"Perpendicular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the Finchley Road All Saints' Church stands up conspicuously. This is a fine church in the Perpendicular style, built in 1846. The chancel was added in 1866, and the tower and spire in 1889. It is really the church of the Eyre estate, and was largely built by the Eyre family. There is in it a beautiful marble font of uncommon pattern, and ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... that an ordinary robin is perfectly aware that while squirrels and cats are able to ascend the perpendicular trunk of a tree, they cannot climb the painted pillar of a piazza; and consequently it is perfectly safe to build a nest at the ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... the fishing-boats were all either stranded, or at anchor, nearer the village. But why and whither had she gone? The ocean, in front, failed to answer the latter question, and his glance turned. On the one hand was the village; on the other, high, almost perpendicular rocks ran seaward, obscuring the view. It would not be easy to get around that point; without a boat it could ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... series of ponds with only one supply, the water should flow through an open trough with stones and other impediments in it, between the ponds. The ponds may be lined entirely with brickwork faced with cement, and in this case the sides should be made perpendicular. The cement should, however, be exposed freely to the action of the running water for a couple of months at least before any ova ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... could see a perfect square of which all the sides were equal to the distance between s and c, and if at the nearest end of the side towards the eye a pole were placed, or some other straight object, set up by a perpendicular line as shown at r s—then, I say, that if you were to look at the side of the square that is nearest to you it will appear at the bottom of the vertical plane r s, and then look at the farther side and it would appear to you at ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... to leap across to the other train, stirred all my bile. It was on this current of thought that the nobleman who had been hung and the cardinal who had pined in a cage were borne upon my memory. "Small choice," said I, "whether the bars are perpendicular or horizontal. You lose your independence about equally ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... batteries, Stuart's Hill was strongly occupied by Longstreet, with Anderson's division as general reserve; and this wing of the Confederate army was gradually wheeled up, but always under cover, until it was almost perpendicular to the line of the unfinished railroad. The strength of Lee's army at the battle of Manassas was hardly more than 50,000 of all arms. Jackson's command had been reduced by battle and forced marches to 17,000 men. Longstreet mustered 30,000, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... rule, the grammar was leaky and the construction more or less lame; but I did not much mind these things. They are common defects of my own, and one mustn't criticise other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... scenes of terrifying magnificence when she followed Mat over the trail cut along the perpendicular walls of the canon five miles down to the floor of the Valley. One who has not passed over that trail can scarcely conceive of it; and one who has, brings away a sense of the sublime and the beautiful mingled with terror. There against the blue sky stands the perpendicular wall ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... now necessary to find new cover. For long distances the banks of the Pecos are nearly perpendicular, and ten to twenty feet high. At flood the swift current cuts deep holes and recesses in these banks. Prowling along the margin of the stream, Jim found one of these recesses wide enough to hold them both, and ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... to be seen that would have revived one of the Seven Sleepers. Now, on the great-granddaddy-longlegs of all the spidery trestles that ever were built, we would go roaring across a mighty gorge, its sides clothed with perpendicular gardens and vineyards, and with little gray towns clustering under the ledges on its sheer walls like mud-daubers' nests beneath an eave. Now, perched on a ridgy outcrop of rock like a single tooth in a snaggled reptilian jaw, would be a ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... box-cars. On the contrary, they were very narrow—not more than an inch and a half in breadth. I couldn't get half of the width of my sole on them. Then there was nothing to which to hold with my hands. True, there were the ends of the two box-cars; but those ends were flat, perpendicular surfaces. There were no grips. I could only press the flats of my palms against the car-ends for support. But that would have been all right if the cleats for my feet had been ...
— The Road • Jack London
... progress across cracked rocks and bogs, past abysses of unsoundable depths—on the very edges of which my mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes—we arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey. It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the floor levels, partly by exterior batter, the interior wall surface being approximately vertical. Some writers, noting the inclination of the outer wall surface, and not seeing the interior, have inferred that the walls leaned considerably away from the perpendicular. This inference has been strengthened, in some cases, by an examination of the interior, for the inner wall surface, while finely finished, is not by any means a plane surface, being generally concave in each room; yet a line drawn from floor level to floor level would be very nearly vertical. The ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff
... though not seemingly ill adapted to give a great heat with but very little fuel. This they made by digging a round hole in the ground, about 20 inches wide and full 3 feet deep, cutting an opening in the front sloping down to the bottom, perpendicular at the sides, about 9 inches wide and about 15 inches long, reckoning from the edge of the circle: this is to serve to throw in the wood and to allow a passage for the air; at the other side a small opening about 4 inches by 3 inches ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... are regulated by the moon, it is high-water by the shore at this place on the days of the new and full moon, about four o'clock. The perpendicular rise and fall is very inconsiderable, not exceeding four feet at most. In Christmas Sound it is high-water at half past two o'clock on the days of the full and change, and Mr Wales observed it to rise and fall on a perpendicular three feet six inches; but this was during the neap tides, consequently ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... at any angle to the plane of cleavage. We may sometimes see the lines of the true bedding—the lines which were actually horizontal when the mud was laid down—in bits of slate, and find them sometimes perpendicular to, sometimes inclined to, and sometimes again coinciding with the plane of cleavage, which they have ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... dropping from the gray walls of her home, with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here and there a precarious little garden half-way up the steep. Just under her window an almost perpendicular path came up, crept round the walls and entered the town. But no one ever used this road now, for a far wider and better one had been constructed at the other side of the mountain, and all the people came up that way when the day's work ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... young people, and penetrated the recesses of the secret trees. Several little tongues of flame clipped sensitive and ruddy on the naked air, sending a faint glow over the needle foliage. They gave a strange, perpendicular aspiration in the night. Julia waved slowly in her tree dance. Jim stood apart, with his legs straddled, a ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... winnowing the wind, was heard the sough and whizz of those mighty vans, as the Royal Bird, himself an army, performed his majestic evolutions with all the calm confidence of a master in the art of aerial war, now shooting up half-a-thousand feet perpendicular, and now suddenly plump-down into the rear of the croaking, cawing, and chattering battalions, cutting off their retreat to the earth. Then the rout became general, the missing, however, far outnumbering the dead. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... brown, all except the square portion over the fire-place, which was once adorned with a gay paper, but whose brilliancy has long been defaced by smoke and grease. A broken pipe or two, a couple of irons, and a brass candlestick whose shaft leans considerably out of the perpendicular, occupy the mantelpiece. An old rocking-chair and two or three common ones extremely infirm on their legs, complete the furniture. The walls are nearly bare of ornament; the exceptions being a highly-coloured print of a horse-race, and a sampler worked ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... that period being those at Flamstead, Hatfield, North Mimms, Standon, and Ware. Early Decorated portions are noticeable among Norman surroundings at Hemel Hempstead, and among Early English at Wheathampstead; Late Decorated is found with Perpendicular at Hitchin. Standon is the only W. porch in the county. Flamstead and Wheathampstead are the only churches in the county that have retained their original ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... where the visual ray passes through it. If now we trace on the floor a line AB from the nail to the spot B, just under the eye, and from the point o, where this line passes through or under the glass, we raise a perpendicular oS, that perpendicular passes through the precise point that the visual ray passes through. The line AB traced on the floor is the horizontal trace of the visual ray, and it will be seen that the point a is situated on the vertical raised ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... foot of two steep hills, one of which is crowned with the woods of Blaise Castle, and the other with a group of buildings consisting of the parish church, a charming little Gothic structure known as "The Hall," and the national schoolhouse. The church is a fine perpendicular edifice of considerable antiquity, with a square tower surmounted, in true West of England style, by a small turret, having a tiny Gothic spire at one corner. The parishioners are proud of their church, and with justice. It contains ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... and strove barehanded with joy and vigor, which was delightful; yet so systematic, that it was anything rather than romance. It might have been geometry, in that a foe is safer horizontal than perpendicular, and the theorem he applied industriously, with simple ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... perpendicular church standing back from the road, with its churchyard about it; and just beyond it, he turned, his pace involuntarily slackening, to look at a small gabled house, surrounded by a garden, and overhung by a splendid lime tree. Suddenly, as he approached it, the night burst into fragrance, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and cheerful aspect presenting a striking contrast with the gloom of its immediate environs. By a serpentine road cut through the rock, we climbed an ascent, by nature inaccessible; this path, in some parts not three fathoms in breadth, is bounded on one side by the perpendicular rock, and on the other overlooks an abrupt precipice, from which however it is defended by a strong stone balustrade, so that however fearful in appearance, its only real danger lies in an accident which sometimes happens, that large ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... sunbow's rays still arch The torrent with the many hues of heaven, And roll the sheeted silver's waving column O'er the crag's headlong perpendicular, And fling its lines of foaming light along, And to and fro, like the pale coursers tail, The Giant steed, to be bestrode by Death As told ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... dialogues, are in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are neither preceded nor followed by anything with which they harmonise. They give to the whole book something of the grotesque character of those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking where truth is in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Michael Angelo's let into the wall,—and then to the back of it, where he opened a small cloth-covered door, when there yawned before me, below me, and above me, a great wide lofty room. Down into it led an almost perpendicular stair. ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... appertaining to the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, and about three miles, a furlong, and few odd yards from that oft-recorded good town, a dry stone wall, some thirty inches in height, runs from the lofty and perpendicular sea-banks, over a portion of what may be termed the fag-end of Lammermoor, and now forming a separation between the laws of Scotland and the jurisdiction of the said good town; and on crossing to the northern side of this humble but important stone wall, you stand on the lands of Lamberton. Rather ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... down the basement steps through the cellar into the area, and with clenched teeth was looking up the monstrous sheer of red-brick wall cut into long strips by the lessening perspective of perpendicular iron ladders. Under each window each ladder opened out into a little, a very little, balcony. The rest was straighter than ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... vestry, putting on his surplice, and relapsed into a contemplative cheek-scratching that was manifestly habitual. Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly's sense of the church found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with Johnson. "Early Norman arches, eh?" he said, "or Perpendicular." ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... stayed at school at least during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later in the forenoon paid a visit to the annex, he found the Assistant in charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding to his side of the argument with his ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... and during the fine weather it makes a collection of honey intended to be absorbed by its own larvae, if it had not the misfortune to be watched by one of these intriguing Coleoptera. Wherever in Provence there is a perpendicular wall, natural or artificial, a little cliff, a sloping ditch, or the wall of one of those caves which the people of the country use for putting their tools in, the Anthophora hollows out galleries, at the bottom of which he builds a certain number of chambers. He fills each of them with honey, ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... it make a nice contrast to the humming-bird's? Over the bed, shall I? But then, if it should drop down on your nose, you know! I think the corner over the fireplace will be best. Yes, we'll have it right up perpendicular, in the angle. The branch twists a little, you see, and the nest will run out with its odds and ends like an old banner. Might I push up the washstand ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... application of joined hands to the forehead. To the Acharyas or superiors the other members of the sect perform the Ashtanga or prostration of the body with eight parts touching the ground. The tilak or sect-mark of the Ramanujis consists of two perpendicular white lines from the roots of the hair to the top of the eyebrows, with a connecting white line at the base, and a third central line either of red or yellow. The Ramanujis do not recognise the worship of Radha, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... snow-covered swamps. We had to walk over pointed and loose rocks which, sliding from under our feet, made our path dangerous and often threw us down several feet on sharp-edged stones lying beneath the snow. Once we had to climb a towering and almost perpendicular rock which not only detained us but was the cause of great anxiety for the safety of the women who, being heavily laden with furs and one of them with a child at her back, could not exert themselves with the activity which such a task required. Fortunately nothing ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... breeze and becomes quite uncontrollable. The amount of spring that must be given the cross-piece is in proportion to its length, Mr. Eddy's rule being to spring the cross-stick, by means of a cord joining the two ends like a bow, until the perpendicular between the point of juncture of the two sticks and the centre of the cord is equal to one-tenth of the length of the cross-stick, or a little more than one-tenth, if the kite is to be flown in very ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... brought us to a hilltop overlooking the entire lake, with the villages on its edge, and range after range of the mountains of Jalisco and Michoacan. Our animals were more than an hour picking their way down the stony trails between all but perpendicular cornfields, the leaves of which had been stripped off to permit the huge ear at the top the more fully to ripen. A boulder set in motion at the top of a field would have been sure death to the man or horse it ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... man after one of the girls had left him to purify herself, and herself to lave his prick from mere love and excitement of handling a prick, and from long practice she had an art of doing it in a way to raise another perpendicular, which led to its being allayed in the full-blown charms ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... struggled through it. They explored for some little distance up and down to see if an easier point for crossing could be discovered, but came to the conclusion that the spot at which the tracks crossed it was the easiest, as in most places the bank had been eaten away by winter rains and was almost perpendicular. They had reached this spot late in the evening, and prepared to cross soon after daybreak "You will have to fix up three teams to each waggon," Abe had said, "and take one over at a time. We will be out early scouting—for, ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... excitement. He whimpered, he grunted, he wallowed as he fed. He had no time to look where he was going. So, all of a sudden, he fell straight through a thick fringe of blue-berry bushes and went sprawling and clawing down the face of an almost perpendicular steep. ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... realized that a physical change had marched alongside the fluctuations of our temper. The circumference of the bowl was the same as at first, but imperceptibly yet swiftly the hollow had deepened, sunk farther from the sky, the walls had become almost perpendicular and to my terror I found myself looking upward from the bottom of a pit at the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the six weeks' bombardment of the city—May 8 to July 4, 1863. They were used by the non-combatants—mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps—but wait; here are some materials out of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one of the most strenuous days I ever had in the islands, as the road—and what a road!—constantly led up and down the steepest slopes. It seemed to me we were climbing perpendicular mountains all day long, and I had many an opportunity of admiring the agility of my companions. I am a fair walker myself, but I had to crawl on my hands and knees in many spots where they jumped from a stone to a root, taking firm hold with their toes, never using their hands, never slipping, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... lead at command, and heard the man on the quarter-deck, catching the line when it swung into a perpendicular position, report twenty-five fathoms. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... be baked in tin or earthen pans with straight sides, that are as nearly perpendicular as possible. They cut into handsomer slices, and if they are to be iced, it will be found very inconvenient to put on the icing, if the cake slopes in towards ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... ingenious suggestion appears in the 3rd Number of the Journal of the Photographic Society, and deserves to be widely circulated. "My plan is to place a T-square on the bottom of the camera, and draw one perpendicular line on each side (exactly opposite to each other), either with paint or pencil; or the ends of the camera itself will do if perpendicular to the base. Then, having two musket bullets attached to a silk thread, simply ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... him, as his biographer says, with feelings of excusable pride. Another patent in the steam-engine series, taken out in 1784, contained, besides other methods of converting a circular or angular motion into a perpendicular or rectilineal motion, the well-known and much-admired parallel motion, and the application of the steam-engine to give motion to wheel-carriages for carrying persons and goods. To ascertain the exact number of strokes made by an engine during a given time, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... mores. It is not conceivable that the Lysistrata of Aristophanes could be presented on any public stage in Christendom. The whole play is beyond the toleration of modern mores. We meet with jugglers in Homer,[1994] also mountebanks and tumblers.[1995] The kubisteteres spun around on the perpendicular axis of the body, and are compared to the wheel of the potter. Then they pitched down head-foremost, like plungers or tumblers turning somersaults. Some archaeologs have thought that the play of these persons had some analogy with that of the cubic stones which were so prominent in the cult of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... remind her that 'Here was the home of Nausicaa in the Odyssey.' Elsie failed to respond; she was otherwise occupied. At last, I succumbed and gave it up. I remember nothing further till a day and a half later, when we got under lee of Crete, and the ship showed a tendency to resume the perpendicular. Then I began once more to take a languid ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... unfrequently dipping into the water. In some instances they grew out in nearly horizontal lines, for thirty or forty feet. The water being uniformly deepest near the shores, where the banks were highest and the nearest to a perpendicular, Hutter had found no difficulty in letting the ark drop under one of these covers, where it had been anchored with a view to conceal its position; security requiring some such precautions, in his view of the case. Once beneath the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... a perfectly straight-stemmed cocoa-palm; they all have an inclination from the perpendicular more or less; perhaps that is why a cyclone has more effect on them than on ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... amount of lift is of less relative importance than the ratio of lift to drift, as this alone decides the angle of gliding descent. In a plane the pressure is always perpendicular to the surface, and the ratio of lift to drift is therefore the same as that of the cosine to the sine of the angle of incidence. But in curved surfaces a very remarkable situation is found. The pressure, instead of being uniformly normal to the chord of the arc, is usually inclined ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... the sun should be, and a scrap of clear azure is almost visible through the grayish-white edges of the cloud. A moment more, and a timid ray of sunlight gleams in the pools along the road, upon the sheets of fine, perpendicular rain which fall as if through a sieve, and upon the shining, newly washed verdure of ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the useful product of a rich soil and fine climate; the whole bounded by lofty mountains, clothed with rich and almost impervious forests of evergreens, occasionally intermixed with high and nearly perpendicular rocks, whose summits are, for a great part of the year, covered with snow;—the whole forming one of the most agreeable, picturesque, and romantic scenes that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... on Kennedy, "is the perpendicular position of the letter in relation to the line. That is of great value in individualizing a machine. It is very seldom that machines, even when they are new, are perfect in this particular. It does not seem much until you magnify it. Then anyone can see it, and it is a characteristic that ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... rings or stories of various heights, rising to the top of the tower. Each of these stories or galleries has four windows, facing directly to the points of the compass, and rising of course regularly above each other. These four perpendicular ranges of windows admitted air, and, the fire being kindled, heat, or smoke at least, to each of the galleries. The access from gallery to gallery is equally primitive. A path, on the principle of an inclined plane, turns round and round the building like a screw, and gives access to the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... chimneys of this part of the lower town, and upon the great river sweeping by northeastward like another Amazon. The heel of our misshapen foot extends indefinitely toward Montreal. Upon it, on a level with the citadel, are the Plains of Abraham. It was up its high, almost perpendicular, sides that Wolfe clambered with his army, and stood in the rear of his enemy one pleasant September morning over a hundred ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... of the 'Buckras;' but for the most part their demeanor was civil and pleasant. Most of them had the headloads without which a negro woman seems hardly complete in the road, varying in dimensions from a huge basket of yams or bananas to an ounce vial. How such a slight thing manages to keep its perpendicular with their careless, swinging gait, is something marvellous, but they manage it to perfection. Almost every group, in addition, had a well-laden donkey—comical little creatures, looking hardly bigger ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... a steep and rugged path, now crossing a narrow bridge, spanning a fathomless abyss, again creeping along the edge of a precipice, where the eagle soared and screamed over the fir tops in the abyss below, and where a perpendicular wall rose to giddy heights in the clouds above. The path at times was so narrow, that it seemed that the mountain goat could with difficulty find a foothold for its slender hoof. A false step, or a slip upon the icy rocks would precipitate the traveler, a mangled corpse, a thousand feet upon the ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... come down bodily with a crash, partly uprooted, though even then they may be resuscitated for a time. We had a powerful set of pulley tackle by which, when made fast to a neighbouring tree, they could be restored to the perpendicular, after enlarging the hole left by the roots, making the ground firm again round the tree, and placing a strong sloping prop to take the weight on the weak side; good yields would then often ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... fleet, followed them nearly to the pickets. Checking his useless pursuit, he rounded a bush, dropped his whip and stood, voiceless, motionless, the capacity of his powers consumed by the act of breathing and preserving the perpendicular. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... by those Official people. M. de Voltaire knows well enough how he failed to get his moneys, and quitted Frankfurt in a hurry! Here, inexorably certain from the Documents, and testimonies on both parts, is that final Passage of the long Fire-work: last crackle of the rocket before it dropped perpendicular:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... branches of the royal family of Abyssinia were imprisoned in early times, is a little to the north of Lake Haik, and beyond the Mille. It runs north and south, in length about twelve or thirteen miles, and is exceedingly high and steep, the sides thereof being almost perpendicular. Mr Krapf, amongst the most considerable rivers which he passed in this quarter, mentions the Ala, which he states runs to, and is lost in, the deserts of the country of Adel. This is important, and this river is no doubt the Wali of Bruce, which he mentions (vol. iii. p. 248) as the scene ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... turn to the left, the trees suddenly came to an end, and in their place were large piles of mossy, ragged boulders. The canyon ended in a perpendicular, moss-covered wall, hundreds of feet high, and from the top of this wrinkled old cliff leaped the stream into the canyon below. On an old tin sign, fastened to the stump of an immense tree, were the words, ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... sound: a clarion call that tore the veil lying over my mental vision: the sharp, repeated whistle of the whip-poor-will. And with my mind's eye I saw the dusky bird: shooting slantways upward in its low flight which ends in a nearly perpendicular slide down to within ten or twelve feet from the ground, the bird being closely followed by a second one pursuing. In reality I did not see the birds, but I heard the fast whir of ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... were heated and expanded, and the nuts screwed up as before. The lamps being again withdrawn, they contracted in cooling, and the walls were further drawn together. This process was continually repeated, until at length the walls were restored to their perpendicular position. The gallery may still be seen with the bars extending across it, and binding together ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... same room next morning, I stared. The blue had changed to yellow. The life of the water was gone. Nothing met my eyes but a wide expanse of dead sand. You could walk straight across the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from the perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking, concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was high-water, or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was over a long reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... to Slanes Castle, built upon the margin of the sea, so that the walls of one of the towers seem only a continuation of a perpendicular rock, the foot of which is beaten by the waves. To walk round the house seemed impracticable. From the windows the eye wanders over the sea that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat with violence ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... touched the American shore, the question arose as to which method would be the best to adopt in ascending the giddy height. A covered way leads to the top of the bank, which is more than two hundred feet in perpendicular height. Up this steep our ingenious neighbours have constructed on an inclined plane of boards a railway, on which two cars run in such a manner that the weight of the descending car draws up the other to the top of the bank. Both are secured ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... tower near, and high green mountains rise up around. After leaving it, we had a beautiful panoramic view of the northern coast. Many of the precipices are of the same formation as the Causeway; Fairhead, a promontory of this kind, is grand in the extreme. The perpendicular face of fluted rock is about three hundred feet in height, and towering up sublimely from the water, seemed almost to ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... government, it was," he continued, "what often happened in great revolutions, where extreme measures are adopted in the fury of the moment, and the State resembles an agitated pendulum which swings from side to side for some time ere it can acquire its due and perpendicular station. Or it might be likened to a storm or hurricane, which, passing over a region, does great damage in its passage, yet sweeps away stagnant and unwholesome vapours, and repays, in future health and fertility, its immediate ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the width of the stream is still narrowed to about forty yards, and then, as if mustering its whole force previous to its final descent, is precipitated, in one vast, continuous sheet of water, almost perpendicular for ninety feet more. The dashing of the water from such a height produced the usual accompaniment of a cloud of spray broad columns of which were constantly forced up like the successive rushes ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... temple are those of an oblong rectangular block surmounted by a triangular roof. With a qualification to be explained presently, all the lines of the building, except those of the roof, are either horizontal or perpendicular. The most complicated Greek columnar buildings known, the Erechtheum and the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis, are simplicity itself when compared to a Gothic cathedral, with its irregular plan, its towers, its wheel windows, ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... lines of batteries were vomiting fire and brimstone; when all those dark guns that you see poking their grim heads out of every imaginable cleft and zigzag should salute you with shot, both hot and cold; and when, after tugging up the hideous perpendicular place, you were to find regiments of British grenadiers ready to plunge bayonets into your poor panting stomach, and let out artificially the little breath left there? It is a marvel to think that soldiers will mount such places for a shilling—ensigns for five and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... view, a few moments earlier, Maggie had uttered a little cry of surprise, and had then remained silent. Etta looked out of the window and said nothing. It was a most singular out-look—weird, uncouth, prehistoric, as some parts of the earth still are. The castle was built on the edge of a perpendicular cliff. On this side it was impregnable. Any object dropped from the breakfast-room window would fall a clear two hundred feet to the brawling Oster River. The rock was black, and shining like the topmost crags of an Alpine mountain where snow and ice have ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... this method of etheric telegraphy, due to Marconi himself, is the suspension of a perpendicular wire at each terminus, its length twenty feet for stations a mile apart, forty feet for four miles, and so on, the telegraphic distance increasing as the square of the length of suspended wire. In the Kingstown regatta, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... instant death is their portion, though I recall an instance, while on an expedition against the hostile Indians thirty years ago, where a number of mules of our pack-train, loaded with ammunition, tumbled nearly five hundred feet down an almost perpendicular chasm, and yet some of them got on their feet again, and soon rejoined their companions, without having ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... you will come in due time to the telephone over there on that desk. I shall not be far behind you. Sit down. Now unfold your arms and lean both elbows on the desk. That's the idea. You might keep your right hand exposed,—sort of perpendicular from the elbow up. Take the ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... defies all my efforts to dislodge it. The worst work I had was when David (MacDonald's eldest) and I took the charge ourselves. He remained in the lighter to tighten or slacken the guys as we raised the pole towards the perpendicular, with two men. I was with four men in the boat. We dropped an anchor out a good bit, then tied a cord to the pole, took a turn round the sternmost thwart with it, and pulled on the anchor line. As the great, big, wet hawser came in it soaked you to the skin: I was the sternest ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... prayer is to be repeated between daybreak and sunrise; 2nd. The prayer of noon, when the sun shows a sensible declination from the meridian; 3rd. The afternoon prayer, when the sun is near the horizon that the shadow of a perpendicular object is twice it's length; 4th. The evening prayer, between sunset and close of twilight; 5th. The prayer of night, any time during the darkness. The inhabitants of Iceland and Greenland would find themselves sadly embarrassed in complying with these pious precepts, ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... so that the foot should not come between and get crushed; and then one must remember that there is no railing or balustrade here, and directly outside these stairs there is the deep abyss into which one may fall headlong. The deepest shaft has a perpendicular depth of more than a hundred and ninety fathoms, but for this there is no danger, they say, only one must not be dizzy, nor get alarmed. One of the workmen, who had come up, descended with a lighted pine-branch as a torch: the flame illumined the dark rocky wall, and by degrees ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... was sent to hasten the arrival of Desaix's guns. His troops were advancing rapidly, and were scarcely half a mile from the field of battle. Their line of approach seemed formed for the purpose at hand; on the left of the road was a gigantic perpendicular hedge protected by a bank. The infantry was made to file in a narrow line along it, and it even hid the cavalry ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Enimie wedged between the congregated escarpments far below, the little town lying immediately under our feet, as the streets around St. Paul's when viewed from the dome. We say to ourselves we can never get there. The feat of descending those perpendicular cliffs seems impossible. It does not do to contemplate the road we have to take, winding like a ribbon round the upright shafts of the Causse. Follow it we must. We are high above the inhabited world, up in cloudland; there is nothing to do but descend as best we can; so ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... to me that the insensibility which came upon Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made. Doing it at an easy gradient and accustoming oneself to the lessened barometric pressure by slow degrees, there are no such dreadful symptoms. At the same great height I found that even without my oxygen inhaler I could breathe without undue ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick in old times, had been the first to own it.... How they had laughed at the Perpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (since you couldn't be a good Samaritan without stooping over and poking into heaps of you didn't know what)! And now Nick ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... of central tower of the cathedral were blown down by a violent gale of wind, and the presbytery was greatly damaged by the falling material. This bishop rebuilt the present clerestory, designed in the transitional style between Decorated and Perpendicular; the vault is later. It is also probable that he repaired ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... a moment a large portion of the vines, which had been clinging to the rock, fell upon the ground in a burning mass. A cloud of smoke and dust arose, and when it had cleared away the captain and his party saw upon the perpendicular side of the rock, which was now revealed to them as if a veil had been torn away from in front of it, an enormous face cut out of the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... qualification. In the case just imagined for the earth, supposing it to retain the present inclination of its axis while parting with its differential rotation, there would be an interchange of day and night once a year in the polar regions. On Mercury, whose axis appears to be perpendicular, a similar phenomenon, affecting not the polar regions but the eastern and western sides of the planet, is produced by the extraordinary eccentricity of its orbit. As the planet alternately approaches and recedes from the sun its orbital velocity, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... 1361-69. John Froissart in England. His picture of the life of court and people. The national spirit in English literature. Gower and Minot. Geoffrey Chaucer. The standard English language. Lowland Scottish. The national spirit in art. "Flowing decorated" and "perpendicular" architecture. Contrast between England and Scotland. The national spirit in popular English literature. William Langland. His picture of the condition of the poor. The national spirit and the universities. Early career of John Wycliffe. Spread of cultivation among the laity. The national ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... that we may also say as truly that, from the human side, the one thing needful is, more prayer, more believing, persevering prayer. In speaking of lack of the Spirit's power, and the condition for receiving it, someone used the expression—the block is not on the perpendicular, but on the horizontal line. It is to be feared that it is on both. There is much to be confessed and taken away in us if the Spirit is to work freely. But it is specially on the perpendicular line that the block is—the upward look, and the deep dependence, ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... while talking kindly to the wife, and hearing her troubles, was surprised at the forlorn rickety state of the building, the broken pavement, damp walls, and door that would not shut, because the frame had sunk out of the perpendicular. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... creek and over a spur of the mountain to the valley of the Yellowstone, which we followed up eight miles to our present camp. Along on our right in passing up the valley was a vast natural pile of basaltic rock, perpendicular, a part of which had been overthrown, showing transverse seams in the rock. Away at the right in the highest range bordering the valley was Pyramid mountain, itself a snow-capped peak; and further up the range was a long ridge ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... horror, nausea, rendering me momentarily more helpless, I realised that the creature was beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my body. Even then what it was I could not tell,—it mounted me, apparently, with as much ease as if I had been horizontal instead of perpendicular. It was as though it were some gigantic spider,—a spider of the nightmares; a monstrous conception of some dreadful vision. It pressed lightly against my clothing with what might, for all the world, have been spider's legs. There was an amazing host of them,—I felt the pressure ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and I went out of the room without speaking. As I walked across the non-resonant, carpeted stone floor I had the most curious set of sensations I have ever experienced. At nearly every step I took I came into a different stratum or perpendicular layer of air. First it was cool to my face, then warm, then chill again, and again warm. Thinking to calm my nervous excitement, I stood still and looked around me. The great window above my head dimly transmitted the sky reflection, but threw little light into the studio. The folds of the curtain ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... quite likely a time two or three times this. It requires only the most elementary ideas of geometry to see that if we suppose a ray of light to shoot from a star at such a distance in a direction perpendicular to the line of sight from us to the star, we can compute how fast the ray would seem to us to travel. Granting the distance to be only two thousand light years, the apparent size of the sphere around the star which the light would fill at the end of one ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... darkness an object like a great black cloud, which rose high above and seemed about to fall upon them. There was no mistaking its nature, however, for by that time the roar of the breakers right ahead told but too plainly that they were rushing straight upon a high perpendicular cliff. At this moment the vessel struck a rock. It was only a slight touch at the stern, nevertheless it tore the rudder away, so that the intention of the captain to put about and take his chance of striking on the rocks to ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... This is a variety of the previous lace, being worked in the same way, but on four lines of threads, instead of two, namely, one diagonal from left to right, one from right to left, one horizontal, and one perpendicular. The spots are worked on the last line made. The distance of the lines is ...
— The Ladies' Work-Book - Containing Instructions In Knitting, Crochet, Point-Lace, etc. • Unknown
... army ants which inhabit tropical America, Mr. Belt considered to be the most intelligent of all the insects of that part of the world. On one occasion he noticed a wide column of them trying to pass along a nearly perpendicular slope of crumbling earth, on which they found great difficulty in obtaining a foothold. A number succeeded in retaining their positions, and further strengthened them by laying hold of their neighbors. They then remained in this position, and allowed the column to ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... over my shoulder. I was the only one who knew how to present arms. I heard something coming, and called out, 'Who goes there?' and Alberta jumped up in such a hurry that the points other tent—her umbrella, I mean— scratched my face, and before I could recover arms, over went my umbrella, perpendicular, straight smash through the glass of the ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... turn his eyes another way; and, as he wore the helmet of invisibility, the Gorgons knew not in what direction to follow him; nor did he fail to make the best use of the winged slippers, by soaring upward a perpendicular mile or so. At that height, when the screams of those abominable creatures sounded faintly beneath him, he made a straight course for the island of Seriphus, in order to carry Medusa's ...
— The Gorgon's Head - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... must follow the Athenian captives to their prison-grave. The Latomia de' Cappuccini is a place which it is impossible to describe in words, and of which no photographs give any notion. Sunk to the depth of a hundred feet below the level of the soil, with sides perpendicular and in many places as smooth as though the chisel had just passed over them, these vast excavations produce the impression of some huge subterranean gallery, widening here and there into spacious halls, the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... tall trees, but keeps low, flitting from stump to stump and from root to root, dodging in and out of his hiding-places, and watching all intruders with a suspicious eye. He has a very pert, almost comical look. His tail stands more that perpendicular: it points straight toward his head. He is the least ostentatious singer I know of. He does not strike an attitude, and lift up his head in preparation, and, as it were, clear his throat; but sits there on a log and pours out his music, looking straight ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... character no less dignified than its founder in Germany. Erasmus, as he sits enthroned in a scholar's chair in the market-place at Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he stands at Worms. But it was Erasmus, probably, who, among many ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... a gold locket, now in possession of Miss Carroll, represents Dr. Stevenson in his red coat and white waistcoat, and at the back of the locket there is a picture of Parnassus Hill, crowned by the Doctor's residence, with a perpendicular avenue straight up hill, and a negro attendant opening the gate at the foot for Dr. Stevenson, mounted on his horse and returning home. It is a very quaint and ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... Bayou, which curves around them on the south and east, and the eastern slope of the uplift has been cut and gulleyed by many torrents. So strong has been the effect of the rushing water upon the soft soil that these cuts have become deep winding ravines, often with perpendicular banks. One of the ravines is ten miles long. Another cuts the plateau itself for six miles, and a permanent stream flows ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler |
