"Ponderous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... twelve wild horses through the now deserted streets of Puebla, approached the gate that opened out upon the road to Mexico. The rattle of the wheels and the clatter of so many hoofs had awakened the gatekeeper, and at our approach the ponderous portals that inclosed the city by night flew open, and away we whirled out into ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... due to the poor cousin, that Pons flushed red, like a girl found out in fault. The grain of sand was a little too large; for some moments he could only let it work in his heart. Cecile, a red-haired young woman, with a touch of pedantic affectation, combined her father's ponderous manner with a trace of her mother's hardness. She went and left poor Pons face to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... heavens,—and the earth is thrown in, and the headstone with epitaph placed duly to hallow the grave of the dead. Or if, according to the custom of his native land, the body of Euclid is committed to the funeral flames, the pyre, duly prepared with combustibles, is made the centre of the ring; a ponderous jar of turpentine or whiskey is the fragrant incense, and as the lighted fire mounts up in the still night, and the alarm in the city sounds dim in the distance, the eulogium is spoken, and the memory of the illustrious dead honored; the urn ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... 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
... long as you are outside the line of foaming breakers; within those, you may ship water, which is not desirable when there is a cargo. But the boys at the towns sometimes put out in their rude punts into the very vortex of disturbance, being dashed about in the white roar at the base of the ponderous paddle wheels, like a Fiji Islander in his surf-boat. We heard, the other day, of a boatload of daring youngsters being caught by the wheel, their craft smashed into kindling-wood, and they themselves ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... Of his mental condition we learn something from these words: "In the enormous machine of the universe, amid the incessant whirl and hiss of its jagged iron wheels, amid the deafening crash of its ponderous stamps and hammers—in the midst of this whole terrific commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless creature, finds himself placed, not secure for a moment, that on an imprudent motion a wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer crush him to a powder. This sense of abandonment is at first ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... produced a library of treatises on the right of Catholics to choose, to control, and to cashier their magistrates. They were on the losing side. Most of them were bloodthirsty, and were soon forgotten. But the greater part of the political ideas of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau, may be found in the ponderous Latin of Jesuits who were subjects of the Spanish Crown, of ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a sermon, and then a chapter was read, and a long impromptu prayer followed, till some instinct told Mr Peters that supper-time had come, and we rose from our knees with hunger for our predominant feeling. Over supper the minister did unbend a little into one or two ponderous jokes, as if to show me that ministers were men, after all. And then at ten o'clock I went home, and enjoyed my long-repressed yawns in the three-cornered room before going to bed. Dinah and Hannah ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... intellectual ability of its author—so great as to extort our profoundest, though it may be reluctant admiration—there are nevertheless moments in which it appears that his movement is becoming wavering and unsteady—that he is failing to handle his ponderous weapon with self-balanced power. This is particularly the case in that point at which he is passing from the consideration of pure force to the unavoidable consideration of visible nature, the actual existence of which he seems to be obliged to deny. But then I am not sure ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... first the seeds terrene, since ponderous most And most perplext, in close embraces clung, And towards the centre conglobating sunk. And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth Pressed they the fluid essences that reared Sun, moon, and stars, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... upon my knee, the earth, the ponderous earth, pulls you down hard and heavy upon it." So saying, he put his hands upon Rollo's shoulders, and crowded them down, by way of showing him how the earth acted upon him. "It pulls," he continued, "with a strong and steady pull, all the time; and so makes you ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... ponderous Dr. Mowry, fortunately or unfortunately, that he is called upon to listen to; but a younger man, of ripe age, indeed, but full of fervor and earnestness, and with a piercing magnetic quality of voice that electrifies from the beginning. And Reuben ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... mind, that the elder Curtis might be ponderous in body and speech but he certainly revealed horse sense ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... 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 conscious of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... they came upon a singular party travelling in the opposite direction. Their singularity consisted chiefly in this, that instead of mules they had a train of bullock-waggons, which were laden with ponderous mill-machinery. At their head rode a fine-looking man of middle age, who addressed Will in Spanish. Bunco's services as interpreter being called into requisition, the traveller told them that the pass was pretty clear, but advised them to make haste, as the storm ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... straight sword, would have made short work of one of the brawny giants who now attacked him, for he could have leapt out of reach of the tremendous blow, and have run his opponent through ere he could again lift his ponderous axe. But there was no guarding such swinging blows as these with a light sword; and even the advantage of the height of the stairs ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her." Here is the weight of wisdom in itself. See how ponderous it is of itself; so heavy that it may weigh down all that come within the compass of desire, and certainly its compass is infinite. But, he adds, "Length of days are in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour. Her ways ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... occasional single trees, such as may be seen throughout the country, but rather more frequently toward the coast. In these isolated trees their imposing character can be best appreciated, the great trunk carrying the massive head perfectly poised, an interesting example of ponderous weight gracefully balanced. The solid, weighty appearance of the head of the tree is increased by its even and generally symmetrical outline, this especially in the examples near the coast, the mass of foliage ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... encircled his head. His long robe was of dark cloth, cinctured round the waist with his rich sword-belt, from which was suspended a gold-hilted scimitar, encased in a scabbard also enriched with gold: His legs and feet were bare, and had a ponderous look about them, since he suffered from that strange curse of Zanzibar—elephantiasis. His feet were slipped into a pair of watta (Arabic for slippers), with thick soles and a strong leathern band over the instep. His light ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... cannot by any mental process feel that the aggressive bulk of Sir Gilbert Scott's ill-conceived edifice is anything but a crude invasion. More than half a century has passed since this great chapel replaced the Tudor building which had unluckily come to be regarded as inadequate, but the ponderous Early Decorated tower is scarcely less of an intrusion than when its masonry stood forth in all its garish whiteness against the time-worn brick of Lady Margaret Beaufort's court. A Perpendicular tower would have added a culminating and satisfying feature to the whole cluster of courts, ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... while the mother spoke, wanted to say something to the daughter, who stood there so near him, but he could think of nothing that would do; certain words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases, seemed patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to assent to what she had said; he wished simply to tell her she was delightful, and it was difficult to mark that difference. So he only smiled at her in silence, and she smiled back at him—a smile that seemed to him quite ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... cylinders of his engine, and worked the pistons by the expansive force of the gases generated by the explosion. There was no weight but the engine itself and the cylinders containing the liquefied gases. Furnaces, boilers, condensers, accumulators, dynamos—all the ponderous apparatus of steam and electricity—were done away with, and he had a power at command greater than ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... sound. As the distance between the contending ships decreased one began to realise the terrific character of the forces employed by man for the destruction of his fellow-man, for now it could be seen that the Tsarevich, ponderous as was her bulk, literally and visibly heeled and swayed under the tremendous impact of the enemy's projectiles. But we were by no means getting things all our own way, for when the fight had been raging for about half an hour, the Mikasa was ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... reloading. The barrels were not very long, measuring only three feet from breech to muzzle, but they were of one- and-a-half-inch bore and fired a conical shell four and a half inches in length. Notwithstanding their somewhat ponderous appearance they were very light, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... bending trees—whither, on four red-marked occasions, he had watched her disappear—towards the castle, which faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions, rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... is ceilinged with baskets of Mexican orchid, as close as they will fit. Upon the left hand lie a series of glass structures; upon the right, below the level of the corridor, the workshops; at the end—why, to be frank, the end is blocked by a ponderous screen of matting just now. But this dingy barrier is significant of a work in hand which will not be the least curious nor the least charming of the strange sights here. The farmer has already a "siding" of course, for the removal of his produce; he ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... Unto the thousandth parcel of the truth, My song might shadow forth that saintly smile, flow merely in her saintly looks it wrought. And with such figuring of Paradise The sacred strain must leap, like one, that meets A sudden interruption to his road. But he, who thinks how ponderous the theme, And that 't is lain upon a mortal shoulder, May pardon, if it tremble with the burden. The track, our ventrous keel must furrow, brooks No unribb'd pinnace, no self-sparing pilot. "Why doth my face," said Beatrice, "thus ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the first visited, His pipe was shrilly sounding as ponderous yards and coils of rope and casks and guns and gun-carriages and other innumerable fittings and gear of a ship were being hoisted up and lowered into lighters alongside, to convey them to the dockyard. His delight at seeing True Blue as he stepped on deck ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... the right one," rejoined my host with ponderous sarcasm. "But, as I have yet to meet any one who can read your writing, I don't ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... indebted to actors for perfecting them in oratory. Roscius, the actor of Rome, is immortalized by Cicero, and Garrick by lord Chatham and Edmund Burke. If then the stage has been felt to produce such weighty effects in the more arduous part of human improvement, how ponderous in its operation must it not of necessity be, on the other hand, in the promotion of evil, if it exhibit to the growing generation corrupt examples and defective models, not only unrestrained and uncensured, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... mountain peaks, which stretched for many leagues around him. It 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
... by the wrists tiring him, weighing on the pit of his stomach, numbing the back of his brain, making his limbs as heavy as ponderous lead. It seemed to the wearied engineer that there was nothing in this world to be desired but a good sound sleep; he fought against it desperately, but after a long struggle he suddenly succumbed; his head dropped, and he lay prone in the grass, apparently as lifeless, as the unfortunate ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... was so delightfully whole-hearted that even Roberta forgave her everything, down to her absurd enthusiasm over a ponderous psychology lecture and the very dull reception that followed it. At the latter, to be sure, Mary acted exactly like her old self, for she sat in a corner and monopolized Dr. Hinsdale for half an hour by the clock, while her little friends, to quote Katherine Kittredge, "champed their ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... obedience to the enchanter's orders, lifted up their ponderous clubs of ebony, and struck against the four hundred gates, which jarred so much with the blows of the slaves that Ahubal was forced to stop his ears, and was ready to sink into the earth ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... with sandy hair and prominent brown eyes. Being an old bachelor when he married Aunt Agatha, he had very precise, formal ways, and was methodical and punctual to a fault. Next to Uncle Keith, I hated that white-faced watch of his. I hated the slow, ponderous way in which he drew it from his pocket, and produced it for my ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... by means of the protruding shrubs, over the steep precipices. A sudden thought enabled him to baffle for a while the grim pursuer. His foot, applied to a loose rock, launched it in a tone of thunder upon the fiend, who was borne backward half the distance of an arrow's flight by the ponderous mass. During the time he was struggling to disengage himself from the weight that pinned him to the earth, the lover had nearly won the farthest bound of the Manitou's kingdom. And see, the purple ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... streets clear, scattering the crowd to right and left—came the virgin priestess, white-robed and veiled, riding upon a horse, and followed by several mounted priests in white garments and high black caps of ceremony. Behind them advanced the ponderous shrine, swaying above: the heads of its bearers like a junk in a storm. Scores of brawny arms were pushing it to the right; other scores were pushing it to the left: behind and before, also, there was furious pulling and pushing; and the roar ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... natives to live without the constant dread of pestilence; they compelled, for example the Portuguese to wash their clothes, and the Spaniards to wash their hands. They proved to the German that his ponderous fortifications only brought bombardments on his cities, and thus induced him to throw down his crumbling walls, fill up his muddy ditches, turn his barren glacis into a public walk, and open his wretched streets to the light and air ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the cross remained victorious over warring Turks, Greeks, and pirates. Then at the end of this period came the memorable siege of Rhodes. For six months the steel-clad cavaliers withstood the assaults of the Ottoman hosts, and their ponderous battle axes swept down the infidel assailers by scores. Personal strength, however, could not endure the continual strain. The besieged, utterly worn out, were compelled to capitulate and leave Rhodes; but as a compliment to their valor, they were permitted ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... sportsman. He wore invariably an old shooting coat and a cap that had seen younger, but perhaps not better, days. His vehicle was a battered but serviceable two-wheeled cart drawn by a placid though adequate horse. His weapon for all purposes was a rather ponderous twelve-gauge. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... ditches, and see that the hollow-sounding wooden bridges which formed the sole communication by which the hay wagons could pass to and from the distant meadows, were in proper order to sustain their ponderous annual load. Daniel Thorpe was the only accredited unfeathered biped who figured in the parish books as occupant of The Moors; nevertheless that swampy district could boast of one other irregular and forbidden but most pertinacious inhabitant—and ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... about thirty feet they stopped, and found themselves facing a ponderous door, studded and barred with iron. Caspar took from his pocket a key about the size of a goose quill, felt about for a moment, and then with a slight movement of finger and thumb threw back a dozen ponderous bolts with a great echoing clang; the door slowly opened, and they entered ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... exact 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 in ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and quiet, One day, when he went it blind, And followed his singular fancy, And slighted his logical mind, And married a ponderous widow that wasn't of ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... Predicate. De Morgan was exquisitely witty, and though his jokes were always appreciated by his correspondent, yet Hamilton seldom ventured on anything of the same kind in reply; indeed his rare attempts at humour only produced results of the most ponderous description. But never were two scientific correspondents more perfectly in sympathy with each other. Hamilton's work on Quaternions, his labours in Dynamics, his literary tastes, his metaphysics, and his poetry, were all heartily welcomed by his friend, whose letters in reply invariably ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... admitted to the corridor of the Holland Agency by a sharp-nosed individual who regarded him with suspicion. The operatives were undoubtedly expecting trouble from all quarters, for three other large men of the "bull" type, heavy-jowled, ponderous men, surrounded him ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... that hour, a close carriage drove up to the palace. It contained no less a personage than the Prime Minister, the Marquis de Lutera,—a dark, heavy man, with small furtive eyes, a ponderous jaw, and a curious air of seeming for ever on an irritable watch for offences. His aspect was intellectual, yet always threatening; and his frigid manner was profoundly discouraging to all who sought to win his ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... brother became their spiritual teacher, and, ere long, had the great satisfaction of seeing them "clothed, in their right mind, and sitting at the feet of Jesus." His influence has been almost boundless. A man of magnificent physical proportions,—tall, a straight body mounted by a ponderous head, shapely, with a kind eye, benevolent face, a rich cadence in his voice,—the "black Bishop" Crowther is a princely looking man, who would attract the attention of cultivated people anywhere. He is a man of eminent piety, broad scholarship, and good works. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... by the motor stopped before a house with balconies and ponderous pillars, and she and her companions went up the ample stairway and into several uncomfortably crowded, flower-bedecked rooms. Ida, however, was getting used to the lights and the music, the gleam of gems, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... cause was soon perceived. A large stone that had been heaved up with the clay that adhered to the roots and fibres, had been loosened, and had fallen on the ground, close to the spot where Catharine lay. So ponderous was the mass, that had it struck her, death must have been the consequence of the blow; and Hector and Louis beheld it with fear and amazement, while Catharine regarded it as a proof of Divine mercy and protection from Him in whose ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... flights of stone steps, Henry wandered under the September moon. All day he had, with the help of Charles Wilbraham's unwitting secretary, tracked Charles Wilbraham. He knew how Charles had begun the morning by dictating proud and ponderous documents in his proud and ponderous voice, and talking to people who came in and out of his room; how he had then gone to the Assembly Hall and chatted in the lobby to every one of sufficient importance to be worth his while, including ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... other things, very correctly and with a ponderous manliness that masked a real suffering. Loving him not at all she grew sorry for him and kissed him sentimentally one night because he was so charming, a relic of a vanishing generation which lived a priggish and graceful illusion and was being replaced by less gallant fools. Afterward ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... every-day boys, not only in appearance, but in habits and moral qualities. Never did I hear a coarse or profane word pass his lips; the purity of his soul was radiant in his beautiful modest countenance; while his slender, boyish figure, with the ponderous white head poised upon his long, slim neck, always reminded me of a ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... the front door 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 to ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Crusades, which followed, filled Germany with religious and martial excitement, and chivalry was soon in the height of its splendor. The grand specimens of Gothic architecture produced during this period, the cathedrals of Ulm, Strasbourg, and Cologne, in which ponderous piles of matter were reduced to forms of beauty, speak of the great ideas and the great powers called into exercise to fulfill them. The commercial wealth of Germany was rapidly developed; thousands of serfs became freemen; large cities arose, mines were discovered, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... frozen Ross Sea, lying flat, white and peaceful as though such things as blizzards were unknown. To the north and north-east the Knoll. Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague, ponderous, a breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness. God! ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... was left alone in the gloomy solitude of the prison-room, and the ponderous doors were shut upon me, and the harsh bolts driven with a horrid grating noise, that caused my very bones to dinle. But even in that dreadful hour an unspeakable consolation came with the freshness of a breathing of the airs of paradise to my soul. Methought a wonderful ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... mist, and mirk, and dropping rain, it streamed out into the darkness, and was seen by many wakeful eyes. To the poor Student Hieronymus it was a wonderful Aladdin's Lamp; for in its flame a Divinity revealed herself unto him, and showed him treasures. Whenever he opened a ponderous, antiquatedtome, it seemed as if some angel opened for him the gates of Paradise; and already he was known in the ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... blazing from the gilded roof, are seen Bright lamps, and torches turn the night to day. Now for the ponderous goblet called the Queen, Of jewelled gold, which Belus used and they Of Belus' line, and poured the wine straightway, And prayed, while silence filled the crowded hall: "Great Jove, the host's lawgiver, bless this day To these my ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... out in the moonlight and took me into his arms and danced me along that deck with a grace that it would not be possible for either the one from Philadelphia or the one from Saint Louis to imitate. That nice but very ponderous lady from the State of Cincinnati who regarded us from her steamer chair, enjoyed it as much as did I, and she clapped her large hands as Monsieur le Capitaine swung me around into the quietness beyond one of the tall chimneys ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... slender elance beauty a perfect match for her, so that the eighteenth century might have painted them as two young deities from the Court of Olympus, come down to earth to show mortals a vision of the ideal! And General Ratoneau, the ponderous bully in uniform, the incarnation ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... none offered any likelihood for Sterling. From the Church his notions of the "black dragoon," had there been no other obstacle, were sufficient to exclude him. Law he had just renounced, his own Radical philosophies disheartening him, in face of the ponderous impediments, continual up-hill struggles and formidable toils inherent in such a pursuit: with Medicine he had never been in any contiguity, that he should dream of it as a course for him. Clearly enough the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... apartment; and Front-de-Boeuf could hear the crash of the ponderous key, as she locked and ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... the gloom a giant hunter flies: A ponderous brazen mace, with direful sway, Aloft he whirls to crush the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived with dignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy, ponderous dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to his timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list and the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of his table, he let other men talk and listened. They ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lodgings, and therefore she talked over the matter with Alaric. It was at last decided that he, Alaric, should move instead of driving Norman away. His final movement would soon take place; that movement which would rob him of the freedom of lodginghood, and invest him with all the ponderous responsibility and close restraint of a householder. He and Gertrude were to be married in February, and after spending a cold honeymoon in Paris and Brussels, were to begin their married life amidst the sharp winds of a London March. But ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... piece of wood, which easily turned round upon the top of a post. At the other end of the wood was a heavy bag of sand, which, when the rider struck the shield with his lance, swung round and struck him with great force on the back if he did not ride fast and so escape his ponderous foe. There were other forms of this sport, which is so ancient that its origin has been lost in antiquity. Queen Elizabeth was very much amused at Kenilworth Castle by the hard knocks which the inexpert riders received from the rotating sand-bag when they charged "a comely quintane" in her royal ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the spectacle of Jake Rogers bent like hickory in the manfulness of his pulling, and the heavy cart was moving slowly towards the doors. Four men joined him at the time, and as they swung with the cart out into the street, dark figures sped towards them from the ponderous shadows back of the electric lamps. Some set up the inevitable question, ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... of the gravel-bank the water was only three inches deep, so I lay down on my back and, once again elevating my ponderous legs in the air, allowed a cataract of water to flow over me. Somewhat lightened, I advanced into the hole. It was deeper than I thought. I was up to the middle in a moment, and sighed as I thought of the boots— full again. Before I reached the line the water was up ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... that sceptre. He was driven to the water by sheer necessity, but he never took to it kindly. He was at best a sea-soldier, a marine, not brought up from the start in the merchant-service and then polished into the complete blue-jacket and able seaman of the navy. Nobody can think of those ponderous old Romans, whose comedies were all borrowed from Attica, whose poems were feeble echoes of the Greek, and whose architecture, art, and domestic culture were at best the work of foreign artists,—nobody can think of them at sea ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... detective appeared at the doorway. He stopped and looked questioningly at the broken lock. He was alert as a weasel despite his ponderous physique: he fingered it, and studied the evidence of fresh splinters. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... and shook with every stroke of the ponderous piston. The laughter of the crowd, the exchange of gossip and news, the banquet at the long table, the newspapers and books in the reading-room, even the luxurious couches in the staterooms, were ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... hurrying market-wards. And what a lively scene the market presents now, full of cattle and sheep and pigs and crowds of people standing round the shouting auctioneers! And horses, too, the beribboned hacks, and ponderous draught horses with manes and tails decorated with golden straw, thundering over the stone pavement as they are trotted up and down! And what a profusion of fruit and vegetables, fish and meat, and all ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... his well-shaped hand with a gesture which might have been admired in the stately John Kemble; and the servant, understanding the gesture, brought forward a ponderous ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... he could not speak at first, and Simmons lifting his head, looked at him, fiercely; then he swallowed several times, and said, with ponderous dignity: "Certainly, father. Certainly." And Simmons ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... Greek, who had attained his present ponderous dimensions through many years of rest: "I will hasten to fetch the keys." And as he went, puffing and panting, he re-arranged with his short, fat fingers the still abundant hair on the right side of his head. Pontius looked ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... world was then so light, 80 I scarcely felt the weight; Joy ruled the day, and Love the night. But, since the queen of pleasure left the ground, I faint, I lag, And feebly drag The ponderous orb around. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... at the door—for there was really no bell, but a ponderous, old-fashioned, wrought-iron knocker. So deliciously mediaeval! The late Graf von Lebenstein had recently died, we knew; and his son, the present Count, a young man of means, having inherited from his mother's family a still more ancient and splendid schloss ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... contribution; better than the excuse. There are, I may remind you, many kinds of sheep, and the outward difference is often marked. Since, you're from the old country, you can take the little Cheviot and the ponderous Shropshire as examples. You ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... this could be applied to them. The least diameter of the Coliseum is nearly equal in length to the Menai bridge; and if the labor of stretching cords over the one seems small in comparison with that of raising the ponderous chains of the other, we may take into consideration the weight of cloth which those cords supported, and the increase of difficulties arising from the action of the wind on so extensive ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... bookseller's hack or an 'occasional correspondent.' He liked his ready speech, and his fun, but he would not consent to see in either evidences of anything beyond the amusing qualities of a very light intelligence. On the whole, he looked down upon him, as very properly the slow and ponderous people in life do look down upon their more volatile brethren, and vote them triflers. Long may it be so! There would be more sunstrokes in the world, if it were not that the shadows of dull men made such nice cool places for ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... mortal blades, bracelets of wondrous and cunning finish and singular properties—all here is miraculous, the workman, the process, and the work. The vividness with which Homer presents to us the one-eyed Polyphemus, with his tree-staff and his ponderous body, is exchanged by the Scandinavian for smallness, indistinctness of form and of power. The grand in the South is obtained by giving enlarged pictures of man as he is; in the North, by investing him with strange, magic, mysterious qualities. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... his desk hung a tinted map of the metropolis. Upon a table at his elbow were piled ponderous tomes depicting the Bronx in all its beauty, and giving details of suburban sewers. Other volumes contained maps of the fashionable residential district, showing every consecrated block and the exact location as well as the linear dimensions of every awesome residence ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test. Had The Task been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it is, he is merely ponderous—a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence. In the fragment called Yardley Oak he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ungrammatical, vague, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... had known how difficult it was to write a History of the World, I should never have undertaken the task. Of course, any one possessed of enough industry to lose himself for half a dozen years in the musty stacks of a library, can compile a ponderous tome which gives an account of the events in every land during every century. But that was not the purpose of the present book. The publishers wanted to print a history that should have rhythm—a story which galloped rather than walked. And now that ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... the mill without another word; without even a grin from the broad-faced Ole, who sat in ponderous thought in the wagon ahead. To a nature such as his the infrequency of a new idea gives it the force of a cataclysm; during its ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... great event. The village school gave a half holiday. Every able-bodied man and boy from the whole country-side received an invitation—all being needed to "heave up," at the boss carpenter's pompous word of command, the ponderous timbers seemingly meant to last forever. A feast followed, with contests of strength and agility worthy of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... to hunt in couples, you are a deadly pair. I once knew a St. Bernard dog—you will perceive the analogy by-and-by—who lived on terms of friendship with a Skye terrier. By himself Rufus was a mild and inoffensive giant. He adored the house-cat, and used to help her, in a ponderous way, with the care of her numerous family. Many a time have I seen him placidly extended before a fire, while puss used his shaggy body as a sleeping box, and once he was observed to help that anxious tabby-mother with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... to have been disturbed, when they suddenly perceived that both forelegs were missing. On further examination they found that the ponderous tail, seven feet in diameter, was cut through in two places, the thicker portion having disappeared, and that the heavy bones in this extremity of the vertebral column had been severed like straws. The cut surfaces were but little cooler than the interior of the body, showing ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Courant is another typical Dutch newspaper, but appealing to quite other instincts than the Nieuws. In their quiet way the Dutch are rather proud of their Nieuwe Kotterdammer, which inspires something like awe for its undeniable, but slightly ponderous, virtues. The Nieuwe Rotterdammer is absolutely Liberal, and stands no Radical or Social Democratic nonsense; its leading articles are lucid, cool, logical, and to the point; it has correspondents ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... the ladies and gentlemen who sit cater- cornered, and who will not move up; and equally familiar is that large and ponderous person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practically sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by having your knee under him. He implies by this brutal conduct that you are taking up more space than belongs to you, and that you are justly made ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... them there was surely a tragic bond, as they stood there islanded among the swelling tides of civilization which had already engulfed their kindreds. "Last Bull" they had called him, as he answered their gaze with little, sullen, melancholy eyes from under his ponderous and shaggy front. "Last Bull"—and the passing of his race was ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Mardykes Hall is an oblong room wainscoted. From the door you look its full length to the wide stone-shafted Tudor window at the other end. At your left is the ponderous mantelpiece, supported by two spiral stone pillars; and close to the door at the right was the bed in which the two crones had just stretched poor Philip Feltram, who lay as still as an uncoloured wax-work, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... university. I have seen him hold a roomful of otherwise restless youths spellbound for an hour, while he discoursed about the respective inhabitants of the earth and sea at a time when nothing walked on fewer than four legs. And I have seen this scholar, his ponderous tomes shelved for a space, turning over and over with cherishing hands a letter-box that he had made out of card-board and paste, and exhibiting it proudly to his friends. For the hand was the first instrument ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... throng surged thickest. Jew and gentile, greaser and dude, tin-horn gamblers and tenderfeet, hayseeds and merchants, jostled each other good humouredly. In the pool box were two men. One —the auctioneer—a perfect specimen of the "sport"; a ponderous individual, brazen of face and voice, who presented to the crowd an amazing front of mottled face, diamond stud, bulging shirt sleeves, and a bull-neck encircled by a soiled eighteen-and-a-half inch paper collar. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... a strange inconsistency, for why should the Edinburgh Review, if the work be really what he asserts it to be, "light and trifling," etcetera, waste so much powder and shot upon a tomtit? Why has he dedicated twenty-seven pages of ponderous verbosity to so light and trifling a work? How seldom is it that the pages of the Quarterly or Edinburgh condescend to notice even the very best of light literature! Do they not, in their majesty, consider it infra ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact did they appear; until, as it grew ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... rolls his dusky floods Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods, The Nymph, GOSSYPIA, treads the velvet sod, And warms with rosy smiles the watery God; His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns, 90 And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns; With playful charms her hoary lover wins, And wields his trident,—while the Monarch spins. —First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull From ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... rolls of flesh which covered the last vertebrae and pressed upon the giant's cerebellum, and, above all, hearing the shrill, sharp voice which contrasted so absurdly with his huge body, would have understood why this ponderous, coarse being adored his only son, and why he had so long expected him,—a fact proved by the name, Desire, which was ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... undoubtedly due the material which the document embodies and the argument it contains, but it was almost certainly not written by him, but by his chaplain, Pierre L'Oyseleur, Seigneur de Villiers, to whom it owes its rather ponderous prolixity and redundant verbiage. Historically it is of very considerable value, though the facts are not always to be relied upon as strictly accurate. The Apology was translated into several languages and distributed to the leading personages in every neighbouring ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... 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
... Christian principles? Intemperance, social impurity, wide, dreary tracts of ignorance, degradation, bestiality, the awful condition of the lowest layer in our great cities, crushed like some crumbling bricks beneath the ponderous weight of the splendid superstructure, the bitter partisan spirit of politics, where the followers of each chief think themselves bound to believe that he is immaculate and that the other side has no honour or truth belonging to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... His Artemisia about to drink her husband's ashes from a costly cup reveals a ponderous hand. It is but indifferent Rembrandt, despite several jewelled passages. Van Dyck shows at least one great picture, the Betrayal of Christ. The Brazen Serpent only ranks second to it; both are masterpieces, and Antwerp must envy the Prado. The Crown of Thorns, and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... however, had not been done; and Lord Nelson, with his friends, put up at an inn in Woodstock; from whence they went to Blenheim, as strangers, for the purpose of viewing the internal attractions of art, in that grand but ponderous national pile. The family never made their appearance; but sent a servant with refreshments, which Lord Nelson proudly refused. As the duke was at home, his lordship thought, no doubt, that he ought, at ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... winter's-morning in order to be at Bradford with the great waggon-load of goods manufactured by his father; this load was packed over-night, but in the morning there was a great gathering around it, and flashing of lanterns, and examination of horses' feet, before the ponderous waggon got under way; and then some one had to go groping here and there, on hands and knees, and always sounding with a staff down the long, steep, slippery brow, to find where the horses might tread safely, until ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the very essence of those systems. But Darwin's observations were precisely calculated to render such an hypothesis futile. At first people may have failed to see this; and we call to mind the ponderous sarcasms of Flourens when he objected to the theory of Natural Selection that it attributed to nature a power of free choice. "Nature endowed with will! That was the final error of last century; but the nineteenth no longer deals in personifications."[246] In fact Darwin himself put his readers ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... belly till his back was dry, then turned on his broad back and squirmed about in a ponderous way till the broiling sun had wholly dried him. He realized that he was really feeling very well now. He did not say to himself, "I am troubled with that unpleasant disease called rheumatism, and sulphur-bath treatment is the thing to cure it." But what he did know ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and as he swings the weight a ponderous sound ensues, a hollow clamor that is loud enough to arouse the whole street, ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... boat, nearing the Staten Island landing, slowed its ponderous screws. The chauffeur flung away his cigarette, drew on his gauntlets and accelerated his engine. Forward the human drove began to press, under the long slave-driven habit of haste, of eagerness to do the ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... his attention: a bowl of hammered brass, inverted beneath a ponderous book, upon the desk. Why? In a twinkling he had removed both and was studying the impression of a woman's hand in the dust, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... of letting you get drowned, you know," remarked Mr. Robbins with ponderous humor. "A girl who can speechify the way you can, might get to be president some day, if the women's rights folks should win out. I don't say," concluded Mr. Robbins, with the air of making a great concession, "that I mightn't ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... creeping back on the simple-minded old man; insomuch that, if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had disturbed him, his remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr. Dolliver and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which seemed quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the two extremities of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset, illuminating his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a homogeneous shimmer ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... posterity. Till a few years ago, they were the decoration of his tomb near Gazneh, which is built of white marble with a cupola, and where Moollas are still maintained to read prayers over his grave.[38] There too once hung the ponderous mace, which few but himself could wield; but the mace has disappeared, and the sandal gates, if genuine, were carried off about twelve years since by the British Governor-General of India, and restored to their old place, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... man's mind is but one whole; be it palace or hovel, feudal stronghold or Italian villa, it is all of a piece: a duly subordinated spirit bears no superstructure of the Radical, and the friable soil of discontented Liberalism, is too sandy a foundation for ponderous fanes of the religious. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and carried no sound but the soft tinkle of the sap as it dript swiftly into the birchen cups. The faint, sweet smell of the sap seemed to cling upon the darkness. The candle flared up for an instant, revealing black, mysterious aisles among the ponderous tree-trunks, then guttered down and almost went out, the darkness seeming to swoop in upon its defeat. The woman examined it, found that it was all but done, and glanced nervously over her shoulder. Then she made anxious haste to empty and replace the last of the birchen cups ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... three francs: if a drove of hogs, nine francs per whole hog: but upon these subjects Mr. Bulwer, Mrs. Trollope, and other writers, have already enlightened the public. In the present instance, after a momentary pause, one of the men in green mounts by the side of the conductor, and the ponderous vehicle pursues ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... magnitude of the mass relatively with the magnitude of the deflecting pressure, and the rapidity with which that pressure is applied and removed. Thus if a force or weight be very suddenly applied to the middle of a ponderous beam, and be as suddenly withdrawn, the inertia of the beam will, as in the case of the collision of bodies, tend to resist the force, and thus obviate deflection to a considerable extent; but if the pressure be so long continued as to produce ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... for my family, so that I might have more time for the improvement of my mind. For novels and light reading I never had much taste; the ladies' department in the periodicals of the day had no attraction for me. "She would lay a copy of William Penn's ponderous volumes open at the foot of her bed, and drawing her chair close to it, with her baby on her lap, would study the book diligently. A woman of less energy and less will-power than young Mrs. Mott would have given up all hope of being a scholar. She read the best books in philosophy and science. ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... consider the buying of a new hat. From the first he has a terrifying way of dealing familiarly with vast things. Somehow he reminds one of those jugglers who, for a time, toss heavy balls about, and then suddenly astonish the audience by introducing a handkerchief, which flies lightly among its ponderous companions. So Mr. Wells began to juggle with worlds. He has latterly introduced that delicate thing, the human soul and conscience, into the play, and you see it precariously fluttering among the immensities of leaping planets. He persuades himself that ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... nothing for it but to open each door in order. It was of course likely that the two had been thrust into nearby cells, but had these been filled she might have been carried to the very end of the passageway. He fitted the ponderous brass thing into the first lock. It took a man's strength to turn the rusty and clumsy bolt, but it finally yielded. Again it took a man's strength to throw open the door upon its rusted hinges. A half savage thing staggered to the threshold and faced him with strange jabbering. Its face and hands ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... scaffold on which the great bell hung, and from the still taller erection that had been put up as an outlook for "the ship" in summer. At the present time it commanded a bleak view of the frozen sea. Snow covered every housetop, and hung in ponderous masses from their edges, as if it were about to fall; but it never fell—it hung there in the same position day after day, unmelted, unchanged. Snow covered the whole land, and the frozen river, the swamps, the sea-beach, and the sea itself, as ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... portraits) in massive and, for the most part, tarnished frames, and furnished in the solidest of British styles—mahogany chairs and table, an immense sideboard, a white marble fireplace, and a chandelier hanging with ponderous menace above the gleaming expanse of table-cloth. Here were seated eleven persons: Mr. Liversedge and his wife, their seven children (four girls and three boys), Miss Pope the governess, and Mr. Denzil Quarrier; waited upon by two maid-servants, with ruddy cheeks, ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... This ponderous door, in elaborate carpentry, opened upon a flight of steps and on a flower-yard surrounded by elms, firs, and Paulownia trees, the latter of a beany odor and nature. A lower servants' part of the dwelling, in two stories, stretched ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... also a charming ditto daughter of fifteen or sixteen, with ditto eyes. Sitting among old armour and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables, and old canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they made a most romantic show and looked like a chapter out of one of his ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... now threatened the other. But after all she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades, like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo's sorrow could not at any rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand—it was coming slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Ulysses then Arose, and with him rose the king of men. On either side a sacred herald stands, The wine they mix, and on each monarch's hands Pour the full urn; then draws the Grecian lord His cutlass sheathed beside his ponderous sword; From the sign'd victims crops the curling hair;(121) The heralds part it, and the princes share; Then loudly thus before the attentive bands He calls the gods, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... and he would have rather had the trial all alone, but he was too eager and excited to mind much, and soon after the boat was drawn up to the side of the staging, at the end of the dam, the ponderous affair lifted from the cart, and the miller came out to form one of the ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... anywhere, they would wager that it could not escape the young Consul's 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
... Travers yet," boomed Royce, in his ponderous basso,—"not personal hopes, Foster; you needn't feel for your pistol,—but I believe that her heart is with the army, like the soldier's daughter she is." And, audacious as was the speech and deserving ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... machinery, it chattered much more than was agreeable to either philosopher. Various remedies were tried to cure it of its garrulity, but in vain; and one day, Thomas Aquinas was so enraged at the noise it made when he was in the midst of a mathematical problem, that he seized a ponderous hammer and smashed it to pieces.[31] He was sorry afterwards for what he had done, and was reproved by his master for giving way to his anger, so unbecoming in a philosopher. They made no ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... substantial supper was provided for us, to which was added some excellent wine, made in the valley below. Conversation was pretty general in French, and somewhat exclusive in Latin; two of our party understanding the dead language, but ignorant of the living, framed with great difficulty ponderous but by no means Ciceronian sentences, which they launched at our host, who replied with great fluency, showing that for conversational purposes, at least, his command of the language was much better than theirs. Being anxious to attend the early mass in the morning, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Cloth of Gold, was afforded a more thrilling spectacle than when these two paladins rushed to the onset and met in mid-career. Each gave a yell and dug his heels into his charger, and whacked her with the butt end of his lance, and forced her into a ponderous gallop for the meeting. It matters not now what was the precise intent of either jouster, which of them aimed at gorget or head-piece, or at shield, for—either because the flour bags made the lances difficult to manage or of some unevenness in the ground—each missed ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... in the bar of candle-light which one of the shop sconces extended across the room, and lifted the violin to his neck. He was so large that all his gestures had a ponderous quality. His dress was disarranged by riding, and his blond skin was pricked through by the untidy growth of a three-days' beard, ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... man was not an Indian. The former might have stolen the range and valley and mountain, even the desert, but his possessions would ever remain mysteries. Gale had scarcely faced the great gray ponderous wall of cliff before the old strange interest in the Yaqui seized him again. It recalled the tie that existed between them, a tie almost as close as blood. Then he was eager and curious to see how the Indian ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... all present, till Queen Charlotte, annoyed at such weakness, turned her back upon the stage and loudly declared that such a lifelike exhibition was "too disagreeable to look at." Off the stage, however, the personality of Mrs Siddons was transformed. A handsome woman, though of ponderous build, her conversation was singularly dull, and she spoke in a slow, sententious manner as though declaiming a set speech, which peculiarity gave rise to many ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... very dusty room. The air in it was stifling, it oppressed her breast. The walls were covered with bookcases filled with books. The tables were also covered with books—all new, slender, with bright covers. The title-pages were for some reason ponderous, terrible to look at. A tall, gaunt, long-haired student entered; his hair was very straight, his face morose and grey, he wore spectacles. ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... region, after some difficulty and delay, the parlour-maid produced the W-Z volume of an Encyclopaedia and, in deference to the fact that the demand for it had come from Miss Van Vluyck, laid the ponderous tome ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... him!" was the cry, and the ponderous iron gates swung together with a clang. But just one second before they closed, the narrow bicycle, with its terror-stricken burden, slipped through into the street beyond and turned sharply to the west, gaining speed every instant. Droop had escaped for the moment, ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... eye, without winking or wavering, the distant proposition which is to be proven; of advancing to it by steady steps on the shortest route; and bearing up, with the strength of Atlas, the most extended and ponderous chain of logical deductions. Such was the habitual steadiness and strength of his mind, that, unlike his fellow-students, I never saw him lose sight, for an instant, of the point in debate, much less shift that point to something else; in advancing to it, ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... ponderous arm-ring, widely notorious, Forged by the Vulcan of northern tradition, the halting smith Volund; Three marks it weighed, and gold was the metal of which it was fashioned; Carved were the heavens with twelve towering castles, where dwell the immortals,— Emblem of ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... proceed yet further. By the means of this fine herb the invisible substances are visibly stopped, arrested, taken, detained, and prisoner-like committed to their receptive gaols. Heavy and ponderous weights are by it heaved, lifted up, turned, veered, drawn, carried, and every way moved quickly, nimbly, and easily, to the great profit and emolument of humankind. When I perpend with myself these and such-like marvellous effects of this wonderful ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... no tale of treasure, however preposterous. The story ravished him with delight. He was near someone who had possessed this wealth. He saw someone who had seen this pile of gold. He seemed near it; it was there, somewhere close by, under his eyes, under his fingers; it was red, gleaming, ponderous. He gazed about him wildly; nothing, nothing but the sordid junk shop and the rust-corroded tins. What exasperation, what positive misery, to be so near to it and yet to know that it was irrevocably, irretrievably lost! A spasm of anguish passed through him. He gnawed at his bloodless lips, at the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... that our hero was ignorant of the large number of emigrants that was moving over the plains, and it is quite probable that his sagacity was precocious enough to look ahead at the result of attempting to carry forward such ponderous loads, and such a variety of at least dispensable things as the earlier parties started with. A detailed list of the 'amount and variety of goods and wares, useful and superfluous, including many of the appendages of refined and fashionable life, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... obtained the advantage, now the other. His nerves demanded relief from the friction, but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day's holiday. Twice every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational body in his father's bedroom. Maggie helped the body to feed itself at table. But Maggie apparently had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... heroine could not shock a taste which had been formed by the Sorrows of Werther. It is extremely moral, deeply sentimental, and of a deadly earnestness—three characteristics which could not fail to recommend it to a dreary and ponderous generation, the most deficient in taste that ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... when the Argonauts, as these fifty brave adventurers were called, had prepared everything for the voyage, an unforeseen difficulty threatened to end it before it was begun. The vessel, you must understand, was so long and broad and ponderous that the united force of all the fifty was insufficient to shove her into the water. Hercules, I suppose, had not grown to his full strength, else he might have set her afloat as easily as a little boy launches his boat upon ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... rested in Independence Hall. In New York I suppose not less than half a million people passed by to view the body. General Scott came down with the procession to the station, and to him I introduced our Illinois friends. His response was given in a most dignified and ponderous style: "Gentlemen, you do ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... of capacious and old-fashioned dimensions, its ponderous wood-work carefully hidden by the American ensign, the fly of which was to serve as an envelope for the feet and ancles of the ladies, was strongly slung and lowered into the stern sheets of the governor's state barge, a craft containing nearly as much timber ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... which it springs. The acting of Mary Anderson, from the first moment of her career, was of the kind that needs that deep insight and broad judgment,—aiming to recognise and rightly estimate its worth. Yet few performers of the day were so liberally favoured with the monitions of dullness and the ponderous patronage ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... in dealing with ponderous and awful blunders like this that the satiric power of the writer finds its ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... and listened with all politeness to my story. But when I looked at his heavy set features, his slow eyes, and the ponderous study furniture which surrounded him, I could hardly tell him what I had come to say. It was all so substantial, so material. And, besides, what would I myself have said a short month ago if one of my colleagues ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... whole; to which he sometimes added a walk in the evening, to visit children or friends, or transact some necessary business. When the weather was very unpleasant, he availed himself of the Harlem cars. Upon one of these occasions, it chanced that the long, ponderous vehicle was nearly empty. They had not proceeded far, when a very respectable-looking young woman beckoned for the car to stop. It did so; but when she set her foot on the step, the conductor, somewhat ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... to his care. Miss Letitia Mangan was far from considering herself a little girl. She was sixteen and a half, and conceived herself to be of combatant rank, even though her thick, dark hair banged on her back in a ponderous pigtail, and her education at the Cluhir Convent School was still uncompleted. The fat, piebald pony that she was riding would have a sore back before she got home. Christian, perched wren-like on her ancient steed ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... noted, one of the two great contributions of the twelfth-century revival of learning to the field of university studies was scholastic theology. The number of books written on this subject was enormous. The ponderous tomes, loaded with comments, make a long array on the shelves of our great libraries, but they are memorials of a battlefield of the mind now for the most part deserted. The importance of the subject in the scheme of mediaeval education has been much exaggerated; it was ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... moment the ponderous engines paused, panting and quivering like two living, sentient monsters; the next, with heavy, labored breath, as though summoning all their energies for the task before them, they were slowly ascending the steadily increasing grade, moment by moment with accelerated speed plunging ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour |
