"Buttress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and pinnet high, Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair; So still they blaze when Fate is nigh The lordly line of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... during its first year; in the second it is apt to deteriorate. Coach to Chtillon, 12 m. S.E. Die, on the Drme, is in a small plain surrounded by mountains, of which the most remarkable is Mont Glandaz, 6648 ft. above the sea, flanked by great buttress cliffs. On the top is an undulating plateau, covered with small stones and grass; 5 hrs. required for the ascent. At the foot of the mountain is the rustic but not uncomfortable establishment of Sallires-les-Bains; ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... and pinnet high, Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair— So still they blaze, when fate is nigh The lordly line of ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... slight stir among the bushes attracted his attention. Slipping behind a corner of the buttress, he waited, somewhat sheltered from the dripping rain by the overhanging ivy. He had not long to stand shivering there. A ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... hence in a fresh light. But this reconstruction means travail of thought. Easier than thinking with surrender of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking about for something with which to buttress it against attack. ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... St. Edmund's Shrine glitters now with diamond flowerages, with a plating of wrought gold. The wooden chapel, as we say, has become a stone temple. Stately masonries, long-drawn arches, cloisters, sounding aisles buttress it, begirdle it far and wide. Regimented companies of men, of whom our Jocelin is one, devote themselves, in every generation, to meditate here on man's Nobleness and Awfulness, and celebrate and show forth the same, as they best can,—thinking ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... right, some ten feet distant, a little table-land of grass projected from the face of the cliff—the green top of a flying buttress, as ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... inhabitants is to be estimated by the decoration of the religious buildings, this faculty must be rated very low indeed. The exterior of the church is as richly ornamented as the inside; and not a buttress, arch, or canopy is without the remains of crumbled carving, worn by time, or disfigured by the ruder hand of calvinistic or revolutionary violence. Tradition refers the erection of this edifice to the English. From the certainty with which ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... we entered a suspicious-looking place. On the right was a stony buttress, along whose base the stream, when there is one, flows; and to this depression was our road limited by the rocks and thorn-trees, which filled the other half of the channel. The left side was a precipice, grim and barren, but not so abrupt as ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... much importance, may be observed, which commences at the fourth cervical vertebra, and is greatest at about the sixth, seventh, or eighth vertebra; this consists in the haemal descending processes being united to the body of the vertebra by a sort of buttress. This structure may be observed in Cochins, Polish, some Hamburghs, and probably other breeds; but is absent, or barely developed, in Game, Dorking, Spanish, Bantam, and several other breeds examined ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... splint, lap, bar, rod, boom, sprit^, outrigger; ratlings^. staff, stick, crutch, alpenstock, baton, staddle^; bourdon^, cowlstaff^, lathi^, mahlstick^. post, pillar, shaft, thill^, column, pilaster; pediment, pedicle; pedestal; plinth, shank, leg, socle^, zocle^; buttress, jamb, mullion, abutment; baluster, banister, stanchion; balustrade; headstone; upright; door post, jamb, door jamb. frame, framework; scaffold, skeleton, beam, rafter, girder, lintel, joist, travis^, trave^, corner stone, summer, transom; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... hand, entitled 'An Everlasting Task for Arminians.' Turning aside for a moment to drive some weary operative with a word as rough as a driver uses to his over-driven horse, he would return to the 'Everlasting Task,' and cull some choice sentence or read some twisted text used to buttress up the Calvinistic creed. Reading aloud to himself the words—'Real Christian charity is swallowed up in the Will of God, nor is it in its nature to extend itself one step beyond, nor desire one thing contrary to, the glory of Jehovah. ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... surveyors came to take a view of their work of measurement, they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress) to support the building, which tottered on that false foundation. It was evident that the goodness of the soil, the number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution, made such ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... did of every project of his wife's. Lady Cumnor's character was perhaps a little too ponderous for him in reality, but he was always full of admiration for all her words and deeds, and used to boast of her wisdom, her benevolence, her power and dignity, in her absence, as if by this means he could buttress up his ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... shroud—it must have it betimes— The quaint Gothic carving it catches, And upwards from story to story it climbs And scrambles with leaps and with snatches. Now woe to the warder, poor sinner, betides! Like a long-legged spider the skeleton strides From buttress to buttress, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... "have it out" with James. That might be rather dreadful; it might take her where she must refuse to go—but on the whole, she didn't think it need. The certainty that she couldn't go to Norway, that James must be made to see it, was a moral buttress. Timidity of James would not prevail against it. Besides that, deeply within herself, lay the conviction that James was kind if you took him the right way. He was irritable, and very annoying when he was sarcastic; but he was good ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... There is a buttress of burnt brick to the southeast of the church, which appears as if it might have been ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... having leaped from his engine, the latter darted alone at full speed for London. Notice was immediately given by telegraph to London and other stations; and, while the line was kept clear, an engine and other arrangements were prepared as a buttress to receive the runaway, while all connected with the station awaited in awful suspense the expected shock. The superintendent of the railway also started down the line on an engine, and on passing the runaway he reversed his engine and had it transferred at the next crossing to the up-line, so as ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... the storm o'er horizons unseen, that will lay them in dust, Crashings of plunder'd cloisters, and royal insatiate lust:— Far, unseen, unheard!—Meanwhile the great Minster on high Like a stream of music, aspiring, harmonious, springs to the sky:— Story on story ascending their buttress'd beauty unfold, Till the highest height is attain'd, and the Cross shines star-like in gold, Set as a meteor in heaven; a sign of health and release:— And the land rejoices below, and the heart-song of England ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... produce. It is as clean and smooth as the flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as a Greek statue. It curves out toward the base as if planted there to resist the pressure of worlds—probably the most majestic single granite column or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is over three thousand feet above you. Across the valley, nearly opposite, rise the Cathedral Rocks to nearly the same height, while farther along, beyond El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at about the same dizzy height. Near the head of the great ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... decoration has been made. It seems a shapeless pile of towers and machicolated and battlemented curtains, falling into almost complete ruin. But on passing through the single entrance, one finds oneself in a well-proportioned church of nave and side aisles, a south chapel, and an apse. Each buttress of the apse is battlemented outside and forms a turret, and two strong towers are adapted internally to serve as a transept and ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... again!" he shouted. "We are over the worse now and shall soon be in calmer water. Get your feet well out in front of you, if you can, and dig your heels into the mud, then you will act as a buttress to me and help me ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... from being bewitched. He knows who has had money and how much, having reasoned out the matter by inference. He could sell himself to-morrow, but is incorruptible, and will remain a strong rock to the faith, will still buttress up the true hierarchy of heaven. He cannot be bought, and this is strange, for he never ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... enormous eel which frequented the upper end of the lake. But he exhausted all his ingenuity in this endeavour without success. The monster had a secure retreat among the submerged roots of an old buttress tree, beneath an overhanging bank, from which Max daily lured him forth by throwing crumbs into the water; but, after devouring the food that was thrown to him, he would immediately return to his stronghold ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... piled up around it stand there as witnesses of a civilization and architecture certainly more primitive than the civilization and architecture of Roman, Saxon, or Norman settlers. We need not look beyond. How long that granite buttress of England has stood there, defying the fury of the Atlantic, the geologist alone, who is not awed by ages, would dare to tell us. But the historian is satisfied with antiquities of a more humble and homely character; and in bespeaking the interest, and, it may be, the active support ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Tr. 15) contains several small sketches of sections and exterior views of the Dome; some of them show buttress-walls shaped as inverted arches. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... westward across the desert. The young May moon was sinking to rest, its pure pallid light shining faintly in contrast with the ruddy glow of some distant beacon in the mountains beneath. Ever since nightfall the rock buttress at the pass had been reflecting the lurid glare of the leaping flames as, time and again, unseen but busy hands heaped on fresh fuel and sent the sparks whirling in fiery eddies to the sky. Languid and depressed ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... emotion, as to give relief to his own. Though now well on the wrong side of sixty, John Knott was hale and vigorous as ever. His rough-hewn countenance bore even closer resemblance, perhaps, to that of some stone gargoyle carved on cathedral buttress or spout. But his hand was no less skilful, his tongue no less ready in denunciation of all he reckoned humbug, his heart no less deeply touched, for all his superficial irascibility, by the pains, and sins, and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Fellfoot, we observed six stripes of snow near the top of the cliff, being very conspicuous at a great distance, when viewed from the southward. These stripes, which are formed by the drift of snow between the buttress-like projections before described, and which remained equally conspicuous on our return the following year, have probably at all times much the same appearance, at least about this season of the year, and may, on this ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... ram against the walls; Now shake the ramparts, now a buttress falls, But, still no breach—"Once more one mighty swing "Of all your beams, together thundering!" There—the wall shakes—the shouting troops exult, "Quick, quick discharge your weightiest catapult "Right on that spot and NEKSHEB is our own!" 'Tis done—the battlements come crashing ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the Gods!—most of the—by your head! Patricius, that was a man, I think; armed too; who looked forth from behind yon buttress of the bridge." ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... through the water, the eyes of both peered intently forward, in an endeavour to pierce the obscurity, and, if possible, discover some low limb of a tree, or projecting buttress, on which they might find a foothold. They had good hope of success, for they had seen many such since starting from the shore. Had rest been necessary, they might have obtained it more than once by grasping a branch above, or clinging to one of the great trunks, whose gnarled and ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... build. His eyes, his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face showed a sunburn whitening. It had passed through strange climates. He had the look, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... go sure-foot along that little ledge,' said Nance, pointing as she spoke; 'then out through the breach and down by yonder buttress. It is easier coming back, of course, because you see where you are going. From the buttress foot a sheep-walk goes along the scarp—see, you can follow it from here in the dry grass. And now, sir,' ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grass plot before the door, burnished pigeons cooed, and trod their stately minuet, their iridescent plumage showing every opaline splendor as the sunlight smote them; and on a buttress of the clock tower, a lonely hedge-sparrow poured his heart out in that peculiarly pathetic threnody which no other feathered throat contributes to the varied volume of bird lays. Poised on the point of an iron spike in the line that bristled along the wall, a mocking ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... There was a buttress of Notre Dame, a black arch of the Pont Neuf, part of an old courtyard in the Faubourg St. Germain,—all very fresh and striking. Yet, with the recollection of his poverty in her mind, she could not help ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... forbidding. We found inside him a frog, dead but otherwise in good preservation, which accounted for his distended and sleepy state. One day, just after Evensong, when the people were coming out of church, one of the boys heard a hiss, and saw a cobra in the angle of a buttress. The long bamboo was again ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... throb with the fear Of bringing his house about his one ear; And his people came round it, quite a throng, To buttress the walls and make them strong: A full month he sat, and felt like a mome Not daring to shout his Bing, ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Captain Arms, who should surely have known the lay of the land about his childhood's home, had been so interested in their talk that before they were aware of the danger the great vessel had run her nose upon a projecting buttress of the mountain. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... the transept is the choir, with a clerestory of four lofty Perpendicular windows of four lights each, with a bold flying buttress between ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... dome-arches. Their thrust is neutralized by the use of ties and by the barrel vaults of the cross arms, and these in their turn depend on the thickness of the walls. The lower buildings attached to the church in the form of side-chapels and the narthex also helped to stiffen and buttress the cross walls. The system is by no means perfect in these late churches. It was apparently found impossible to construct drum domes of any size, except at the extreme risk of their falling in, and probably it is for this reason that many of the larger domes in late churches, ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... said Waterloo. 'If people jump off straight forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they are seldom killed by drowning, but are smashed, poor things; that's what THEY are; they dash themselves upon the buttress of the bridge. But you jump off,' said Waterloo to me, putting his fore- finger in a button-hole of my great-coat; 'you jump off from the side of the bay, and you'll tumble, true, into the stream under the arch. What you have got to do, is to mind how you jump in! There was poor Tom Steele ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... although the doors and window-shutters were well fastened, every object without was distinctly seen through the jointed beams. Paul, followed by Domingo, went with intrepidity from one cottage to another, notwithstanding the fury of the tempest; here supporting a partition with a buttress, there driving in a stake, and only returning to the family to calm their fears, by the hope that the storm was passing away. Accordingly, in the evening the rains ceased, the trade-winds of the south pursued their ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... the shore, a plot of ground Clips a ruin'd chapel round, Buttress'd with a grassy mound; Where Day and Night and Day go by, And bring no ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... bunch weighing as much as 120 lb. to 160 lb. and comprising as many as forty-eight dozen individual bananas. So great is the weight that to prevent the downfall of the plant a stake sharpened at each end—one to stick in the ground and the other into the soft stem—is needed to buttress it. Before the fruit has fully developed, other shoots have appeared; but each plant bears but one bunch, and when that is removed the plant is decapitated and slowly decays, and the second and third and fourth shoots from the rhizome successively arrive ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... of a cloud, arouses the anger of this small creature like a guinea pig, and they back against a stone or rock uttering shrill defiance. Our author found, in most examples, a bare patch on the rump, due to their rubbing against the said buttress of support when at bay. He wonders why a bare patch, and not a callosity, should not result from this ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... they to the Gate, and lo! the Bride thereby, leaning against a buttress, gazing with no dull eyes at the coming throng. She was now clad in her woman's attire again, to wit a light flame- coloured gown over a green kirtle; but she yet bore a gilded helm on her head and a sword girt to her side in token of her oath to the God. ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... point, the passing blurrs would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third with an empty saddle on its back—a lady's or "side-saddle", if one could have distinguished the horns. They may have struck a soft track or level, or rounded the buttress of the hill higher up, but before they had time to reach or round the foot of the spur, blurs, whispers, stumble and clatter of hoofs, jingle of bridle rings, and the occasional clank together of stirrup irons, seemed shut off as suddenly and completely as though a great sound-proof door ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... the main supports of our dam, being detached from the cliff as Lumley had surmised, had been undermined by the unusual floods of the previous week. Even in that condition it might have remained fast, so strong was our artificial buttress, but as the foundation wore away the rock heeled over to one side a little; this deranged the direct action of the buttresses, and in an instant they flew aside. The rock was hurled over, and the whole of our ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... rounded the shoulder of the overhanging cliff. Along this I advanced, and at a sudden turning, a few yards beyond the canyon's end, the path widened, and at my left I saw the opening to a large cave. Before, the ledge continued until it passed from sight about another projecting buttress of the mountain. ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... King's Chamber at Montauban, is a window, at a great height from the ground, a very deep ravine, which is one of the main defences of the city, lying below it. In the adjoining ante-chamber is a similar window, and between the two is a projecting buttress, and outside the sill of each is a stone ledge a foot wide, which runs round the buttress. I do not know who first thought of it, but one day when the King was absent and we pages were lounging in the room—which was against the ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... the light was, it aided the poor fugitives at that dead hour of night to find an angle between the church wall and a buttress where the eaves afforded a little shelter from the rain, which slackened a little, when they were a little concealed from the road, so that the light need not betray them in case any passenger was abroad at such an hour, as two ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... entrance has been a spiral staircase, leading to the rooms above and to the top of the castle, which has had a flat roof, surrounded by a parapet and several turrets. The walls of this tower are very strong and firm; a deep buttress is placed at each corner, and one against the middle of each side wall. A small square tower has stood at the southern corner, but the greater part of it has been thrown down by the sea. The foundation of one side wall is also ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... porter who let Raphael out told him somewhat insolently, that his mistress would see no one, and receive no messages: but he had made up his mind: complained of the sun, quietly ensconced himself behind a buttress, and sat coiled up on the pavement, ready for a desperate spring. The slave stared at him: but he was accustomed to the vagaries of philosophers; and thanking the gods that he was not born in ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... least some recompense That we return from airy Eastern domes Glittering in blank sunlight, unto lands Where men erect their temples to the gods In forms whose light and shadow, stress and play Of arch and buttress, satisfies my blood Better than does barbaric loveliness. The dome that poises its clear perfect curves Rising above the palm-trees, with the look As of a winged bubble lightly resting On needless masonry—that symbolled form Of heavenly perfection never fills My heart as do ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... closed.... So long as the stories multiply in various lands, and so few are positively explained away, it is bad method to ignore them.'[13] Here they are not ignored, because, whatever the cause or causes of the phenomena, they would buttress, if they did not originate, the savage belief in spirits tenanting inanimate matter, whence came Fetishism. As to facts, we cannot, of course, 'explain away' events of this kind, which we know only through report. A conjurer cannot ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the brief consideration of a few other words that have been dealt with unfairly, in order, if not to found, at all events to buttress, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... forest that the scene below them seemed to them all to be the most beautiful that had ever gladdened the eyes of men. Imagine a valley about five miles in length, narrowing at each end, and opening out about the centre to a width of two miles, the sides of grass sloping up to a buttress of rock, and rippling along the whole length into folds, with little valleys in between—narrow at the summit, where they joined the rock-wall, and wide at the base, where they opened out on the parent valley, through which flowed a broad stream, fringed ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... more closely, saw the dark shadow of a man's body pressed against the inside buttress of the corner of the Cathedral wall. The shadow crouched, the body all drawn together as though folding in upon itself to hide its ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Gelderland, to which he had been elected by the estates of that province on the 11th of March. That important bulwark of Holland, Zealand, and Utrecht on the one side, and of Groningen and Friesland on the other—the main buttress, in short, of the nascent republic, was now in hands which would defend ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... It lay nestled within the bosom of this cone at a depth of just where, on the outside, the green began. The sun had set early upon it and it now lay a grayish-blue surface surrounded by a luxuriant tangle of growing things. In a circle about it stood the dark buttress of the lava sides. It was like a turquoise set in stone. The contrast to its surroundings was as startling as a living eye of faultless ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... river, which flows nearly round the cathedral close, being on the side furthest from the town. The London road crosses the river by a pretty one-arched bridge, and, looking from this bridge, the stranger will see the windows of the old men's rooms, each pair of windows separated by a small buttress. A broad gravel walk runs between the building and the river, which is always trim and cared for; and at the end of the walk, under the parapet of the approach to the bridge, is a large and well-worn seat, on which, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... have stood serene on Fenner's Ground, indifferent to blisters, While the Buttress of the period Bowled me his peculiar twisters: Sung, "We won't go home till morning"; Striven to part my backhair straight; Drunk (not lavishly) of Miller's Old dry wines ...
— English Satires • Various
... deepest commiseration and sorrow. We long to see him escape from the black cloud which, by what may fairly be called his "black art," he has conjured up around himself. We hope to know him as a future buttress of his shaken country, and as a friend of his yet "unknown God." Should this change, by the mercy of God, take place, what pangs would many passages of his present work cost him! Happy should we be, could we persuade ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... of the space between the centre and the left-hand divisions, is a specimen of pointed architecture in its best and purest style. The arches are lofty and acute. Each angle is formed by a double buttress, and the tabernacles affixed to these are filled with statues. The basement of the oriel, which projects from the flat wall of the house, after the fashion of a bartizan, is divided into compartments, studded with medallions, and intermixed with tracery of great variety ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... made by cutting out a piece of strong canvas into the shape of the animal, and painting it properly. Loops are sewn in different places, through which sticks are passed, to stretch the curves into shape: a stake, planted in the ground serves as a buttress to support the apparatus: at a proper height, there is a loophole to fire through. It packs up into a roll of canvas and a bundle of five ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... caught it and tossed it from echo to echo. It was not loud but immensely prevalent. Those wayfarers who had fled came back to the brink of the hill and those who had stood their ground walked out into the grass to look back. Around the curve of a buttress of rock that stood out at the line of the road, the head of a column of Roman cavalry appeared. The superb color-bearer bore on his hip the staff supporting ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... mean what they do not mean in their grammatical and obvious sense. Thus, men of every school, under the mighty names of men who knew the truth—but who could only give such portion of truth as they deemed man at the time was able to receive—use their names to buttress up mistaken interpretations, and thus walls are continually built up to block ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... were dead in three months, 100 of the others were invalided, and only 25 remained fit for duty. From a further body of 150 men sent as a reinforcement, half were reported on the sick list the day after their arrival. The main buttress of the Khedive's authority in this region was therefore hollow and erected on an insecure foundation. The Egyptian soldiers possessed firearms, and the natives, in their ignorance that they could not shoot straight, were afraid of them; but the natural progress of knowledge would inevitably ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... But I decided at last upon disembarking Jarl and Samoa, to seek out and conciliate the natives. So, landing them upon a jutting buttress of coral, whence they waded to the shore; I pushed off with Yillah into the water beyond, to ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the center of a devil's drama. It is society's attitude to her that is unthinkable. By men she is used for their pleasure and then despised and scorned. By women she is held an outcast, and yet she is the main buttress of the immunity of ordinary women from danger and temptation. She is the creation of men who traffic in lust and yet is held shameless by her patrons. She is the product of the social sins for which we are all responsible, and ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... jogged on, with that peculiar gravity age brings to equine hoofs, about a mile, when the buttress of a thick wall came into view abutting on the lane, and perched thereon what at first I deemed a coloured figment of the mist that festooned the branches and clung along the turf. But when I drew near I saw it was indeed a child, pink and gold and palest blue. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... a vaulted stone roof must have required consummate capacity and skill. At Eton, where, however, the stone roof was never built, the buttresses planned to carry it appear so enormous that the building seems to be all buttress, but here such an impression could never for a moment be gained, for the chapel filling each bay completely masks the widest portion of the adjoining buttresses. The upper portions are so admirably proportioned ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... in God is not of so detached a character as this advice assumes. In the course of ages the belief in God has acquired associations that give it the character of a highly obstructive force. It has become so entangled with inculcated notions of right and wrong that it is everywhere used as a buttress for institutions which have either outgrown their utility, or are in need of serious modification in the interests of the race. The opposition encountered in any attempt to deal with marriage, divorce, or education, are examples of the way in which religious ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... passes over the roofs filled with flowers, warbling, and sunlight, with the same pleasure; but to-day it stops at the end of a buttress which separates ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to an eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton who ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... then, the sole trust of these imposters was in their own statements; but before the coming of Christ again to the earth, when the cry will often be "Lo here is Christ," and "Lo there is Christ," these imposters will buttress their claims with the ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooners aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... thick welter of ivy which Time had built into a bulging buttress of greenery against the old grey wall at the end of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... Under slow but resistless pressure the strata of the Appalachian trough were thrust against the rigid land, and slowly, steadily bent into long folds whose axes ran northeast-southwest parallel to the ancient coast line. It was on the eastern side next the buttress of the land that the deformation was the greatest, and the folds most steep and close. In central Pennsylvania and West Virginia the folds were for the most part open. South of these states the folds were more closely appressed, the strata were much broken, and the great thrust ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... party of six Englishmen with six Oberland guides, who left the inn at 3 A.M. on July 20, 1862, were not, perhaps, in a specially poetical mood. Yet as the sun rose while we were climbing the huge buttress of the Moench, the dullest of us—I refer, of course, to myself—felt something of the spirit of the scenery. The day was cloudless, and a vast inverted cone of dazzling rays suddenly struck upward into the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... {big-endian} vs. {little-endian}, RISC vs. CISC, etc., etc., etc. As in society at large, the intensity and duration of these debates is usually inversely proportional to the number of objective, factual arguments available to buttress any position. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... offers us in the pinnacle and flying buttress a striking example of the adoption of a mechanical feature, and its transformation into an element of beauty. Nothing could at first sight be more hopeless than the external half-arch propping the side of a pier, or the chimney-like weight of stones pressing ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... summit of the scale, and stood Upon the second buttress of that mount Which healeth him who climbs. A cornice there, Like to the former, girdles round the hill; Save that its arch ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... for hundreds of miles westward, and then begins to slope toward the Atlantic Ocean in the far distance. Sometimes, as in Central Africa, the slope to the west is very sudden, and another range of mountains forms the western buttress of the great central plateau. All the great rivers of Africa, with the exception of the Niger, rise on this plateau or on its mountain-flanks, which have a very high rainfall. The bush, or great forest, which is almost impenetrable in the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... qualities which Lincoln exhibited in the White House: "Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind; it is not aggressive so much as passive; and among passive things, it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that, to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end.... Slow and careful in coming to resolutions, willing to talk with ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... devices usually referring more to the past, than to the future. There is a large old church, just at the extremity of the village, and just below the castle, on the slope of the hill. The gray wall of the castle extends along the road a considerable distance, in good repair, with here and there a buttress, and the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... men in medical purple hurried to and fro. From this room came groans and wailing. He had an impression of an empty blood-stained couch, of men on other couches, bandaged and blood-stained. It was just a glimpse from a railed footway and then a buttress hid the place and they were going ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... the lateral pressure be slight, it may retain its character of a wall, being supported against the pressure by buttresses at intervals; but if the lateral pressure be very great, it is supported against such pressure by a continuous buttress, loses its wall character, and becomes a dyke ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... talk, but with, a speed winged by fear got to the school, sprang on the buttress beneath the window, effected their entrance, and vanished after replacing the bar—Eric to his study, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... the ground with fragments, and all that remained standing, in addition to a portion of the apse, where five columns of the central nave, still upholding a shred of entablature, and four cyclopean buttress-piers on which the dome had rested—piers which still arose, isolated and superb, looking indestructible among all the surrounding downfall. But a denser mist flowed past, another thousand years no doubt went by, and then nothing whatever ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... succeeded in passing safely round this frowning buttress of the mountains, Alexander turned northward, and advanced into the very heart of Asia Minor. In doing this he had to pass over the range which he had come round before; and, as it was winter, his army were, for a time, enveloped in snows and storms among the wild and frightful defiles. ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray. When the broken arches are dark in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; Wnen silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the howlet to hoot o'er the dead man's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... little temple of Athena Nike, tho outside the Propylaea—thrust out as it were on a sort of great buttress high on the right—must still be called a part, and a very striking part, of the Acropolis. It is only of late years that it has been cleared of rubbish and modern stone-work, thus destroying, no doubt, some precious traces of Turkish occupation which the fastidious historian may ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... noticed Mannering, who, from the position which he had taken to watch Meg Merrilies's incantations, had the appearance of some one who was concealing himself, being half hidden by the buttress behind which he stood. The Captain, for such he styled himself, made a sudden and startled pause, and thrust his right hand into his bosom between his jacket and waistcoat as if to draw some weapon. 'What ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that the trace forked into two—one going around the tops of the decaying branches, while the other took the direction of the roots; which, with the soil still adhering to them, formed a rounded buttress-like wall of full ten feet in diameter. The trunk itself was not over five—that being about the thickness of the tree. It was a matter of choice which of the two paths should be followed: since both appeared to come together ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... "Mine eyes have often striven to pierce those stone walls, and see him lying there in that narrow chamber, or forcing his way upwards, to catch a glimpse of the blue sky above him. When I have seen the swallows settle on the old buttress, or the thin grass growing between the stones waving there, I ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... nose had changed its shape considerably, and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... be overpowered by the fanatics of his tribe, conducted his prisoners to a sacred place, on an abruptly raised plateau at the other end of the "pah." This hut rested against a mound elevated a hundred feet above it, which formed the steep outer buttress of the entrenchment. In this "Ware-Atoua," sacred house, the priests or arikis taught the Maories about a Triune God, father, son, and bird, or spirit. The large, well constructed hut, contained the sacred and choice food which ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... by the Puerta de Rochapea which gives exit to the city on the northern side. It had been sunny since morning, and the snow had melted from the roads, but the hills across the plain were still white and great drifts were piled against the ramparts, forming a natural buttress from the summit of the steep river bank almost to the deep embrasures ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... way," said Alberic. "I scrambled down that wide buttress by the east wall last week, when our ball was caught in a branch of the ivy, and the drawbridge ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself the task of explaining to the Indians that we wanted to land, a want that they grasped directly; the leader nodding and pointing forward beyond a sudden bend of the river, where it made a sweep to our right round a towering buttress of rock, which projected so far that it seemed to block up the channel, and turn the place into a lake. Then bending once more to their paddles, they set up their monotonous chant, and in about an hour we were round the great rocky buttress, ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... Europe is at its height, she still groans under the unrestricted despotism of an autocrat. Here the effects of progress that obtain elsewhere seem inverted. Such advance as is made in civilization and knowledge is used to buttress imperial tyranny and the knout is wielded more cruelly than ever before. We behold liberal institutions overthrown and a whole people held in bondage worse than slavery. We hear of families torn asunder, of ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... set, and dusk was already falling, when half frantic with fear, I at length made out a crevice which appeared to offer a possible means of saving my life. It ran diagonally across the rock at a steep angle upwards, going out of my sight around a big buttress that overhung me, and I could not tell whether it reached to the actual top or not. But it was my only chance, and with my heart in my mouth I made my way towards it. I could just reach it, and setting my teeth and summoning all my courage, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the gorge behind us; our last view was out a granite gateway formed of two nearly vertical precipices, sharp-edged, jutting buttress-like, and plunging down into a field of angular boulders which ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... was essential for his rescue. The effort now on these icy steeps might cost either man or beast a broken limb, if no more. With an instinct of self-protection the animal had chosen the lee of a great buttress of the cliff, and could stand there safely all night though the temperature should fall still lower. The young pack-man called out a word or two of encouragement, listening fearfully as the sound struck back in the silence from the icy bank of the river, the craggy ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... is a very fine house you've got over you;" throwing his eye again towards a wooden buttress which supported one of ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the kings whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority. But although liberty was not ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton |
