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Great Bear   /greɪt bɛr/   Listen
Great Bear

noun
1.
A constellation outside the zodiac that rotates around the North Star.  Synonym: Ursa Major.






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"Great Bear" Quotes from Famous Books



... procession. All of the principal stars are now well known, and their limits clearly defined upon charts, so that we can easily acquire a knowledge of them. The inhabitants of North America have the constellation of Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, and the North Star always with them; they never wholly disappear below the horizon. When the mariner sailing north of the equator has determined the position of the "Great Bear," two of whose stars, ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... Odyssey, Calypso directs Odysseus, in accordance with Phoenician rules for navigating the Mediterranean, to keep the Great Bear "ever on the left as he traversed the deep" when sailing from the pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to Corfu. Yet such a course taken now would land the traveller in Africa. Odysseus is said in his voyage in springtime to have seen the Pleiades and Arcturus setting late, which seemed to ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... detected Addison giving a sly wink to Theodora. This confused me so much that I stopped in haste and was more cautious about my realistic descriptions in future. Halstead began hectoring me that forenoon concerning my adventure, and nicknamed me "the great bear hunter." Much incensed, I retorted by asking him whether he had paid for that seed-corn. Hearing that, Addison, who was near us, cast an inquiring look at Halstead, and the latter hurriedly changed the subject; he was unusually polite to ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... at the body of the great bear; the next moment its presence was forgotten. He passed on, and confronted those whom he had unwillingly rescued. The depression of his brows, and the glint of his eyes and merciless set of his jaws, ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... aiming at the shoulder, and my bullet shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the laurel bushes, so that it was ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... Great Bear Lake and the Mackenzie River, however, and saw the ragged peaks of the Rocky Mountains, which here almost touch the shores of the Arctic Sea. Blown on and on, with little diminution of speed, it was not many hours before the Snowbird was flying over Alaskan wilds. The flying ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood

... full-moon was there, and there was no cloud or haze to obscure her light; but she did not shine. Her white, rayless face was a mockery to the night. The same was true of the stars. The dazzling canopy was faded out, and Cygnus and the Great Bear were subdued to pallid points, like patches of white-gray paper ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... instruction," said a saint in Cromwell's war, "that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty." Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way,—Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules:—every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,—justice, love, freedom, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... sleepy," grumbled the Great Bear; "I am trying to keep my eyes open. Perhaps that is the reason I wink ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May

... you might be somewhere along the western shore. After we divided for our scout about the lake, the Great Bear and I met as we had arranged, but you did not come. We concluded that the enemy had got in the way, and so we took from its hiding place a canoe which had been left on a former journey, and began to cruise upon Andiatarocte, calling at far intervals ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler

... chests of the worst cigars you ever smoked; three pipes of wine that no one would drink, and a great bear, that had been imported from Greenland for the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... replied his father; "but we must have been mistaken, I suppose. Of course, they could have got behind Great Bear and then kept ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking

... willow, alder, etc.—have an appearance of youth; so that the traveller would hardly suppose them to be more than a few years old, at first sight. Really this juvenile appearance is a species of second childhood; for, on the shores of the Great Bear Lake, four centuries are necessary for the growth of a trunk not as thick as a man's wrist. The further north the more lamentably decrepit becomes the appearance of these woodlands, until, presently, their sordidness is veiled by thick growths of ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... hours he may be guided by the wind, provided he is sure he is not going ashore on Long Island. Thus, in time, he feels his way out into the open sea. By day he has some idea of direction with the aid of the sun; by night, when the sky is clear he can steer by the Great Bear, or "Cynosure," the compass of his ancient predecessors on the Mediterranean. But when it is cloudy, if he persists in steaming ahead, he may be running towards the Azores or towards Greenland, or he may be making his ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... dreadfully as I stood staring about me! It was not dark out here in the open field, for at this season of the year it is not dark there all night long, when the sky is unclouded. Away in the north was the Great Bear. I knew that constellation, for by it one of the men had taught me to find the pole-star. Nearly under it was the light of the sun, creeping round by the north towards the spot in the east where he would rise again. But I learned only afterwards to understand this. I gazed at ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... I can, but the doubts which you and your sister so often throw on my understanding make me almost doubt myself," retorted Lambert, with a laughing glance at Elsie. "You must know, then, that there is a constellation named the Great Bear. It bears about as much resemblance to a bear as it does to a rattlesnake, but that's what astronomers have called it. Part of it is much more in the shape of a plough, and one of the stars in that plough is the pole-star. ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne

... long. 25 W.—Rather hot. It is very fine to see all the stars of the heavens almost rise and pass overhead and set—Great Bear and Southern Cross shining as in rivalry of each other, and both hemispheres showing forth all their glory. Only the Polar Star, that shines straight above you, is gone below our horizon; and One alone knows how much toil, and perhaps sorrow, there may be in store for me ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the Baboo, with a business-like impassibility that in Wall Street would have made him a great bear;— "where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... Voltaire, whom she looks upon as a god. She was, by the bye, put into a great rage one day, lately, by a print-seller in the street, who was crying, "Here is Voltaire, the famous Prussian; here you see him, with a great bear-skin cap, to keep him from the cold! Here is the famous Prussian, for six sous!"—"What a profanation!" said she. To return to my story: M. de Chenevieres had shewn her some letters from Voltaire, and M. Marmontel had read an 'Epistle ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 1 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... Venus and Jupiter, and Sirius the dog star, and Saturn, and the star you steer your ship by, the polar star.... And all the constellations, the Milky Way, and the belt of Orion, and the Plow and the Great Bear and the great glory you see when you pass the line, the Southern Cross ... and the little stars you have no names for, but mark them on your chart with quaint Greek letters.... Our little world is so little, so pathetically little in this immensity.... It is as ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... the sixties, had almost started World War Three. An atomic blast had leveled a hundred square miles of the city and started fires that had taken weeks to extinguish. Soviet Russia had roared in its great bear voice that the Western Powers had attacked, and was apparently on the verge of coming to the defense of its Asian comrade when the Chinese government had said irritatedly that there had been no attack, that traitorous ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett

... "Look out for the Great Bear and the Bull!"—another command for the Hispaniola, for now that the ship was higher, she was passing among the stars, all as perfectly round as so many toy balloons, all marvelously luminous, and each most accommodatingly marked ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... just back up there on that hill we'll find the remains of the railway cut, and less than ten miles north of here lies all that's left of Buffalo. Some luck, eh? Cast away, only fifteen miles or so from a place like that. And we might have gone to Great Bear Lake, or to—h-m!—to any other place, for all the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... these dogs is white, with patches of grayish-black and brown. They are known only in the neighbourhood of the Mackenzie River and of the Great Bear Lake in North America They appear to be good-tempered and easily manageable, and soon become familiar even with strangers. They are most valuable to the Indians, who live almost entirely on the produce ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... reached to the stars. When the tree had finished growing, Wainamoinen sang another magic song, so that the moon was caught fast in the tree's branches and obliged to shine there until Wainamoinen should reverse his spell. And then by another spell he made the stars of the Great Bear fast in the tree-top, and then jumped into his sledge and drove on again to his home, with his cap set awry on his head, mourning because he had promised to send Ilmarinen back to the Northland, to forge the magic ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind

... sort of resentment that these two dirty Indians must be watched, and so break into his much needed rest. He riveted his attention upon the stars, and began to name over the constellations he could see. There was the Great Bear, the trapper's timepiece in the wilderness; and there, almost directly above him and very bright, the North Star, the hunter's compass. Then, there was the Big Dipper, very high, and the Little Bear. Southerly, through the trees, and looking ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... thalers, laughingly promising to repeat the prescription whenever Arvid was again wounded at "single-stick." He was greatly pleased to have his friend with him once more, and, when Arvid was strong enough to join in his vigorous sports again, one of the first things he proposed was a great bear-hunt up among the snow-filled forests ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... of the story of the great bear, the medium bear, and the little ditto,' observed Montgomery, who was apt at an analogy. 'You may remember that when the great bear found ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse

... known that persons are likely to be competent trainers of animals if they are born under the influence of the Whale or of the Centaur or the Lion or the Scorpion or when the Lesser Bear rises at dawn or in those watches of the night when the Great Bear, after swinging low in the northern sky, is again beginning to swing upwards, or at those hours of the day when, as it can be established by calculations, the Great Bear, though invisible in the glow of the sunlight, is in that part of its ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... the direction of the Great Bear, showed him the polar star; then Cassiopeia, whose constellation forms a Y; Vega, of the Lyra constellation—all scintillating; and at the lower part of ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... cities in the far north, that of Bearville, on the shores of Great Bear Lake, in latitude 65 degrees, must not be passed over. Bearville is the metropolis of one of the finest mineral districts in the world, but had it not been for the inexhaustible deposits of all the useful ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius

... one respect, anyhow. There was really no reason in the world why Tom should not lie upon the great bear-skin rug in front of the library fire those cold winter nights if he wanted to, nor need anyone be surprised that he should want to. It was indeed a most delightful place to lie in. The bear-skin was soft and in every way ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs

... driftwood, when, their eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, they found a pile of wood in the corner of the cave, which satisfied them that at some time in the past this cave had been used by robbers or pirates, who probably had been driven away by this great bear, or possibly might even have been eaten ...
— Tommy Trots Visit to Santa Claus • Thomas Nelson Page

... say it is a piece of very good fortune;—at least, for those who like bears' feet for dinner. Somebody or other has lighted upon the great bear that got away in the summer, and poked her out of her den, on the fjelde. She is certainly abroad, with her two last year's cubs; and their traces have been found just above, near the foss. Olaf had heard of her being roused; ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau

... the boy, "neither darkness, nor the great bear, nor the were-wolf. For I am Gundhar's son, and ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... yards long, but papa says it is difficult to tell this, but that it is really about a degree and a half in length, or about six diameters of the moon. The nucleus is larger and brighter than any star in the Great Bear, and these are all bright here to a degree of which you can form no idea. The planets look as large as fourpenny-pieces. Papa has made me reduce them to this estimate, as I originally said as large as sixpences; but he questions altogether ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... ashes of the path, of course, are supposed to be hot and glowing, not dead and black like the ash-paths of modern running-grounds. Other and more recent names for certain constellations are also intelligible. In Homer's time the Greeks had two names for the Great Bear; they called it the Bear, or the Wain: and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out, though no resemblance to a bear is manifest. In the United States the same constellation is popularly styled the Dipper, and every one may observe the likeness to a dipper ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... nearly a pint, the president made his speech to the health and happiness of the young 'squire, and draining it dry, passed it on to his left-hand neighbour. The croupier did the same, and like the great bear of Bradwardine, did the acorn of Nannau begin to make its rounds, in a manner quite as fearful to me as was the terrific approach of the bear aforesaid to the heir of Waverley Honor. Unfortunately for me, I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various

... Modern critics, however, admit that there was a prince of this name, and find proof of it in the frequent mention of him in the writings of the Welsh bards. But the Arthur of romance, according to Mr. Owen, a Welsh scholar and antiquarian, is a mythological person. "Arthur," he says, "is the Great Bear, as the name literally implies (Arctos, Arcturus), and perhaps this constellation, being so near the pole, and visibly describing a circle in a small space, is the origin of the famous ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... ago the constellation of the Great Bear or Dipper was a starry cross; a hundred thousand years hence the imaginary Dipper will be upside down, and the stars which form the bowl and handle will have changed places. The misty nebulae are moving, and besides are whirling around in great spirals, some ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... up that night at Hauskuldstede, and roused all his household, "I will tell you my dream," he said. "I thought I saw a great bear go out of this house, and I knew at once this beast's match was not to be found; two cubs followed him, wishing well to the bear, and they all made for Hrutstede, and went into the house there. After that I woke. Now I wish to ask ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... the different animals and how to trap and shoot them, and lastly he taught him about the stars and the stories connected with them. Little Mus-kin-gum could point out the Dipper or Great Bear, the Little Bear, how the last star but one in the Dipper—the star at the bend of the handle—is called 'Mizar,' one of the horses; and just above tucked close in is a smaller star—'Alcor' or 'the rider.' The Indians called ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... suddenly asked himself this, a confused, painful sense of awe seemed to crush him to the ground. Persistently he gazed at a brilliant star in the tail of the Great Bear and recollected how Kousma the peasant in the melon-field had called this majestic constellation a "wheelbarrow." He felt annoyed, in a way, that such an irrelevant thought should have crossed his mind. He gazed at the black garden in sharp ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... entire heavens, looking at one minute upon the stars surrounding the vernal, and at another, by changing my position, upon those in the neighbourhood of the autumnal equinox. By little more than a turn of my head I could see in one direction Polaris (alpha Ursae Minoris) with the Great Bear, and in another the Southern Cross, the Ship, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... drowned in this drink of men—I who had never known a mother's breast in the briefness of time I had lived—had it not been for Lingaard. But when he plucked me forth from the brew, Tostig Lodbrog struck him down in a rage. We rolled on the deck, and the great bear hounds, captured in the fight with the North Danes ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... England's fault. She has done all she could to avoid it. It is the Great Bear of Russia who wants Turkey put out ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... sitting beside Oo-koo-hoo, we began talking about bear hunting and he said: "My son, some day you, too, may want to become a great bear-hunter, and when you do go out to hunt alone, don't do as I do, but do as I say, for I am growing old and am sometimes careless about the way I approach game." Puffing away at his pipe, he presently continued: "In trailing bear, the hunter's method of approach, of course, depends ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... it is, dearie. Love's not a spiritual nor a mental thing. It's purely physical. A love affair is always a thousand times swifter under the Southern Cross than under the Great Bear. And it's a million times swifter on board ship than anywhere else because people are thrown into such close contact. They've nothing to do and their bodies get slack and pampered, and they eat heaps too much. It's like the Romans ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... Special Native Constable Ilavinik and Corporal W. V. Bruce were those who were in at the end when two Eskimo men, Sinninsiak and Uluksak, were arrested by them at Coronation Gulf as the self-confessed murderers of the two priests. Leaving Great Bear Lake in April, 1916, La Nauze, Wight and Ilavinik reached Coronation Gulf a month later and here they met Corporal Bruce, who had been sent out by Inspector Phillips from Herschell Island to gather information that would help to locate the priests, if alive, and if they ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... Koko," cried Koko's mother when she stuck in her finger. "That will make him a great bear-hunter ...
— The Eskimo Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... of Gijigonai, the day makers Glittering heath, the Golden locks of the hero-god Great Bear, constellation of Guanacaure, mountain of Guaranis tribe Guaymis, tribe of Darien Guazacoalco ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... largely a show to satisfy the people that the most patient investigator in the world at the head of a small court had taken evidence on what every Tom and Dick had to say for and against in any part of the country outside of the Yukon. Had it been practicable to hold a session on Great Bear Lake, to determine the trade relations between the copper-kniving Eskimos and the meat-swapping Yellow Knife Indians, Sir Henry ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... closed my eyes, and knelt down there in the utter darkness for a few minutes, to spring up again confident and refreshed to begin peering up through the trees for the stars. For I wanted to make out the Great Bear; and I quite laughed as I thought that it was the shining one I sought, not a grizzly. If I could see that, I thought I could shape my course due south-east. That must lead me out of the forest, when, even in the darkness, the ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn

... gentleman was pointing out the constellations—the Great Bear hanging low in the north-east, pointing to the Pole star, and across it to Cassiopeia's bright zigzag high in the heavens; the barren square of Pegasus, with its long tail stretching to the Milky Way, and the points that cluster round Perseus; Arcturus, white Vega and ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... traveling northward" or "Bram and his wolves passed us"—always Bram AND HIS WOLVES. For two years the Police lost track of him. That was when Bram was buried in the heart of the Sulphur Country east of the Great Bear. After that the Police kept an even closer watch on him, waiting, and expecting something to happen. And then—the something came. Bram killed a man. He did it so neatly and so easily, breaking him as he might have broken a stick, that he was well off in flight before it was discovered that ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood

... mansion of an adjacent ex-premier, the belt of Orion was not oblivious of a belted earl's cosy red-brick home just opposite, and the house of a certain famous actor and actress close by had been taken by the Great Bear under its ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... pa? What makes him be a great bear? Papa-sy, dear," she continued, stroking his face with her little hands, and patting him, very much as Beauty might have patted the Beast after she fell in love with him; or as if he were a great baby. In fact, he began to look ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... approval. The trace of a liking that had appeared in him had found a response in them. Friendship replies to friendship, and Will, who six months ago would have laughed at the endorsement of blanketed wild men, now felt a thrill of pleasure. But Xingudan as yet said little more. He pointed to the great bear and said: ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... directs his course at night by the pole-star, and in the daytime by the sun and the wind. I have seen Guaiqueries and pilots of the Zambo caste, who could find the pole-star by the direction of the pointers alpha and beta of the Great Bear, and they seemed to me to steer less from the view of the pole-star itself, than from the line drawn through these stars. It is surprising, that at the first sight of land, they can find the island of Guadaloupe, Santa Cruz, or Porto Rico; but the compensation of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... few people had seen Crockett, he had obtained very considerable renown in that community of backwoodsmen as a great bear-hunter. Dr. Butler, a man of considerable pretensions, and, by marriage, a nephew of General Jackson, was the rival candidate, and a formidable one. Indeed, he and his friends quite amused themselves with the idea that ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... fires had eaten away a few inches of the base of the rock. Under its overhang some one had written with a black coal the words "Bear Valley Camp." On this suggestion the children called for a bear story, and lying back on the green mat of boughs, Samson told them of the great bear of Camel's Hump which his father had slain, and many other tales ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller

... en celui meisme leu," etc. (Li Tresors, p. 122). Magister or Magistra in mediaeval Latin, La Maistre in old French, signifies "the beam of a plough." Possibly this accounts for the application of Maistre to the Great Bear, or Plough. But on the other hand the pilot's art is called in old French maistrance. Hence this constellation may have had the name as the pilot's guide,—like our Lode-star. The name was probably given to the N.W. point under a latitude ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... the Zodiac was made his mother, and the constellation in conjunction with her, which is now known as Bootes, but anciently called Arcturus, his foster father. He is represented as holding in leash two hunting dogs and driving Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, around the north pole, thus showing that the original occupation of the celestial foster father of the young God Sol was that of a bear driver, and that his sons, referred to in job xxxviii., 32, are the dogs Asterion and Chara. It will be observed that Virgo is represented in our ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... light, by which alone the existence of an electro-magnetic current is appreciable, be actually connected with matrial groups of vesicles of vapor in motion, or, more correctly speaking, if light penetrate them, passing from one vesicle to another. Franklin saw near Great Bear Lake a beaming northern light, the lower side of which he thought illuminated a stratum of clouds, while, at a distance of only eighteen geographical miles, Kendal, who was on watch throughout the whole night, and never lost sight of the sky, perceived ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... miles south-east the fleet touched at Java the Less "in compass about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices, ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced to stay for five months by stress of weather—till they got away into the Bay of Bengal, the extreme ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... was Hudson's Bay; westward lay the black forests and twisting waterways of Upper Saskatchewan; and north—always north—beckoned the lonely plains and unmapped wildernesses of the Athabasca, the Slave and the Great Bear—toward which far country their trail was slowly but ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... the boat for the other two Norsemen, while Johannes and Jakobsen, after carefully cleaning the blades of their lances, laid them against a rock, took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and then, taking out their knives, began to skin the great bear. ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn

... red running half-way around the mid-height: the crimson draperies in front of the three tiers set apart for the ministerial party and the Felibres. And for a roof over all was the dark star-set sky: whence the Great Bear gazed wonderingly down upon us with his golden eyes. We were in close touch with the higher regions of the universe. At the very moment when the play was beginning there gleamed across the upper firmament, and thence ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... the door. The Arctic moon, shedding a queer blue radiance over the snow hung high in the black vault. Directly overhead the Great Bear gleamed like hanging lamps, with magnificent Vega blazing like a rich jewel. She ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... Dartmouth, a place on the Devonshire coast. Tell Thackeray that he is never to invite me to his house, as I intend never to go: not that I would not go out there rather than any place perhaps, but I cannot stand seeing new faces in the polite circles. You must know I am going to become a great bear: and have got all sorts of Utopian ideas into my head about society: these may all be very absurd, but I try the experiment on myself, so I can do no great hurt. Where I shall go in the summer I ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... curling from its top, appeared. This gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. The leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge saying, "Nemesho,[65] help us. We claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us." "Sit down and eat, my grandchildren," said the old man. "Who is a great Manito?" said he, "there is none but me; but let me look," and he opened the door of the lodge, when lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft

... But I had also spread; a fact that is not common for lads at that age. Grace said I had lost all delicacy of appearance; and as for Lucy, though she laughed and blushed she protested I began to look like a great bear. To confess the truth, I was well satisfied with my own appearance, did not envy Rupert a jot, and knew I could toss him over my shoulder whenever I chose. I stood the strictures on my appearance, therefore, very well; and, though no one was so much derided and laughed at as myself, in that critical ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... travellers (even Mr. Catlin, who is generally correct) have entirely mistaken the country inhabited by the Shoshones. One of them represents this tribe as "the Indians who inhabit that part of the Rocky Mountains which lies on the Grand and Green River branches of the Colorado of the West, the valley of Great Bear River, and the hospitable shores of the Great Salt Lakes." It is a great error. That the Shoshones may have been seen in the above-mentioned places is likely enough, as they are a great nation, and often send expeditions very far from ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat

... he, "that it has something to do with the Great Bear, and the Dipper, and the Plough, and ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit

... "who does not see stars at such times? I see the Great Bear now, and the little one, its cub; and Andromeda, and Perseus' chain-armor, and Cassiopea in her golden chair, and the bright, scaly Dragon, and the glittering Lyre, and all ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... knowledge in a field which human interests can never enter. The periodic time of Uranus, the nature of Saturn's ring, and the occultation of Jupiter's satellites are as far removed from the concerns of mankind as the heliacal rising of Sirius, or the northern position of the Great Bear." This may seem to be a utilitarian view, with which those philosophers who have cultivated science for its own sake, finding in the same a sufficient reward, can have ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... way in latitude since our vessel had quitted that Chinese furnace, and the constellations in the sky had undergone a series of rapid changes; the Southern Cross had disappeared at the same time as the other austral stars; and the Great Bear, rising on the horizon, was almost on as high a level as it is in the sky above France. The evening breeze soothed and revived us, bringing back to us the memory of our summer-night watches ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... tribes whose chief food-animal was the bear felt it necessary to kill and cat a bear occasionally; but they could not do this without a sense of guilt, and some fear of vengeance from the great Bear-spirit. So they ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which the tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community with their totem and with each other. And since they could not make any reparation directly ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... the luxurious hanging draperies, the pillow, crushed into the depths of an eider-down quilt, its lace border standing out in contrast against the background of blue silk, bore a vague impress that kindled the imagination. A pair of satin slippers gleamed from the great bear-skin rug spread by the carved mahogany lions at the bed-foot, where she had flung them off in her weariness after the ball. A crumpled gown hung over a chair, the sleeves touching the floor; stockings which a breath would have blown away were ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... a green mound of waste, within sight of the populous bridge, the gleemen were exercising their art. Here one dexterous juggler threw three balls and three knives alternately in the air, catching them one by one as they fell [30]. There, another was gravely leading a great bear to dance on its hind legs, while his coadjutor kept time with a sort of flute or flageolet. The lazy bystanders, in great concourse, stared and laughed; but the laugh was hushed at the tramp of the Norman steeds; and the famous Count by the King's side, as, with ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Canada to the Pacific. Amongst these travellers we must mention Daniel William Harmon, a member of the North-West Company, who visited Lakes Huron and Superior, Rainy Lake, the Lake of the Woods, Manitoba, Winnipeg, Athabasca, and the Great Bear Lake, all between N. lat. 47 degrees and 58 degrees, and reached the shores of the Pacific. The fur company established at Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia also did much towards the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne

... periods they calculated by the solar year, but for short intervals they reckoned by lunations. They had observed and even given names to the principal constellations. Among the Iroquois, the Pleiades were called the "Dancers;" the Milky Way, "the Path of Souls;" the Great Bear had a name corresponding with that which we give it; the Polar Star was designated as "the star that never sets;" it served to guide them in their long marches through the forests and across the great prairies of the west. When the sky was clouded, they were led through ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... conspicuous stars of this constellation are to be looked for towards the north-east, about half way between the horizon and the point overhead (or zenith), the length of the set of stars being vertical. On a summer's evening the Great Bear is nearly overhead. On an autumn evening he is towards the north-west, the length of the set of seven being somewhat inclined to the horizon. Finally, on a winter's evening, he is low down towards the ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor

... on the Great Bear," he said, "and for ten days and ten nights I was in camp— alone— laid up with a sprained ankle. It was a wild and gloomy place, shut in by barren ridge mountains, with stunted black spruce all about, and those spruce were haunted by ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... against strangers than law or protection could devise. Bold would be the trader who would carry his goods to the far away Mackenzie River; intrepid would be the voyageur who sought a profit from the lonely shores of the great Bear Lake. Locked in their fastnesses of ice and distance, these remote and friendless solitudes of the North must long remain, as they are at present, the great fur preserve of the Hudson Bay Company. Dwellers within ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... life, many ties, and friendships, and acquaintances. Her poem on 'Corsica' had brought her into some relations with Boswell; she also knew Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. Here is her description of the 'Great Bear:'— ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)

... so thoughtfully that presently he missed the road to Pyecrafts—if ever he had been on the road to Pyecrafts at all—altogether. He found himself upon a highway running across a flattish plain, and presently discovered by the sight of the Great Bear, faint but traceable in the blue overhead, that he was going due north. Well, presently he would turn south and west; that in good time; now he wanted to feel; he wanted to think. How could he best help ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... child starting back from my helmet like what-d'ye-call'im—Hector's son, as described by Mr. Pope in his 'Iliad'); it was through Mr. Reynolds that I was introduced to a score of these gentlemen, and their great chief, Mr. Johnson. I always thought their great chief a great bear. He drank tea twice or thrice at my house, misbehaving himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors, and not trouble myself about ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth. Why it was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale told to me by a man who had dwelt in the land too long to know better. It was of the great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St Elias, never descending to the levels of the gentler inclines. Now God so constituted this creature for its hillside habitat that the legs of one side are all of a foot longer than those of the other. This ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... the group containing these seven stars is the Great Bear. The group was given this name because men at first thought it looked like a ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long

... The Centaurs. (15) Probably the flute thrown away by Pallas, which Marsyas picked up and then challenged Apollo to a musical contest. For his presumption the god had him flayed alive. (16) That is, the Little Bear, by which the Phoenicians steered, while the Greeks steered by the Great Bear. (See Sir G. Lewis's "Astronomy of the Ancients", p. 447.) In Book VI., line 193, the pilot declares that he steers by the pole star itself, which is much nearer to the Little than to the Great Bear, and is ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... heat generally works a cavity in the snow underneath, sometimes quite a chasm, seven or eight feet deep—fire above, water below. Ha! I'm glad to see my old friend the Great Bear looking through over the pines yonder. Our ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... once on the lake, had plenty of light. Two moons, one at three quarters and the other full, shone brightly, while the water was alive with gymnotuses and other luminous creatures. Sitting and living upon the cross-timbers, they looked up at the sky. The Great Bear and the north star had exactly the same relation to each other as when seen from the earth, while the other constellations and the Milky Way looked identically as when they had so often gazed at them before, and some idea of the immensity of space was conveyed to them. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... through the remnant of their conversation and then lay staring at the stars while his hulk of a partner, this great bear who in his awkward good nature had trampled upon holy ground, slept peacefully by his side. The Pleiades fled away before Orion, the Scorpion rose up in the south and sank again, the Morning Star blinked ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... I tried to keep going, but the gale traveled too fast and blew in whirling eddies, so we got the pelts out of the bundle, and wrapped ourselves in the largest ones. The smaller ones we used for our feet. Father found two great bear-skins and covered the horse—that acted as a shield on one side from the storm—the other horses stood in front and back of us, ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... hollows which now hold the world's largest series of lakes. Even the lakes of Central Africa cannot compare with our own Great Lakes and the other smaller lakes which belong to the same series. These additional lakes begin in the far north with Great Bear Lake and continue through Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, and Lake Winnipeg to the Lake of the Woods, which drains into Lake Superior. All these lakes lie on the edge of the great Laurentian shield, where the ice, crowding down from the highland ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... Yorkshire Lying Tale in Henderson's Folk-Lore, first edition, p. 337, a Suffolk one, "Happy Borz'l," in Suffolk Notes and Queries, while a similar jingle of inconsequent absurdities, commencing "So he died, and she unluckily married the barber, and a great bear coming up the street popped his head into the window, saying, 'Do you sell any soap'?" is said to have been invented by Charles James Fox to test Sheridan's memory, who repeated it after one hearing. (Others ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various

... into another room to attend to some of my own, and after a while my mother came there to me. "I've let him the rooms, Hugh," she said, with a note of satisfaction in her voice which told me that the big man was going to pay well for them. "He's a great bear of a man to look at," she went on, "but he seems quiet and civil-spoken. And here's a ticket for a chest of his that he's left up at the railway station, and as he's tired, maybe you'll get somebody yourself to fetch it down ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher

... great war will go on, and that you and I and the Great Bear, who is away, will encounter many more ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler

... steps off, was the great bear slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces. He had heard the hunters and reared himself on his haunches. Seeing them, he dropped again on all-fours, and the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders bristled ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... the skins of these little wapiti licked clean and empty of bodily structure. No other male grizzly was permitted to enter his domain. He was, in fact, the monarch of the mountain, the great bear of ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... Wainamoinen now hastens back to Kalevala and interviews his brother Ilmarinen, who refuses to journey northward or to forge the magic Sampo. To induce the smith to do his will, Wainamoinen persuades him to climb a lofty fir-tree, on whose branches he claims to have hung the moon and the Great Bear. While Ilmarinen is up in this tree, the wizard Wainamoinen causes a violent storm to blow his brother off to the Northland, where, welcomed by Louhi, Ilmarinen sets up his forge, and after four days' arduous work ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... cry came too late. As bruin reared himself old Peter's shot rang out. An instant later, with such a cry as never issued from the throat of any bear, he dropped to the veranda floor and lay there motionless. The great bear hunt was over. ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond

... stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... go to the great bear's den for three months, but it shall be the last time!" Lucy ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade

... Eagles, Venus by Doves, the Moon by Women, Mars by Wolves, Mercury by Cocks, the Sun by Horses, and Saturn by Serpents; besides the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, and some figures from the forty-eight Constellations of Heaven, such as the Great Bear, the Dog Star, and many others, which, by reason of their number, we must pass over in silence, without recounting them all in their order, since anyone may see the work; which figures are almost all by the hand of Perino. In the centre of the vaulting is a circle with four figures representing ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari

... the Syracuse Journal:— Clark's "History of Onondaga," Vol. 1, page 43, near the bottom, says:—"The Quis-quis, or great hog, was another monster which gave the Onondagas great trouble, as did also the great bear, the horned water-serpent, the stone giants, and many other equally fabulous inventions, bordering so closely upon the truly marvelous, that the truth would suffer wrongfully if related in full; but ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.

... to be more and more planted by them in the waste sand: intrusive chaos, and Triglaph held at bay by them," till at last in 1240, seventy years after the great Bear's death, they fortify a new Burg, a "little rampart," Wehrlin, diminutive of Wehr (or vallum), gradually smoothing itself, with a little echo of the Bear in it too, into Ber-lin, the oily river Spree flowing by, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... cried the old men, When he came in triumph homeward With the sacred Belt of Wampum, From the regions of the North-Wind, From the kingdom of Wabasso, From the land of the White Rabbit. He had stolen the Belt of Wampum From the neck of Mishe-Mokwa, From the Great Bear of the mountains, From the terror of the nations, As he lay asleep and cumbrous On the summit of the mountains, Like a rock with mosses on it, Spotted brown and gray with mosses. Silently he stole upon him, Till the red nails of the monster Almost touched him, almost ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... as he is about to pass, holds out his leg as if to show him something and stops him): In my leg—the calf—there is a tooth Of the Great Bear, and, passing Neptune close, I would avoid his trident's point, and fell, Thus sitting, plump, right in the Scales! My weight Is marked, still registered, up there in heaven! (Hurriedly preventing De Guiche from passing, and detaining him by the button of his doublet): ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand

... Great Bear," whose part in the war brought on internal strife and revolution which robbed Czar Nicholas of his throne, traces its history back for more than ten centuries, when the Norse invaded the territory and founded Veliki Novgorod, for many years one of the chief Russian cities. The Norse, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... me Moon, and Sun release me, And the Great Bear lend his counsel, Through the portal that I know not, Through the unaccustomed passage. From the little nest that holds me, From a dwelling-place so narrow, To the land conduct the roamer, To the open ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... and once more found ourselves in our own Northern hemisphere—nearer to our native country, though the course by which we must reach it would be still longer than that we had traversed. Our old acquaintance the Great Bear showed himself once more, and we looked upon him with joy, as though he had brought intelligence from our ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue

... me in that time; and this thing was that I did begin now to see the Night Land from the new outlooking of my distance from the Mighty Pyramid. And it was as that a man of this day did go from the earth to travel among the stars, and lo! should he not find them to shift upon his vision; so that the Great Bear and this and that shaping of the star clusterings, should make a new order, as he did wander onwards; and so should he find that there was naught that was truly fixed, as he did before then think; but all to alter according unto the place whence the looking! And this thing shall ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... this species once covered the eastern two-thirds of the continent of North America. It extended from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains, and from Great Bear Lake to Florida and Texas. Eastward of the Mississippi it has for twenty years been totally extinct, and the last specimens taken alive were found in ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... private opinion, the least offensive picture in the whole set, seems to be the bear; because he represents ursa major, or the Great Bear, who presides over the North, where the Reformation first began, and which, next to Britain, (including Scotland and the north of Ireland) is the great protector of the Protestant religion. But, however, in those signs where I observe the bear to be chained, I can't ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... statues of Merodach and Ishtar, in turn with those of Nebo and Tashmit, of Mullil and Ninlil, of Eamman and of Zirbanit; sometimes at the rising of a particular constellation—as, for instance, that of the Great Bear, or that of the sons of Ishtar; sometimes at the moment when the moon "raised above the earth her luminous crown." On such a date a penitential psalm or a litany was to be recited; at another time it was forbidden to eat of meat either cooked or smoked, to change the body-linen, to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... was filled with objects always in the same places, which, for the mother held memories of her marriage time, and for the young ones seemed as necessary and uncriticised a part of their world as the stars of the Great Bear seen from the back windows. Mrs. Meyrick had borne much stint of other matters that she might be able to keep some engravings specially cherished by her husband; and the narrow spaces of wall held a world history in scenes and heads which the children ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... beauty of the Northern night broke over her soul. Straight before her gleamed and flashed and ebbed and palpitated the aurora. One moment its long arms shot beyond the zenith; the next it had broken and rippled back like a brook of light to its arch over the Great Bear. Never for an instant was it still. Its restlessness stole away the quiet of the evening; ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... ensign of the great bear clan of many nations, why is the symbol that you wear familiar to me—and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... looked upon the wind-clear northern sky and saw the starry constellations all unchanged. Capella hung in the west, Vega was rising, and the seven glittering points of the Great Bear swept overhead in their ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... exclamation. He would at first doubt his eyes. I should inquire the cause of his consternation, and it would be hard to explain. He would ask me with a certain singularity of manner for "Orion," and I should not find him; for the Great Bear, and it would have vanished. "Where?" I should ask, and "where?" seeking among that scattered starriness, and slowly I should acquire ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... painting, Pl. CXXIII, Hasjelti will be recognized as the leader. He carries a fawn skin filled with sacred meal; the spots on the skin are seven and in the form of a great bear. The fawn skin indicates him as the chief of all game. It was Hasjelti who created game. The first six figures following Hasjelti are the Ethsethle. The next six figures are their wives. Toneennili, the water sprinkler ...
— Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand Painting of the - Navajo Indians • James Stevenson



Words linked to "Great Bear" :   plough, wain, wagon, Charles's Wain, dipper, constellation, big dipper



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