even to the boundaries of the horizon, where, from a dusk green, distance changed them to a sullen blue, and confused their tints with those of the livid and thunderous-looking sky.
The shafts in this mine are not sunk perpendicularly, but are slightly inclined: the huge buckets, lowered and raised by means of powerful machinery, are but ancient caldrons, counterparts of those in which the weird witches in "Macbeth" might have brewed their unholy decoctions, or such as the dreadful giants that formed the nightmare of my childhood might have used in preparing those Brobdignagian repasts among the ingredients of which a plump child held the same rank as a crab in ours.
This feudal legacy of a brobdignagian agricultural sector in, for instance, Poland now hampers the EU accession talks. Vassals were little freer than slaves. In comparison, burghers, the inhabitants of the city, were liberated from the bondage of the feudal labour contract.
Murmurous chanting it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to me; unfamiliar, abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal-clear jewels of sound, golden tollings and all ordered, mathematical, GEOMETRIC, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians of the ruins, Brobdignagian of the haunted hollow.
During its sojourn at the hotel the appreciation of its meanness had troubled us. But now, in the shabby little chamber, where there were no rival attractions to detract from its glory, we felt proud of it. It was just the right size for the surroundings. A two-franc tree, had Grand'mere possessed one, would have been Brobdignagian and pretentious.
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