"Ponderous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The very largeness of the forms about him, whether human, vegetable, or floral, appealed to his bold brush, and I think that critics should take this into consideration before declaring his southern pictures garish. They often seem so, but then the sunset there is glaring, the shadows ponderous and full of harsh complementary reflects, while humanity wears another aspect in this southern island where distance is annihilated by the clarity of the atmosphere. No, Paul Gauguin is certainly not a plagiarist. Clive Bell has written: ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... high-warp looms to work with extraordinary activity. As though he would rival the great Gobelins itself, he reproduced the most ambitious of pieces, the Raphael series, Acts of the Apostles, and a long list of ponderous groups wherein oversized gods disport themselves in a heavy setting of architecture and voluminous draperies. He also produced some contemporary battle scenes which are now in ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Piedmont and Coastplain provinces to the shores of the Atlantic between the Potomac and the Savannah. As shown by Allen, the buffalo, "prior to the year 1800," spread eastward across the Appalachians(34) and into the priscan territory of the Siouan tribes. As suggested by Shaler, the presence of this ponderous and peaceful animal materially affected the vocations of the Indians, tending to discourage agriculture and encourage the chase; and it can hardly be doubted that the bison was the bridge that carried the ancestors of the western tribes from the crest ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... remarked each newcomer who idly joined the onlooking throng. Especially he observed each cab or carriage that hurried up to the wharf's front. He studied each of the alighting occupants as they yielded their effects to the antic, white-jacketed mulatto cabin-boys, behind whom they crossed the ponderous unrailed stage and vanished on their up-stairs way to the boiler deck, the cabin, and their staterooms. Had his mild scrutinizings been a paid service, they could ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... desired as little as themselves. He smiled at my courageous spirit, paid me the first quarter of my income, and gave me the remainder of my personal effects, which had been sent to me, under his care, in a couple of rather ponderous boxes. With these I returned in triumph to my lodgings, more content with my position than I should have thought possible a week before, and fully determined to make the best ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... world knows you—you and your children! It sees you fat of figure, an Adam's apple struggling with your every vowel, ponderous of temperament. It sees you a sullen and varicose mistress, whose draperies hang heavy and ludicrous from a pudgy form. It sees you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine struggling awkwardly from out a cyclopean vat ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... this. That block is a ponderous piece of steel, quite complicated, and it swings on a hinge fastened to one side of the rear of the gun. Once it is swung back into place, it is made fast by means of screw threads, wedges or in whatever way the inventor of the ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... himself out of his chair, and received the visitor with ponderous cordiality. "It is a long time since we have had the pleasure of welcoming you to Elmerton, Mrs. Pryor," he said. "Your family has sustained a great loss, ma'am, a great loss. Miss ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... made, a third trial of her powers was attempted on the eleventh day of September, with the weight of twenty-six of her long and ponderous guns, and a considerable quantity of ammunition and stores on board; her draft of water was short of eleven feet. She changed her course by inverting the motion of the wheel, without the necessity of putting about. She fired salutes as she passed the forts, ...
— Fulton's "Steam Battery": Blockship and Catamaran • Howard I. Chapelle
... for years, your remarkable personal grace and beauty had been a source of pleasure to me; and I had pictured you wedded to Pauline Lister, for instance, in her dazzling whiteness, and soft radiant youth. So my morbid self-consciousness said: 'What! This young Apollo, tied to my ponderous plainness; growing handsomer every year, while I grow older and plainer?' Ah, darling! It sounds so unworthy, now we know what our love is. But it sounded sensible and right that night; and at last, with a bosom that ached, and arms that ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... seemed as if this vague brightness arose from the snow itself, in order to spread itself into space. By degrees the highest and most distant summits assumed a delicate, fleshlike rose color, and the red sun appeared behind the ponderous giants of the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... warrant," said Mr. Clinch with ponderous gallantry; "but methinks 'tis nothing compared with the nectar that grows on those ruby lips. Nay, by St. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... at them across the open with terrific speed. Jack had not the faintest idea that so ponderous a beast could move at such a pace, and he stared with fascinated eyes at the extraordinary sight. The "rogue" was an immense tusker, a big, wild, savage-looking brute, who charged with up-lifted trunk, and now ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... first day's journey brought me at evening to a village, whose name I have forgotten, situated about eight leagues from Orleans. It is a small, obscure hamlet, not mentioned in the guide-book, and stands upon the precipitous banks of a deep ravine, through which a noisy brook leaps to turn the ponderous wheel of a thatch-roofed mill. The village inn stands upon the highway; but the village itself is not visible to the traveler as he passes. It is completely hidden in the lap of a wooded valley, and so embowered in trees ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... he was extremely proud of his strength, and of his hands, which were well-formed, but large, firmly knit and powerful, such hands as rightly belonged to a gentleman whose ancestors had given many a crushing blow with ponderous battle-axe in ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... article, but I did not mean any harm. I saw by an item in the Boston ADVERTISER that a solemn, serious critique on the English edition of my book had appeared in the London SATURDAY REVIEW, and the idea of SUCH a literary breakfast by a stolid, ponderous British ogre of the quill was too much for a naturally weak virtue, and I went home and burlesqued it —reveled in it, I may say. I never saw a copy of the real SATURDAY REVIEW criticism until after my burlesque was written and mailed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who happened to verge somewhat toward a complacent mood upon this occasion, smiled grimly at his wife's commendation, and even unbent so far as to indulge in some ponderous attempts at wit with Laura concerning her "magnificent offer," and asserted that if she had been "like his wife, she would have jumped at the chance of getting hold of such a crude, unreformed specimen of humanity. Indeed," concluded he, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... a ponderous clanging and the rattle of chains, the while Fray Joseph stood reeling in his tracks. Then suddenly from every side burst forth the radiance of many lamps. Torches sprang into flame, braziers of resin wood began to smoke, flambeaux were ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Governor, lifting his head from the hand he had kissed with ponderous gallantry. "What ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... of his fictions he, in truth, did more to remove wrong impressions, dissipate prejudices, and open the eyes of Europe to a knowledge of American life and manners, than could have been accomplished by the longest and most ponderous array ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... carry a pressure of more than two hundred and fifty pounds to each square inch of surface—about four times as great as in the iron boilers formerly used. Locomotives of eighty tons draw the fast passenger trains at a speed of sixty miles an hour. Ponderous compounding engines weighing one hundred and twenty tons haul ninety or more steel freight cars that carry each a load of 100,000 pounds. The iron rails formerly in use weighed about forty pounds per ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... evening, she consented to get up, and make an effort to eat. Therese then saw what a terrible shock her aunt had received. The legs of the old lady had become so ponderous that she required a stick to assist her to drag herself into the dining-room, and there she thought the walls ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... procession of the idol Juggernaut in India, instead of the thousand devotees who used to drag at the ropes to haul his chariot from the temple to the river, hired coolies had to be substituted, and the victims who willingly threw themselves under the ponderous wheels to be crushed ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... becoming ponderous! Do you know it? Suppose I didn't care to see you this particular afternoon. Is there any reason why you should take ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... of expression. Her slight figure seemed hardly large enough to contain the great heart that beat so fervently within, and the soul that expanded more and more as one year gave place to another. It was difficult to believe that such a fairy hand could pen thoughts of such ponderous weight, or that such a "still small voice" could utter them with equal force. But it was Mrs. Browning's face upon which one loved to gaze,—that face and head which almost lost themselves in the thick curls of her dark brown hair. That jealous hair could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... national, rather than religious, and Catholics vied with Protestants in offering aid to the queen: it was a united rather than a divided nation which Philip faced. The English fleet, composed of comparatively small and easily maneuvered vessels, worked great havoc upon the ponderous and slow-moving Spanish galleons, and the wreck of the Armada was completed by a furious gale which tossed ship after ship upon the rocks of northern Scotland. Less than a third of the original expedition ever returned ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... with social usages. We read of the Chinese that they have "ponderous ceremonies transmitted from time immemorial," which make social intercourse a burden. The court forms prescribed by monarchs for their own exaltation, have, in all times and places, ended in consuming ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the man who has been led to believe that he is a brilliant and interesting talker has been led to make himself a rapacious pest. No conversation is possible between others whose ears are within reach of his ponderous voice; anecdotes, long-winded stories, dramatic and pathetic, stock his repertoire; but worst of all are his humorous yarns at which he laughs uproariously though every one else ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... was absolutely stirless, . . it appeared as though it had been thrown, a ponderous weight, into the vault of heaven, and having fallen, there purposed to remain. Ever and anon beamy threads of lightning played through it luridly, veining it with long, arrowy flashes of orange ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the seas, either by the definite will of God so ruling, or the peculiar sway of nature, which also is God's working, Neither can I think that, so reputed and so valued as you are, you would, to the forfeit of your own discerning ability, impose upon me an unfit and over-ponderous argument, but that the satisfaction which you profess to have received from those incidental discourses which we have wandered into hath pressed, and almost constrained, you into a persuasion that what you require from me in this point I neither ought nor can in conscience defer beyond this time, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... immediately given up. "Very well; now take mine, dress yourself in them, and let's be off." While the young man was putting on with decided distaste the garments of the cocher, the latter managed to introduce his ponderous bulk into those of the poet. This done, out they went. "Get up on the box."—"On the box?"—"Yes, idiot," said the coachman, growing more and more familiar; "I am going to get into the cab, now drive me wherever you ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... whole drawn by eight or ten horses, two abreast with a driver riding on a pony with a long whip, which gave him command of the whole team! Average pace about 1 1/2 to 2 miles an hour, including stoppages, as taken from old time tallies, for their journeys! These ponderous wagons, with their teams of eight horses and broad wheels, were actually associated with the idea of "flying," for I find an announcement in the year 1772, that the Stamford, Grantham, Newark and Gainsboro' wagons began "flying" on Tuesday, March 24th, ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... the advancing party the nature of the danger which awaited them. He shouted strenuously, but in vain—and with a feeling almost amounting to agony, he beheld the little troop resolutely advance beneath the ponderous rock, which, held in its place by the slightest purchase, needed but the most moderate effort to upheave and ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... eye. The general conviction was, that if every creditor of the firm, or even the devil himself, should some day take it into his head to come into the office, there would not be found even the slightest error in one of the ponderous and ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... any other political or social question, but the investigation of which need not make us get excited and angry and call one another bad names. I venture to hope that by these means I may manage to compile a not unedifying or uninteresting narrative, though our subject be withal somewhat a ponderous one. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... were demolished and the materials used in constructing walls wherever they were needed, or in strengthening the barricades. Prodigious military engines, made to throw heavy stones, and beams of wood, and other ponderous missiles, were set up within his lines, and openings were made in the walls and other defenses of the citadel, wherever necessary, to facilitate the action of ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... quarter of the town and his own. When he passed from the brightly lit city into his own quarter, the streets were like ugly gutters to drain the darkness, and the "Ark" rose mysteriously into the sky of night like a ponderous mountain. Dark cellar-openings led down into the roots of the mountain, and there, in its dark entrails, moved wan, grimy creatures with smoky lamps; there were all those who lived upon the poverty of ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sculptures and the entablature;—from the portraits of grim men and severe-eyed women, arrayed in orderly procession along the walls, and scowling a contemptuous enmity against the degenerate invader of their gloomy bowers and venerable halls; from the vast, dusky, ponderous, and complicated draperies that concealed the windows, and hung with the gloomy grandeur of funereal trappings about the hearse-like piece of furniture that was destined for his bed,—Lord L., on entering his apartment, might be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... as she listened to Leonard's eager narration; and Ethel glanced towards Harry to see whether he were admiring. No; Harry was bringing in a hall arm-chair in the background, for a vary large, heavy, vulgar-looking old man, who seemed too ponderous and infirm for a place on the benches. Richard made one of a black mass of clergy, and Aubrey and Gertrude had asserted their independence by perching themselves on a window-seat, as far as possible from all relations, whence they nodded a merry ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Father, Royall Dane: Oh, oh, answer me, Let me not burst in Ignorance; but tell Why thy Canoniz'd bones Hearsed in death, Haue burst their cerments, why the Sepulcher Wherein we saw thee quietly enurn'd, Hath op'd his ponderous and Marble iawes, To cast thee vp againe? What may this meane? That thou dead Coarse againe in compleat steele, Reuisits thus the glimpses of the Moone, Making Night hidious? And we fooles of Nature, So horridly to shake our disposition, With thoughts beyond thee; reaches of our Soules, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... night a lofty scaffold had been erected on the bridge of Sant' Angelo, and the plank and block were placed thereon. Above the block was hung, from a large cross beam, a ponderous axe, which, guided by two grooves, fell with its whole weight at the ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and one by the poet. [Footnote: See the Republic X, 596 B ff.] Now the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Stepan Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... together. We found some shell-fish, viz., limpets, periwinkles, and abundance of small oysters growing on the rocks, which were very sweet. In the sea we saw some green turtle, many sharks, and abundance of water-snakes of several sorts and sizes. The stones were all of rusty colour, and ponderous. ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... it," mused Guilder, entering his big touring car and depositing a bundle of blue-prints and linen tracing paper at his own ponderous feet. Quair followed him and spoke briefly ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... came a confusion of voices, but none of them human. A wind was racing to almost gale-like violence and with it came the inrush of warm air to peaks and valleys that had been tight-frozen. Between precipices echoed the crash of ice sliding loose and splintering as it fell in ponderous masses. Men sweating in the glare of collossal bonfires toiled at the work of ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... arm thrust across the sky; it is so high it is scarcely noticed in walking under it; it is so great and ponderous, and ultra in size, that the eye and mind alike fail to estimate it. For it is a common effect of great things to be overlooked. A moderately large rock, a moderately large house, is understood and mentally put down, as it were, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... cold and cheerless, weakly penetrating the ever-present frost veil. The tide, still defying the shackles of the mighty power that had bound all the rest of the world, surged up and down, piling ponderous ice cakes in mountainous heaps along the river banks. Occasionally an Eskimo or two would suddenly appear out of the snow fields, remain for a day perhaps, and then as suddenly disappear into the bleak wastes whence he ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might—as may, we will suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chill rain begins at shut of eve, In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. Each one kept shroud, nor to his neighbour gave Or word, or look, or action of despair. 40 Creues was one; his ponderous iron mace Lay by him, and a shatter'd rib of rock Told of his rage, ere he thus sank and pined. Iaepetus another; in his grasp, A serpent's plashy neck; its barbed tongue Squeez'd from the gorge, and all its uncurl'd length Dead; and because the creature could ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... of him as if he saw some expected and unpleasant thing far in the distance. Then with irresistible steps, neither swift nor slow, but ponderous, he strode to the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... cloth cape with a capacious hood, amused us greatly, for on meeting us, lest our bold eyes should pierce their disguise, they would stop and turn their faces to the wall. What these poor creatures suffer from the heat in these ponderous cloaks can only be imagined, and Dulcigno ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... this Spanish woman, I expected the breath of prophecy, wide outlooks, extraordinary visions. Not at all; her book is simply strange and pompous, wearisome and cold. Then the phraseology of her book is intolerable. All the expressions which swarm in those ponderous volumes, 'my divine princess,' 'my great queen,' when she addresses Our Lady, who in her turn speaks to her as 'my dearest,' just as Christ calls her 'my spouse,' 'my well-beloved,' and speaks of her continually as 'the object of my pleasure and delight,' the way in which ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... be bowed With woes far heavier than the ponderous tomb That weighed upon her gentle dust, a cloud Might gather o'er her beauty, and a gloom In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom, Heaven gives ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... and noble bridge to span The icy chasm that sunders man from man. Wherever wrong had fixed its bastions deep, There did his fierce yet gay assault surprise Some fortress girt with lucre or with lies; There his light battery stormed some ponderous keep; There charged he up the steep, A knight on whom no palsying torpor fell, Keen to the last to break a lance with Hell. And still undimmed his conquering weapons shine; On his bright sword no ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... apparently more important than men. This particular horse did not attract with beauty. At first glance he seemed ugly. But he was a giant, black as coal, rough despite the care manifestly bestowed upon him, long of body, ponderous of limb, huge in every way. A bystander remarked that he had a grand head. True, if only his head had been seen he would have been a beautiful horse. Like men, horses show what they are in the shape, the ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... accomplished facts may save yet the precious vestiges of parliamentary institutions. Don Juste's eyes glowed dully; he believed in parliamentary institutions—and the convinced drone of his voice lost itself in the stillness of the house like the deep buzzing of some ponderous insect. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and influence the people. He was absolutely a novel personage to Mary: their conversations are like a quick glancing of polished weapons—his, too heavy for her young brilliancy of speech and nature, crushing with ponderous force the light-flashing darts of question; but she, no way daunted, comprehending him, meeting full in the face the prodigious thrust. A brave young creature of twenty confronting the great Reformer, in single combat so to speak, and retiring from the field, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... head sagely, and said nothing. The immediate result of the experience was that Veronica went to Miss Beasley, and borrowed An Antiquarian Survey of the County of Bedworthshire, including a description of its Castles and Moated Houses, together with a History of its Ancient Families—a ponderous volume dated 1823, which had before been offered for the girls' inspection, but which nobody had hitherto summoned courage to attack. She studied it now with deep attention, and gave a digest of its information for the benefit of weaker minds, ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... barrier to his improvement arose from one defect in his character; and that was the habit in which he constantly indulged, of deploring the past, without making any very strong efforts toward amendment in the future. He was one evening seated in his room; a ponderous volume lay open on his study-table, and for a time he vainly tried to fix his attention thereon, till finally he closed the book, and leaning back in his chair, his brows contracted, and the lines about his mouth grew tense, as if his thoughts were anything but pleasing. ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... to its Cultured Despisers. Translation by Oman. (Ponderous, dogmatic in its philosophy, but profound and sympathetic in its ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... "Left" or "Right turn:" "Formation by squares," and finally the critical "Change front to rear." If this last maneuver is successfully accomplished, the strategos will compliment the drill sergeants; for it is notoriously difficult to turn a ponderous phalanx around and yet make it keep good order. The drilling goes on until the welcome order comes, "Ground arms!" and every perspiring soldier lets his heavy shield slip from his ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... of Johnson's career, one can not but see that the companionship and nimble wit of Garrick saved his ponderous and melancholy mind ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... residuary legatee, whose property they were, he endeavoured to extract the substance. In this he has not been very successful, as I have found upon a perusal of those papers, which have been since transferred to me. Sir John Hawkins's ponderous labours, I must acknowledge, exhibit a farrago, of which a considerable portion is not devoid of entertainment to the lovers of literary gossiping; but besides its being swelled out with long unnecessary extracts from various ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... centripetal and centrifugal; otherwise, I might burst by the natural pressure of too highly confined interior forces! I confess that, though not subject to such infliction, I very nearly fainted over these ponderous polysyllables! He also informed me that the beautifully paved highway to popularity in the coal mines was to excavate large quantities of the carboniferous substance contained in the subterranean ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... sat in silence for some little time after listening to this extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock Holmes pulled down from the shelf one of the ponderous commonplace books in which ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... rejoined my host with ponderous sarcasm. "But, as I have yet to meet any one who can read your writing, I don't suppose ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... and somewhat three-cornered appearance, are very clever over bad ground. The ladies whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Shanghai, like those in India, were all devoted to riding, and I had many merry scampers across country with them. In the country round Tientsin, we had often to jump over ponderous coffins, for John Chinaman has a provoking way of omitting to bury his relations, after he has stowed them ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... current of the Sensibility novelists, who impressed their curious morals or manners on all men and women in civilised Europe, was French in unbroken succession, from the day when Madame de la Fayette first broke ground against the ponderous romances of Madeleine de Scudery, to the day when Benjamin Constant forged, in Adolphe, the link between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century romance, between the novel of sentiment and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... cemetery of the Medici, the Sagrestia Nuova, is a ponderous and dismal toy. It is a huge mass of expensive, solemn, and insipid magnificence, erected over the carcasses of as contemptible a family as ever rioted above the earth, or rotted under it. The only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... mannerism was introduced by the pseudo-philosophers of the Universities and may be discerned everywhere, even among the first literary notabilities of the age. It is the mother of that forced and vague style which seems to have two, nay, many meanings, as well as of that prolix and ponderous style, le stile empese; and of that no less useless bombastic style, and finally of that mode of concealing the most awful poverty of thought under a babble of inexhaustible chatter that resembles a clacking mill and is just as stupefying: one may read for hours together ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... aware of his purpose, halted also, and awaited the moment of his rush; when once more he darted forward, and the combatants met with a skill which called forth a cry of involuntary applause from the Christians themselves. Muza received on the small surface of his shield the ponderous spear of Alonzo, while his own light lance struck upon the helmet of the Christian, and by the exactness of the aim rather than the weight of the blow, made Alonzo ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... rational purposes, viz., giving a useful function to a word, which at present has none, and also providing an intelligible expression for an idea which otherwise is left without means of uttering itself except through a ponderous circumlocution. Precisely in the same circumstances of idle and absurd sequestration stands the term polemic. At present, according to the popular usage, this word has some fantastic inalienable connection ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Luckett would never let her touch the salt, which will ruin the hands. Cicely, however, who would do something, turned the cheeses in the cheese-room alone. Taking one corner of the clean cloth in her teeth, in a second, by some dexterous sleight-of-hand, the heavy cheese was over, though ponderous enough to puzzle many a man, especially as it had to come over gently that the shape might ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... Though the ponderous wheels of Juggernaut no longer go crushing over the bodies of prostrate victims, the assembled crowd rush to the car with almost appalling fury and excitement. Pilgrims, however, come in vast numbers ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... much contrast between the lightness of his book, "Songs for the Children," and his ponderous setting of Kipling's "Recessional." The treatment of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Southern Lullaby" is unusual, and the songs, "My Ladye" and "The Ideal," both in ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... regimental bands played continuously and it seemed to me that they all played the tune of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." And the rain drizzled down, while every fifteen minutes one of the big navy guns roared and sent a ponderous shell shrieking up the ravine above in the direction of the enemy. To this day, whenever I hear an instrumental band playing "The Girl I Left Behind Me," there come to me the memories of that gloomy Sunday night at Pittsburg ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... God! what superhuman Peal was that? Not man, nor woman, Nor twenty madmen, crush'd, could wreak Their soul in such a ponderous shriek. Dumbly, for an instant, stares The field; ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... before Jane could swallow her sobs, her sister ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed by the ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign old gentleman, whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him a ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... them in the dim candle-light of the night before, and he realized now, what had escaped him then, that there was neither dressing-table, wardrobe, nor chest of drawers, that the entire space of the small apartment was filled by the clumsy bed, a folding wash-stand, and two ponderous arm-chairs covered in shabby red velvet. These, with a dingy gold-framed mirror hanging above the tiny corner fireplace, and a gilt clock under a glass shade, formed the ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... many of the most delightful and daring NUANCES of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans—pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a portion of that learned oration, and Mom Wallis, not quite understanding, pinned up and used as a sort of shrine the portion about doubting the devil; but as a sermon the parts were never assembled on this earth, nor could be, for some of it was ground to powder under eight pairs of ponderous heels. But the minister at that trying moment was too much otherwise engaged to notice that the child of his brain lay ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... and rang the ponderous iron bell which hung from a chain by the side of a Gothic column, and a man-servant in livery, with powdered hair, appeared in reply ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Lausitz, are a good deal disturbed by Austrian Tolpatcheries; and do feats, heroic in the small way, in smiting down that rabble. A valuable Officer or two is lost in such poor service, poor but indispensable; [Funeral Discourses (of a very curious, ponderous and serious tone), in Gesammelte Nachrichten, ii. 458, 464, &c.] and the troops have not always the repose which is intended them. Lieutenant-Colonel Loudon (Scotch by kindred, and famous enough before long) is the soul of these Croat enterprises,—and gets his Colonelcy ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... replies: "Norma, an opera piece." Since the parson's exit he has been executing "Norma" with great spirit, and, so far as I am able to judge, with wonderful skill. I doubt not his thoughts are a thousand miles hence, among brown-skinned wenches, dressed in crimson robes, and decorated with ponderous ear-drops. In fact, "Norma" is good, and goes far to carry one out of ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... is largely a matter of fancy, and there is no rule to the effect that a slender player should use a light club and one of powerful build a heavy one; indeed, one constantly finds the slim men employing the most ponderous drivers, as if, as it were, to make up for their own lightness, while heavy men will often prefer clubs that are like pen-holders to them. Once more I suggest the adoption of the medium as being generally the most satisfactory. I have a strong dislike to drivers that are unusually ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... his den, The Douglas in his hall? And hop'st thou hence unscathed to go? No, by Saint Bride of Bothwell, no! Up drawbridge, grooms,—what, warder, ho! Let the portcullis fall." Lord Marmion turned,—well was his need,— And dashed the rowels in his steed, Like arrow through the archway sprung; The ponderous gate behind him rung: To pass there was such scanty room, The bars, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... girl." He produced this confidence with ponderous solemnity. "She lives across the square ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... giant in pain; the sharp jerk, and then the steady pull at the carriage in which I was sitting; the "pant, pant! puff, puff!" of the iron horse, as he buckled to his work with a will; and then, finally, the preliminary oscillation of the ponderous train, the trembling and rumbling of creaking wheels along the rails—as we glided and bumped, slowly but steadily, out of the terminus—the distance signal showing "all clear" to us, and blocking the up line with the ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... gates were opened wide, and, file after file, the weary soldiers marched into the city; and dashing homeward after his brilliant assault, Conde and his squadron galloped in the last: but when the ponderous bars were once more drawn across the portals, it was felt that the combatants indeed were saved, but that the Fronde ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when those four letters, "son b." were written under the date of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... husband, the table linen had been woven for her in Ireland, the cut glass blown for her in England; the fragile china came from Sevres, and the massive silver had travelled from England to Virginia in the reign of Elizabeth. The room may have been ugly, nay, ponderous, but it had ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... exterior, the hand of decay is perceptible on every side; the rooms are ruined, the windows broken, the floors unsafe (excepting, by the way, a small portion of the building which is habitable). A ponderous broad oak staircase leads to a dismantled state-room, shorn of the principal part of its panelling, carving, and chimney-pieces.[1] Other desolate apartments retain their names as if in mockery; "the drawing-room," "the chapel," "Lady ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... this plan, he ordered the men to plant several ponderous logs in the same position as the first beam, over which other logs were thrown crosswise, and the whole ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... they thrust the ponderous cheese, And the loaves of wheat and rye; None stinteth him for lack of ease— For each a stintless welcome sees In the Baron's ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... farmer would be, and much like the other farm-houses of the region. But Diana's room, a little one it was, had one side filled with bookshelves; and on the bookshelves was a dark array of solid and ponderous volumes. A table under the front window held one or two that were apparently in present use; the rest of the room displayed the more usual fittings and surroundings of a maiden's life. Only in their essentials, however; ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... laid impenetrable brass, and tin, And precious gold and silver; on its block Placed the huge anvil, took the ponderous sledge, And held the pincers in the ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... master Duncan; I am but the ghost of poor China," and the ponderous bundle dropped first to the horse's nose and then at his forefeet, while her face fell into her trembling hands, her tears flowing down through her fingers, the first ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... the electric current that the heart itself generates," pursued Kennedy, hammering home the new and startling idea. "That current is one of the feeblest known to science, for the dynamo that generates it is no ponderous thing of copper wire and steel castings. It is just the heart itself. The heart sends over the wire its own telltale record to the machine which registers it. The thing takes us all the way back to Galvani, who was the first to observe ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... that?" Lord Groome inquired, with that ponderous affectation of playfulness which he believed to be acceptable ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... was really doing a little work, a more ponderous step broke the silence of his landing, a heavy footfall full of friendship. Certainly that was not Angel, nor even the more weighty Esther, though when the knock came it was little and ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... intrigues begun on the promenade or in the gambling-rooms were helped along by the ample opportunities of meeting, with the passions stimulated by the music and the wine. At 4 o'clock many took an afternoon nap. Then came the chief event of the day, the ponderous table d'hote. At 9 p.m. every one flocked to the Casino, and the game went merrily on until midnight. Then to bed, each and all with more or less ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton's great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... and wondering if it could possibly right itself, and if my father could escape. Was this the end of our struggles and adventures? Was this death? All these questions flashed through my mind in the fraction of a second, and a moment later I was engaged in a life and death struggle. The ponderous monolith of ice sank below the surface, and the frigid waters gurgled around me in frenzied anger. I was in a saucer, with the waters pouring in on every side. A moment more and I ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... leaving the mopping-up parties to complete their work. The Tanks bravely waddled up after them, in a vain effort to keep up, for the attacking infantry went so fast, in the first stages, that they easily outstripped those ponderous giants and left them ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... of our heroine, Zelma Burleigh, and of her Cousin Bessie. The morning before, a fragrant May morning, scores of summers ago, Roger Burleigh, a stout Northumbrian Squire, had rolled himself, in his ponderous way, into the snug family-parlor at the Grange, and addressed his worthy dame with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... intact. One should read them again and again, line by line. Ponderous eloquence, fustian bombast, and mouldy pathos combine with the display of pomp, to excite world-wide admiration. This play of well-rehearsed parts is given before an audience of generals, high officials and politicians, and the scene ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... where she was; for so many mornings she had wakened up in strange places that it took her several minutes before she could make out the geographical whereabouts of the heavy blue moreen curtains, the print of the lord-lieutenant of the county on the wall, and all the handsome ponderous mahogany furniture that stuffed up the room. As soon as full memory came into her mind, she started up; nor did she go to bed again, although she saw by her watch on the dressing-table that it was not ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Condition of the Principalities of New Netherland, or New Sweden, for the Use of the Lord's High Proprietors thereof" (for of such precious dead dust this library is full); but I found, instead, wrapped in weighty sentences and backed by the gravest and most ponderous testimony, the story of a baby, "a Sucking Child six Months old." It was like a live seed in the hand of a mummy. The story of a baby and a boy and an aged man, in "the devouring Waves of the Sea; and also among the ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... in some respects even preferable to sole-leather. The principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing. One's hepar, or, in vulgar language, liver,—a ponderous organ, weighing some three or four pounds,—goes up and down like the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements, at every step of a trotting horse. The brains also are shaken up like coppers in a money-box. Riding is good, for those that are born ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... already produced a total departure from the original intention of the Government; a scheme, probably, that was radically defective when adopted, and which contained the seeds of its own ruin. Recourse to electors has become an idle form, ponderous and awkward, and in some of its features uselessly hazardous. We are in the habit of comparing the cost of government in this country with that of other nations in the Old World. Beyond a question, the Americans enjoy great advantages in this important particular, ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... duplication of the first part and emphasizes the main tonality of G major. That Haydn was not forced to this literal repetition through any lack of fancy is shown by the skilful amplification of the first theme, in measures 177-184. The whole movement sparkles with sunshine; and those ponderous "heavy-weights" who criticise it because it is not deep or "soulful" are looking for qualities which the music does not pretend to contain. It is the work of a wholesome, cheerful-hearted man expressing through his favorite language his joy ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... full view of that grand old building—a castle of the olden times—kept, so far as possible to elegance or comfort, in its ponderous mediaeval grandeur. But Madam Art had softened all its ruder features. Plate-glass was sunk into those thick walls; circular rooms in those twin towers, commanded a splendid view of the valley, over which the castle was built. The broad stone terrace connecting the ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... my time; I rushed—but no— Fate ever mocks an ardent man; Even as I rushed, unwieldy, slow, Bore down a ponderous Pickford-Van, And under two broad wheels crushed flat My ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... obstruct the. vision the Alpha and Omega of the whole spectacle are plainly observable. The gradual mustering of the forces is near the Rockies to the westward, then the skirmish-line of fleecy cloudlets comes rolling and tumbling in advance, bringing a current of air that causes the ponderous wind-mill at the railway tank to "about face" sharply, and sets its giant arms to whirling vigorously around. Behind comes the compact, inky veil that spreads itself over the whole blue canopy above, seemingly banishing ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic from the incomprehensible unseen. On looking out of the window, I saw by some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; we, I say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train, striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went. Of course there was nothing unusual in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... convenience, of the principles of the popular faith, which were recognized as irrational. One of the most prominent men of the Scipionic circle, the Greek Polybius, candidly declares that the strange and ponderous ceremonial of Roman religion was invented solely on account of the multitude, which, as reason had no power over it, required to be ruled by signs and wonders, while people of intelligence had certainly no need of religion. Beyond doubt the Roman friends of Polybius substantially ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... his other boys succeeded in reaching their castle, and barricading the ponderous door. And then commenced the battle. The besieged were well armed, and all behaved with admirable bravery; but none more bravely than Shell's wife, who loaded the pieces as her husband and sons ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... suited to the growth of the plantain is found in the virgin land most recently taken in from the forest, having a formation of clay and decomposed vegetable substances. A large portion of organic matter is required, as well as clay or other ponderous strata, to afford the greatest production of fruit. I have known good plantains produced in the West Indies, upon land considerably exhausted by the culture of cotton, but which was enriched by the application of a quantity of the decomposed ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Brasher—I must own that his manner is a little ponderous—"is of a scientific, I may say also, and at the same time, of a judicial nature. Our object is the Pursuit of Truth and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... that rough walk in the ponderous suits across the broken terrain of the asteroid was a short one, measured by the beating of his own heart, Dane thought it much too long. There was no sign of life by the air lock of the bubble—no move on the part of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... and clear, is doubtless a question upon which some difference exists. But even here our island Church has been less vexed by controversy than have most other portions of the Christian realm. No Cummins or Colenso has arisen among its bishops. Only once has the ponderous machinery of its canon on "discipline" been put in motion against a presbyter. That instance occurred in 1877, when the Rev. H. E. Carlyon of Kaiapoi, a very earnest and devoted man, was found guilty by the Bench of Bishops of erroneous teaching and unlawful practice in regard to auricular ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... which even she, the strangest of her sex, was not exempted. Go? Not I, Olalla—O, not I, Olalla, my Olalla! A bird sang near by; and in that season, birds were rare. It bade me be of good cheer. And once more the whole countenance of nature, from the ponderous and stable mountains down to the lightest leaf and the smallest darting fly in the shadow of the groves, began to stir before me and to put on the lineaments of life and wear a face of awful joy. The sunshine struck upon the hills, strong ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the vers de societe order, albeit the lightness is of a somewhat ponderous variety. It, however, has much interest as a character sketch from the life, and is said by those who had the opportunity of knowing to be ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the upper part of his ponderous figure arrayed in a frock-coat. He did not take kindly to what he termed "those skittish sparrow-tailed affairs". Frock-coats suited him, but I am not partial to them on every one. They look well enough on a podgy, fat, or broad man, but on a skinny ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... father, royal Dane; O, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn'd, Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again! What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... floundered out through the last row of saplings and bushes, his beard embellished with a broken twig, his big face red and perspiring. He was a fine, a mighty man, ponderous of shoulder, monumental of height, stupendous of girth; there was cloth enough in the hot-looking black frock-coat he wore for the canopy of a small pavilion. Half a dozen books were under his arm, and in his hand he carried a hat which evidently belonged to "that other monsieur," ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... grudge for absconding in summer. Schwarz glared coldly at him, as if unsure to what Maurice alluded; and when the latter had recalled the details of the case to his mind, he said rudely: "You went your way, Herr Guest. Now I go mine." He commenced to turn the leaves of his ponderous note-book, and after Maurice had stood for some few minutes, listening to Beyerlein trip and stumble through Mozart, he felt that, for this day at least, he could put up with no more, and left ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to the Hemlock Farm at stated periods during the summer. He had, to be plain, sat down before Jane's heart to besiege it with the same ponderous benign calm with which he ate an egg or talked of death. There was a bronze image of Buddha in the hall at the Farm, the gaze of the god fixed with ineffable content, as it had been for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Egypt, was the leading art. The Egyptians were the first people who learned to raise buildings with vast halls supported by ponderous columns. Their wealth and skill, however, were not lavished in the erection of fine private mansions or splendid public buildings. The characteristic works of Egyptian architecture are the tombs of the kings and the temples of the gods. The picture of the great structure ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... on among the secondary planets of our solar system; and we may conjecture that probably most of the satellites are governed by the same law; especially if it be founded on such a construction of their figure as makes them more ponderous towards their ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... sympathy, understanding, and admiration between the two men, but it was still heavily veiled by self-interest. To Mr. McKenty Cowperwood was interesting because he was one of the few business men he had met who were not ponderous, pharasaical, even hypocritical when they were dealing ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the divinity professor, crossed the square rapidly. He was a middle-aged man, stout, almost ponderous, in figure; but he held himself rigidly upright, and walked fast across the square. The extreme neatness of his clothes contrasted with the prevailing shabbiness of the students and the assistant lecturers who followed him. Yet he did not seem to be a man who gave to externals more than ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... horses, impelled by some mysterious home yearning, hit the back trail in a black night of downpour, and they trudged half a day through wet grass and dripping scrub to overtake the truants. Thunderstorms drove up, shattering the hush of the land with ponderous detonations, assaulting them with fierce bursts of rain. Haps and mishaps alike they accepted with an equable spirit and the true philosophy of the trail—to take things as they come. When rain deluged them, there was always shelter to be found ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... is full strange to him who hears and feels, When wandering there in some deserted street, The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels, The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet: Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth? 5 Who in this city of the stars abideth To buy or sell as those in ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... readily do," replied Leonard; "but I must first procure a light." With this, he groped his way among the close ranks of ponderous pillars, but though he proceeded with the utmost caution, he could not avoid coming in contact with the beds of some of the other patients, and disturbing them. At length he descried a glimmer of light issuing from ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bolts, on which iron shackles slid, with a padlock at the end; used to confine the legs of prisoners in a manner similar to the punishment of the stocks. The offender was condemned to irons, more or less ponderous according to the nature of the offence of which he was guilty. Several of them are yet to be seen in the Tower of London, taken in the Spanish Armada. Shakspeare mentions Hamlet thinking of a kind ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... asunder by wedges of ice; and glaciers, welded, half of ice seven times frozen, and half of gold seven times frozen, hang down from them, and fall in thunder, cleaving into deadly splinters, like the Cretan arrowheads; and into a mixed dust of snow and gold, ponderous, yet which the mountain whirlwinds are able to lift and drive in wreaths and pillars, hiding the paths with a burial cloud, fatal at once with wintry chill, and weight of golden ashes. So the wanderers in the labyrinth fall, one by one, and are buried there:—yet, over the drifted graves, those ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... and Doctor Thurlow had many gracious words to say of the boys in the army, and spent much time reading letters from those at the front who belonged to the church and Sunday school, and spoke of the "supreme sacrifice" in the light of a saving grace; but the sermon was a gentle ponderous thing that got nowhere, spiced toward its close with thrilling scenes from battle news. John Cameron as he listened did not feel that he had found God. He did not feel a bit enlightened by it. He laid it to his own ignorance and stupidity, though, and determined not to give up the ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... the ponderous box, the soldiers managed to get it down the stairs and through the thirteen barred and bolted doors. Four several times one or other of the soldiers expressed the opinion that Grotius himself must be locked within it, but ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley |
