"Unwieldy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distance made more sweet," [72] [S] Yon isle conceals their home, their hut-like bower; Green water-rushes overspread the floor; [73] 240 Long grass and willows form the woven wall, And swings above the roof the poplar tall. Thence issuing often with unwieldy stalk, They crush with broad black feet their flowery walk; [74] Or, from the neighbouring water, hear at morn [75] 245 The hound, the horse's tread, and mellow horn; Involve their serpent-necks in changeful ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... arise, in the transactions of a Lodge, is decided with an especial reference to its particular circumstances. Were the accomplishment of such an herculean task possible, except after years of intense and unremitting labor, the unwieldy size of the book produced, and the heterogeneous nature of its contents, so far from inviting, would rather tend to distract attention, and the object of communicating a knowledge of the Principles ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... Russian main Army made its practical appearance in those parts. Fermor had, in the interim, seized Thorn, seized Elbing ("No offence, magnanimous Polacks, it is only for a time!"),—and would fain have had Dantzig too, but Dantzig would n't. Not till June 16th did the unwieldy mass (on paper 104,000, and in effect, and exclusive of Cossack rabble, about 75,000) get on way; and begin slowly staggering westward. Very slowly, and amid incendiary fire and horrid cruelty, as heretofore;—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... should be specially borne in mind in working with boys; a "gang" usually consists of from seven to fourteen. The girls' class is different, and the size of the group does not materially matter. The class, however, should not be so unwieldy as to make it impossible for the teacher to give ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... protected by hose of mail and shoes of steel; a broad, strong poniard (called the Mercy of God), hung by his right side; the baldric for his two handed sword, richly embroidered, hung upon his left shoulder; but for convenience he at present carried in his hand that unwieldy weapon which the rules of his service ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Every family or clan possesses its own familiar spirits of this class. They are represented by men who disguise their bodies in dense masses of sago leaves and their faces in grotesque masks with long hooked noses. In this costume the maskers jig it as well as the heavy unwieldy disguise allows them to do. But the dance consists in little more than running round and round in a circle, with an occasional hop; the orchestra stands in the middle, singing and thumping drums. Sometimes two or three of the masked men will make a round of the village, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... decision. "I see nothing in it. You shall have your vendor's shares, precisely as I promised you. I don't see how you can possibly ask for anything more." He looked at the other's darkling face for a moment, and then rose with unwieldy deliberation. "If you're so hard up though," he continued, coldly, "I don't mind doing this much for you. I'll exchange the thousand vendor's shares you already hold the ones I gave you to qualify you at the beginning—for ordinary shares. You can sell those for ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... built on the east bank, and to them came presently numbers of strange vessels, broad in the beam like a barge, and with monstrous lateen sails that looked too unwieldy to be furled or set; and on their bows they bore the painted letters "I.W.T., R.E." and a numeral. They were native feluccas, garnered from every canal and waterway in Egypt. They brought grain and fodder for the horses, rations for the men, vegetables of all kinds from the fertile province ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... terrified eyes, watched the unequal combat and heard the shouts for help. Anon despair might whelm her at the thought of how they had lost their opportunity of escaping; but for the present she had no thought save for the life of that brave man who was defending himself with an unwieldy chair. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... beasts of burden and of the field partake of the general joy; as Thomson says, "Nor undelighted by the boundless spring Are the broad monsters of the foaming deep From the deep ooze and, gelid cavern roused, They flounce and tumble in unwieldy joy." ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... hath the leafless tree, through which the cold wind whistles? How unadorned the noble horse, when of his beauteous mane he's shorn! O! who would love a purring cat, all in her furlessness forlorn. Ah, look around my darling pig! look on all living things, From the huge unwieldy mammoth to the smallest bird that sings;— Were these not shagged or feathered all, how loudly should we jeer;— Who would warmly strive to please e'en man, were ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... inconvenient or ridiculous, and not impossibly both; but I shouldn't at all mind upholding in public disputation, say, at the Poetry Bookshop, that there was no other way than Drayton's of doing the thing at all. It was the mythopoetic way. For purposes of poetry, Britain is an unwieldy subject, and if you are to allow to a river no other characters than those of mud and ooze, swiftness or slowness, why, you will relate of it little but its rise, length and fall. Drayton's weakness is that he can conceive of no other ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... Poor Shock remained hopelessly engaged with his hands and feet, and replied at unexpected places, in explosive monosyllables at once ludicrous and disconcerting. Not even The Don, who came to her assistance, could relieve the awkwardness of the situation. Shock was too large to be ignored, and too unwieldy to ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... no trace of the past tears upon her cheeks, surprised Mrs. Tregenza by a display of most unusual energy and activity. She helped the butcher to get the pig into a low cart built expressly for the conveyance of such unwieldy animals; she looked mournfully at her departing companion, knowing that the morrow had nothing for him but a knife, that he had eaten his last meal. And while Joan listened to the farewell grunts of the fattest pig which had ever adorned her father's sty, Mrs. Tregenza ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Sunshine, because he was the youngest of all; and the little fellow explained how he had learned during the week that heavy hens like his Cochin Chinas should be given low roosts because it was such an effort for them to lift their unwieldy bodies. ...
— Master Sunshine • Mrs. C. F. Fraser
... husband, he was inimitable, and brought down the house two or three times during the evening. He was also very great as "Little Toddlekins," a part that might have been specially written for him. The character is that of a stout, somewhat bulky and unwieldy young person who possesses an inordinate appreciation of her own imaginary charms. Her father, whom I might designate as a fly-by-night sort of a gentleman, a character which I once ventured to portray myself, is obsessed by the one thought of getting ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... "lies in managing with skill the capacity of the intellect, and contriving such helps, as, if they strengthen not its natural powers, may yet expose them to no unnecessary fatigue. When ideas become very complex, and by the multiplicity of their parts grow too unwieldy to be dealt with in the lump, we must ease the view of the mind by taking them to pieces, and setting before it the several portions separately, one after an other. By this leisurely survey we are enabled to take in the whole; and if we can ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... important; because this special problem is separate from the old general quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the Bible and all strong books, old and new. The special problem to-day is that certain powers and privileges have grown so world-wide and unwieldy that they are out of the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderately poor. They are out of the power of everybody except a few millionaires—that is, misers. In the old normal friction of normal ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... skipped jauntily down the steps to the gateway, the Doctor followed his unwieldy, oddly-dressed form with his eyes, and, inclining his head gravely to Dick's sweeping wave of the hand, asked with a compassionate tone in his voice. "You don't happen to know, Richard, my boy, if your father has ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... that the red-faced gentleman walked, neither could it be said that the red-faced gentleman ran. His mode of progression might best be described as a succession of short and unwieldy jumps, which, as he was a rather stout gentleman, appeared to indicate some very urgent and pressing need for hurry. His face was bathed in perspiration, and his collar had become flaccid and shapeless from the same cause. It appeared to Tom, as he gazed at those rubicund, though anxious, features, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... into the valleys. The great steamer seemed not to know where to turn. The raging waters twisted it over now on its starboard side, now on its port side. Of its herculean might, nothing remained but its unwieldy, helpless bulk. It turned about slowly, and turned back again, and all of a sudden a fearful sea, like a thousand hissing white panthers leaping from a dark green mountain ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... swung out there in the tide, a large unwieldy object which threatened to come in contact with one or other of the many ships and long black screws lying in the river, all of a sudden a little, panting, puffing steamer came alongside and, amidst more shouting, ropes were thrown and she was made fast, while another appeared off the ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... four of the Plays. These duplicates I shall ask Mullet to oblige me by accepting. Mullet is not the chap who bored your father so fearfully by endless talk about Shakespeare and Napoleon, but he is a prodigious admirer of the great dramatist. He has the Plays in one huge, unwieldy volume, and for that reason reads them less than he would if they were in a more handy form. Mullet is a great reader of the old English poets (I don't mean so far back as Chaucer and Spenser), and I suppose he can repeat ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... obliged Tilly to abandon his first strong position and draw up his army under the western heights, where it formed a single extended line, long enough to outflank the Swedish army; the infantry in large battalions, the cavalry in equally large and unwieldy squadrons; the artillery, as stated, on the slopes above. The position was one for defence rather than attack, for Tilly's army could not advance far without being exposed to the fire of its own artillery. Each army ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... became highly colored. He had not been accustomed to praise, and such compliments as these from a rich banker were unwieldy ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... really the ancient warlike custom of the people. It seems in some respects too elaborate to be the armature of a simple and primitive race. We may reasonably suppose that at least the scale armor and the unwieldy wicker shields (yeppa), which required to be rested on the ground, were adopted at a somewhat late date from the Assyrians. At any rate the original character of the Median armies, as set before us in Scripture, and as indicated both by Strabo and Xenophon, is simpler than ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... indomitable determination to wrestle with and prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... by some stout rifleman, fighting for his cowering wife and children, that a score of savages would recoil baffled, leaving many of their number dead. A boat's crew of resolute men might beat back, with heavy loss, an over-eager onslaught of Indians in canoes, or push their slow, unwieldy craft from shore under a rain of rifle-balls, while the wounded oarsmen strained at the bloody handles of the sweeps, and the men who did not row gave shot for shot, firing at the flame tongues in the dark woods. A party of scouts, true wilderness veterans, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... had been a beauty in her day, but as she passed middle age the family failing seized upon her, and she grew huge and unwieldy, the disproportion of her enormous figure to her small feet giving her an awkward, ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the cup of sin. Better than they could he understand the futility of garrulous legislation at the State Capitol, to be offset by ignorance, avarice, weakness and disease in the congestion of the big, unwieldy city. When he fined the girls he knew that it meant only a hungry day, one less silk garment or perhaps a beating from an angry and disappointed "lover." When he sent them to the workhouse their activities were merely discontinued for a while to learn ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... Dauphine's tutor. The Ambassador gravely replied that he should certainly send off a courier immediately to Vienna to inform the Empress that the only fault the French Court could find with Marie Antoinette was her being not so unwieldy as their own Princesses, and bringing charms with her to a bridegroom, on whom even charms so transcendent could make no impression! Thus the matter was laughed off, but it left, ridiculous as it was, new bitter enemies to the cause ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... victim like a gigantic pair of clippers. The strongly plated heads of these fishes were commonly a foot or two feet in width. Life in the waters became more exacting than ever. But the Arthrodirans were unwieldy and sluggish, and had to give way before more progressive types. The toothed shark gradually became the lord of ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... as the time of Henry VI. the brotherhood of lawyers had attained to an unwieldy growth, and it separated into two halls, the original two halls of the Knights Templar forming the nuclei around which the frequenters of each grouped themselves. Thus arose the Middle and Inner Temple. Under the eighth Henry the two societies ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... draperies of dirty curtain muslin over tawdry brocaded caftans. Their paler children swarmed about them, little long-earringed girls like wax dolls dressed in scraps of old finery, little boys in tattered caftans with long-lashed eyes and wily smiles, and, waddling in the rear, their unwieldy grandmothers, huge lumps of tallowy flesh who were probably still ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... he believed in the sanctity of love's children, Carl also believed that merely to be married and breed casual children and die is a sort of suspended energy which has no conceivable place in this over-complex and unwieldy world. He had no clear nor ringing message, but he did have, just then, an overpowering conviction that Ruth and he—not every one, but Ruth and he, at least—had a vocation in keeping clear of vocations, and ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Seacombe every boat, returning from sea, must run ashore and be hauled up the beach and even, in rough weather, over the sea-wall. The herring and mackerel drifters, which may venture twenty miles into the open sea, cannot be more than twenty-five feet in length else they would prove unwieldy ashore. To avoid their heeling over and filling in the surf, they must be built shallow, with next to no keel. They have therefore but small hold on the water; they do not sail close to the wind, and beating home ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Instead of the unwieldy and formidable looking apparatus of a short time ago, experimenters are now vying with each other in making small or novel equipment. Portable sets of all sorts are being fashioned, from one which will go into an ordinary suitcase, to one so small it will easily slip into ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... says Camden, "charged the enemy with marvellous agility, and having discharged their broadsides, flew forth presently into the deep, and levelled their shot directly, without missing, at those great ships of the Spaniards, which were altogether heavy and unwieldy." Moreover, the Spanish fashion, in the West Indies at least, though not in the ships of the Great Armada, was, for the sake of carrying merchandise, to build their men-of-war flush decked, or as it was called "race" (razes), which left those on deck exposed and open; while the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... unwonted pain, surpris'd with fright, The wounded steed curvets, and, rais'd upright, Lights on his feet before; his hoofs behind Spring up in air aloft, and lash the wind. Down comes the rider headlong from his height: His horse came after with unwieldy weight, And, flound'ring forward, pitching on his head, His lord's ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... him was blocked by the unwieldy forms of five buffaloes, in charge of a naked brown wisp of humanity four feet high, armed with a no more formidable weapon than a pine branch stripped of its needles. But the crux of the situation lay in the fact that, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... established some years ago, composed of representatives from the local alumni bodies, has been for various reasons far from an effective body, though it contains the germ of a force which may become active whenever a proper occasion may arise. More competent, because less unwieldy, is the Executive Committee composed of five members of the Council and two chosen at large. This body, though it has only met semi-occasionally, has initiated several movements which have had a real influence on the relations between the University and the graduates. ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... satisfactory manner, express the real views of the Committee. They claim to have drawn up a body of improved marginal references, to have wholly removed archaisms, to have supplied running headings, to have modified what they consider unwieldy paragraphs, to have lightened what they regard as clumsy punctuation, and by typographical arrangements, such as by leaving a line blank, to have indicated the main transitions of thought in the Epistles and Apocalypse. These and ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... ship, as before, and prepared a second raft; and having had experience of the first, I neither made this so unwieldy, nor loaded it so hard, but yet I brought away several things very useful to me; as first, in the carpenter's stores I found two or three bags full of nails and spikes, a great screw-jack, a dozen or two of hatchets, and, above all, that most useful thing called a ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... four centuries, the central power of the emperors incessantly struggled against this increasing debility; but the moment at length arrived, when all the practised skill of despotism, over the long insouciance of servitude, could no longer keep together the huge and unwieldy body. In the fourth century, we see it at once break up and disunite; the barbarians entered on all sides from without, the provinces ceased to oppose any resistance from within; the cities to evince any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... on hand to adjust matters!" she thought inwardly. "But I can see that when they really begin to use their 'phones at all, as most owners of them do, this exchange business would become a rather unwieldy affair." Then Joyce sighed so profoundly that Gus heard it at the other end, even as he ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... been in that vicinity about three weeks when one day he met the woman. He knew her at once, although she was greatly changed. She had grown stout, although, poor soul! it seemed as if there had been no reason for it. She was not unwieldy, but she was stout, and all the contours of earlier life had disappeared beneath layers of flesh. Her hair was not gray, but the bright brown had faded, and she wore it tightly strained back from her seamed ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... caterpillar exceeded that of the shaft. It seemed to reflect for a few moments, and then with feverish haste enlarged the shaft. Another difficulty had then to be overcome. Was it possible to force such a bulky and unwieldy body head first down—the habitual way? The insect came to a rapid decision in the negative. Backing into the shaft, it seized the caterpillar by the head and drew it down, presently emerging, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... efforts to call to mind what tools and other things were left in it which might be used against me. But my agitation confused me. I could remember nothing except my father's big stone-saw, which was far too heavy and unwieldy to be used on the roof of the cottage. I was still puzzling my brains, and making my head swim to no purpose, when I heard the men dragging something out of the shed. At the same instant that the noise caught my ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... told here, as there was no need it should be in a hymn which is not history, but the lyrical echo of what is told in history; one image explains it all—'Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind.' The metaphor—one that does not need expansion here—is that of a ship like a great unwieldy galleon, caught in a tempest. However strong for fight, it is not fit for sailing. It is like some of those turret ships of ours, if they venture out from the coast and get into a storm, their very strength is their destruction, their armour wherein they trusted ensures ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... plain. Look to the individual words; use them in the simplest way— distinctive words to give exactness of meaning and familiar words to give strength. Words are the private soldiers under the command of the writer and for ease of management he wants small words—a long word is out of place, unwieldy, awkward. The "high-sounding" words that are dragged in by main force for the sake of effect weigh down the letter, make it logy. The reader may be impressed by the language but not by the thought. He reads the ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... that in the summer-time it was visited by bisons with their calves, and in Winter by reindeer. This theory is open to a great many objections. As is well known, some animals make quite extensive migrations annually, but we can scarcely believe that heavy, unwieldy animals like the hippopotamus, were then such industrious travelers as to wander every year from Italy to Northern England and return. But the very ground on which this theory rests, that of strongly contrasted summers and winters, could not be true of Europe or the western portions ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... before starting, there being no occasion now to tally-mark, as I was in full possession of the brand. This amount of cattle in one herd was unwieldy to handle. The first day's drive we scarcely made ten miles, it being nearly impossible to water such an unmanageable body of animals, even from a running stream. The second noon we cut separate all the steers two years old and upward, finding a few under twenty-three ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... had drunk blood enough to blow out his little carcase to the shape of a tennis-ball, when he would poise himself upon his long legs, and, spreading his wings, make an effort to rise, but in vain; bloated and unwieldy, his wings refused to sustain him; his usual activity was gone, and there he stood disgustingly ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... was of course much too large and unwieldy a craft to be moved by the same means, and nothing of the kind was even attempted; her crew, however, maintained a smart fire upon us as we approached; but as we were careful to keep her end-on so that only her two stern-chasers could be brought to bear upon us, and as we kept up a hot ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... down the steps again. There was a moon clear in a frosty sky. How white the steps shone! For all her life she remembered the big, unwieldy figure of ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... training and discipline, and providing, by the most diligent foresight and minute instruction, that each officer concerned should know exactly what was expected of him. In short, it was to perfection of quality, and not to an unwieldy bulk of superfluous quantity, that Exmouth confided his fortunes ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... Having dropped to the raft, and seized a short paddle, he joined Joe and the engineer in forcing the unwieldy raft away from the side of the ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... loaded with bacon and other farm merchandise for the southern market. Allen went in charge of the expedition, and young Lincoln was engaged as "bow hand." They started in April, 1828. There was nothing to do but steer the unwieldy craft with the current. The flatboat was made to float down stream only. It was to be broken up at New Orleans and ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... his readiness to depart. I made my farewell calls, and we packed our baggage into my tarantass, with the exception of the terrible trunk that adhered to me like a shadow. As we had no Cossack and traveled without a servant, there was room for the unwieldy article on the seat beside the driver. I earnestly advise every tourist in Siberia not to travel with a trunk. The Siberian ladies manage to transport all the articles for an elaborate toilet without employing a single 'dog house' ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... and as I thought of it in despair, my eye was caught by the rotundity of paunch which still appertained to the English harpooner, the only living being besides myself out of so many. "I must have fat," cried I fiercely, as I surveyed his unwieldy carcase. He started when he observed the rolling of my eyes, and perceiving that I was advancing towards him, sharpening my knife, he did not think it prudent to trust himself longer in my company. Snatching up two or three blankets, he ran on deck, and contrived to ascend to the main-top ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Nature had made an error, and was busy rectifying it. The dinosaurs—all the giant reptiles—were now sorely pressed. Brute strength, giant size and tiny brain could not win this struggle. The huge unwieldy things were being beaten. The smaller animals, birds and reptiles were more agile, more resourceful, and began to dominate. Against the giants, and against all hostility of environment, they survived. And the giants went down to defeat. Gradually, over ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... slightest doubt of it, sir." Tristram stared at the old gentleman, who was of a tall unwieldy figure, short ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mighty wave, a square beam of wood, bent at an obtuse angle, which Clara at once pronounced to be the knee from some large boat, and, rushing dauntlessly into the water, the energetic little maid battled with the wave for its unwieldy toy, and finally dragged it triumphantly out upon the beach, and beyond the reach of the wave, only wishing that she had "a piece of chalk to make father's mark upon it." Failing the chalk, she rushed off home for "father and one of the boys," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... a little after breakfast, we caught a glimpse of the great ironclad Lepanto, which the Italians had just launched, and a great unwieldy ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... back crippled; and that old and experienced captains, however confidently they may take the command at first, frankly own that they'll never put foot in her again, you very naturally begin to suspect that there's something wrong in her build. She is either too unwieldy, like the Great Eastern, or she is too long to turn well, or she requires such incessant repair; or, most fatal of all, she is entered for a trade where nobody wants her; and therefore you resolve that, come what ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... in under a great spread of canvas to berth close alongside the two steamships; for, once the ice had moved north, there was no further obstacle to their coming, and the harbor was soon livened with puffing tugs, unwieldy lighters, and fleets of smaller vessels. Where, but a short time before, the brooding silence had been undisturbed save for the plaint of wolf-dogs and the lazy voices of natives, a noisy army was now at work. The bustle of a great preparation arose; languid ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... opinions of literature manifest his preference for classical themes and formal modes of treatment. He says of Shakespeare: "It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express ... the equality of words to things is very ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... office and opening his wooden chest threw into it what he could of his effects and tried to drag it from the burning building out upon the platform. As he struggled with the unwieldy box, two men ran up from the train toward him, staring at him as if he had been a ghost. He recognized Stanley ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... drank of the wine, he also drank of it; and though he was young, and of a healthful disposition, it so deranged his head that it spoiled his pleasure and disordered him for three days after. Whether it was from drinking these wines, or from some other cause, the King became so lazy and so unwieldy, that he was trussed on horseback, and as he was set, so would he ride, without stirring himself in the saddle; nay, when his hat was set upon his head he would not take the trouble to alter it, but it sate as ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... white Polar bear of truly formidable size. But it had changed its course after Arbalik saw it, for by that time it had turned up one of the ice-valleys before-mentioned and begun to ascend into the interior of the berg. The slow, heavy gait of the unwieldy animal suggested to Rooney the idea that an active man could easily get out of its way, but the cat-like activity with which it bounded over one or two rivulets that came in its way quickly dissipated ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... fortunate that conspiracy should have cut him off in the full vigor of his faculties, in the very meridian of his glory, and on the brink of completing a series of gigantic achievements. Amongst these are numbered—a digest of the entire body of laws, even then become unwieldy and oppressive; the establishment of vast and comprehensive public libraries, Greek as well as Latin; the chastisement of Dacia; the conquest of Parthia; and the cutting a ship canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. The reformation of the calendar he had already accomplished. And of all his projects ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... obliged to travel in India by the old cumbrous methods of going on foot or on horseback, in palanquins or unwieldy coaches; now fast steamboats ply on the Indus and the Ganges, and a great railway, with branch lines joining the main line at many points on its route, traverses the peninsula from Bombay to Calcutta in three days. This railway does not run in ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... burning furnace; hollow murmurs were heard at a distance, and a putrid and suffocating smell arose; when, in the midst of the fiery clouds, the black form of a haggard and hideously distorted female became visible, furiously riding on an unwieldy monster with many legs. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... outlines of an old settle, which jutted from the corner of the fireplace half way out into the room. As it was seemingly from this seat that the men, who at various times had been found lying here, had fallen to their doom, a thrill passed over me as I noted its unwieldy bulk and the deep shadow it threw on the ancient and dishonored hearthstone. To escape the ghastly memories it evoked and also to satisfy myself that the room was really as empty as it seemed, I took another step ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... would solve the question of transportation to the sea could she but launch the huge, unwieldy craft. Unfastening the rope that had moored it to the tree, Jane pushed frantically upon the bow of the heavy canoe, but for all the results that were apparent she might as well have been attempting to shove the ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... years before Pfalzbourg was a hundred leagues from the frontier. The ramparts were in ruins, the ditches filled up, and there was nothing in the arsenal but miserable old muskets of the time of Louis XIV., which were discharged with matches; and the guns were so unwieldy on their heavy carriages, that horses were required to move them. The arsenals were really at Dresden and Hamburg and Erfurt; but though we had not stirred, we were ten leagues from Rhenish Bavaria, and it was upon us ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... and they are joined by a woody vale to the open clayey lands and salt marshes of the environs of Cumana. A few birds of considerable size contribute to give a peculiar character to these countries. On the seashore, and in the gulf, we find flocks of fishing herons, and alcatras of a very unwieldy form, which swim, like the swan, raising their wings. Nearer the habitation of man, thousands of galinazo vultures, the jackals of the winged tribe, are ever busy in disinterring the carcases of animals.* (* Buffon Hist. Nat. des Oiseaux tome 1 ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... capital and innumerable mines and plants everywhere in the United States, can't they beat the other fellows in the market? Partly because they are carrying too much. Partly because they are unwieldy. Their organization is imperfect. They bought up inefficient plants along with efficient, and they have got to carry what they have paid for, even if they have to shut some of the plants up in order to make ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... been attempted towards the invention of such a lamp by Dr. Clanny, of Sunderland, who, in 1813, contrived an apparatus to which he gave air from the mine through water, by means of bellows. This lamp went out of itself in inflammable gas. It was found, however, too unwieldy to be used by the miners for the purposes of their work, and did not come into general use. A committee of gentlemen was formed to investigate the causes of the explosions, and to devise, if possible, some means of preventing them. At the invitation of that Committee, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the factory. It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the suburbs of trading towns. This one went round the four sides of a square, with the yard for the vats in the middle. The ladders and passages she passed down were on the inside, narrow and dimly lighted: she ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... open space before them, the huge whip was cracked, and away went our team at full gallop, seemingly quite out of control, the driver leaning back in his seat with a contented grin, while his colleague manipulated the unwieldy whip. The tract ran parallel to the Rand for some distance, and we got a splendid view of Johannesburg and the row of chimney-shafts that so clearly ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... proving the impossibility of a raid by airships. They would be chased by French aviators as soon as they were sighted. They would be like the Spanish Armada, surrounded by the little English warships, pouring shot and shell into their unwieldy hulks. Not one would ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... him every advantage and comfort, and teaching him no cruel lessons. But Vittorio Alfieri was nevertheless one of the least happy of little boys, and one of the least happy of young men. He was born with an uncomfortable and awkward and unwieldy character, as some men are born lame, or scrofulous, or dyspeptic. The child of a father over sixty, and of a very young mother; there was in him some indefinable imperfection of nature, some jar of character, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... great business for the commissaries of subsistence. The introduction of the shelter tent of two india-rubber blankets got us rid of the regimental trains, which at the beginning of the war had been the most unwieldy of all our impedimenta. The two soldiers who were thus partners in the little house they carried on their backs, clubbed all their arrangements for comfort, and by working together greatly reduced the hardships of campaigning. Sherman applied the full force of his mind and the strong impulse ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... palpable to sight?" [Footnote: Sec. 251.] Now, whatever one's stand on the question of nature versus humanity in art, one must admit that embodying ideals means, in the long run, personifying them. The poet, despising the sordid and unwieldy natures of men, may try, as Wordsworth did, to give us a purer crystallization of his ideas in nature, but it is really his own personality, scattered to the four winds, that he is offering us in the guise of nature, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... encountered in his youth. Many a hard blow he got, which he still was able to return with interest, ably seconded by De Fistycuff, though, it must be confessed, his Squire had grown somewhat obese and unwieldy. ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... disturbed; And, looking backwards when he looked, mine eyes Saw, over half the wilderness diffused, A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause: "It is," said he, "the waters of the deep 130 Gathering upon us;" quickening then the pace Of the unwieldy creature he bestrode, He left me: I called after him aloud; He heeded not; but, with his twofold charge Still in his grasp, before me, full in view, 135 Went hurrying o'er the illimitable waste, With the fleet waters of a drowning world In chase of him; whereat I waked in terror, And ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... far before he saw Eya hastening after the fleeing ones, his ugly mouth gaping widely and his great, unwieldy body supported by a pair of feeble legs that ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... the archpriest of one of the churches resided, and from its doors there leapt a damsel clad in a jerkin and wearing a scarf over her head. For a while she thumped the gates so vigorously as to set all the dogs barking; then the gates stiffly opened, and admitted this unwieldy phenomenon of the road. Lastly, the barinia herself alighted, and stood revealed as Madame Korobotchka, widow of a Collegiate Secretary! The reason of her sudden arrival was that she had felt so uneasy about the possible outcome of Chichikov's ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Irrawaddy in January.... Long rafts of teak logs pass us occasionally, drifting slowly down with the current. The three or four oarsmen, when they see us, run about over the round logs and give a pull here and a pull there at long oars, and try to get the unwieldy length up and down stream; they wear only a waist cloth, and look so sun-bitten; there is but one tiny patch of shadow in the middle of their island under a lean-to cottage of matting, with a burgee on a tall bamboo flying over it. Our wash sends their dug-out canoe bobbling ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the news that the French had been seen four weeks before from the coast of Candia, and were then steering southeast. This intelligence was corroborated by a vessel spoken the same day. Southeast, being nearly dead before the prevailing wind, was an almost certain clew to the destination of an unwieldy body which could never regain ground lost to leeward; so, although Nelson now learned that some of his missing frigates had also been seen recently off Candia, he would waste no time looking for them. It may be mentioned that these frigates had appeared ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... dearth, paucity, scarcity, deficit. Lame, crippled, halt, deformed, maimed, disabled. Large, great, big, huge, immense, colossal, gigantic, extensive, vast, massive, unwieldy, bulky. Laughable, comical, comic, farcical, ludicrous, ridiculous, funny, droll. Lead, guide, conduct, escort, convoy. Lengthen, prolong, protract, extend. Lessen, decrease, diminish, reduce, abate, curtail, moderate, mitigate, palliate. Lie (noun), untruth, falsehood, falsity, fiction, fabrication, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Douglas, at length. "She is still queen, and the king becomes daily more unwieldy and ailing. It is time to ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... memorandum of the names of visitors was thought of.". . . "My brother now applied himself to perfect his mirrors, erecting in his garden a stand for his twenty-foot telescope; many trials were necessary before the required motions for such an unwieldy machine could be contrived. Many attempts were made by way of experiment before an intended thirty-foot telescope could be completed, for which, between whiles (not interrupting the observations with seven, ten, and twenty-foot, and writing papers for both the Royal and Bath Philosophical Societies), ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... once more, for he was still struggling in the ever-closer embrace of the unwieldy ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Gyas, Sergestus, and Cloanthus, bawling just as lustily as doubtless those coxswains of old shouted; no one, however, struck on the rocks, as we are told the unfortunate "Centaur" did. Still the little mahogany-built Abercorn continued to forge ahead of her unwieldy French competitors. The Frenchmen splashed and spurted nobly, but the little Oxford-built boat increased her lead, her silken "Union Jack" trailing in the water. All the muscles of the French fleet came into play; the admiral's barge churned the water into creaming ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... concentrate so large an army to oppose him. Alexander's troops, being a comparatively small and compact body, and being accustomed to move with great promptness and celerity, could easily evade any attempt of such an unwieldy mass of forces to oppose his crossing at any particular point upon the stream. At any rate, Darius did not make any such attempt, and Alexander had no difficulties to encounter in crossing the Tigris other than the physical obstacles presented ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct. All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if preparing, like Caesar, to fall decently, and went over on its side with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our plans for ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... make a complex and massive compound molecule; and these are able not only to link similar molecules into a more or less indefinite chain, but to unite and include the saturated molecules of many other substances also into the unwieldy aggregate. ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... men liked him, for he had been known to "turn to" and work at a bush fire "as hearty as if he weren't a fat little image av a haythen," said Murty O'Toole; Norah was always delighted when old Ram Das came up the track, his unwieldy body on two amazingly lean legs. Even Mary would not have been ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I have preserved paragraph structure except ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... unwieldy cloudbank and were forced to lose height. The clouds became denser and lower, and the formation continued to descend, so that when the coast came into view we were below ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... When they played ball in the school play ground, Blockey never caught the ball. When they worked together in the gymnasium, Blockey was always left out of the game because he couldn't do things, and was slow and unwieldy in his motions. But one day, a great change came over Blockey and he began to train his will. He worked hard in the gymnasium: he learned to catch the ball, and, by sticking to it, was not only able to catch the ball but became proficient. Then there ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... white-haired courtier, who kneeled among those gathered on the right of her line of progress. Startled by the loud cry of the falling knight, she turned swiftly and saw at her feet a man of monstrous girth struggling in vain to raise his unwieldy form. His plumed hat had rolled to some distance, exposing a bald head with two gray tufts over the ears. His sword stood on its hilt, with point in air, and his short, fat legs made quick alternate efforts to bend ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... entering the grounds, proceed straightway to the celebrities of claw or foot or fin. The delight he took in the hippopotamus family was most exhilarating. He entered familiarly into conversation with the huge, unwieldy creatures, and they seemed to understand him. Indeed, he spoke to all the unphilological inhabitants with a directness and tact which went home to them at once. He chaffed with the monkeys, coaxed the tigers, and bamboozled the snakes, with a dexterity unapproachable. All the keepers knew him, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... ourself with twice The skill, the knowledge, the vitality Actually ours. Yea, as a tree may view With fingerless boughs and lorn pole impotent, An elephant gorged upon its leaves depart, Men often have reviewed an unwieldy past, That like a feasted Mammoth, leisured and slow, Turned its back on their warped bones. Even thus, Momentous with reproach, her grave regard Made me feel mean, cashiered of rank and right, My limbs that twelve good years had nursed were ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... hand-cuffs (No. 1) are heavy, unwieldy, awkward machines, which at the best of times, and under the most favourable circumstances, are extremely difficult of application. They weigh over a pound, and have to be unlocked with a key in a manner not greatly differing from the operation of winding up the ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... is there, although I am not able to break the spell that binds it. It is pleasant to know that Bellini and Mozart, Cimarosa, Porpora, Glueck and all such,—or at least their souls,—sleep in that unwieldy case. There lie embalmed, as it were, all operas, sonatas, oratorios, nocturnos, marches, songs and dances, that ever climbed into existence through the four bars that wall in melody. Once I was entirely repaid for the investment of my funds in that instrument which I never use. Blokeeta, the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... works appear, "beyond mere simplicity and traits of melody." Handel, in one species of composition, wrote down to the singers of his time. Whoever examines the bass songs of that period, will perceive that they were composed for inflexible and unwieldy voices, possessing a large and heavy volume of tone, but incapable of executing any but simple passages, constructed according to an ascertained routine of intervals. Lord Mount-Edgcumbe truly conjectured, that Mozart was led to make the bass so prominent a part in the Don ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... spear clanged harmlessly from the commander's armor, and the warrior who had attempted to pull him from the carrier died before he could give much of a tug. But the combination, plus the fact that the heavy armor was a little unwieldy, overbalanced him. He toppled to the ground with a clash of steel as he ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... social occupation. The House of Commons has long been noted as the best club in England; and this sense of fellowship, of continuing friendship and intimacy, gives a charm to English parliamentary life which is hardly possible with the unwieldy numbers and huge hall of our own House of Representatives, but does spring out of the smaller and continuing membership of the Senate. A class in debating should have the sense of comradeship which comes of hard work together and the trying out of one's own powers against one's equals ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... can discern the point whereat each successive portion has been purged away. But much has also been gained. To change the figure, it is like the continuous development of living things, amorphous at first, by and by shooting out into monstrous growths, unwieldy and half-organized, anon settling into compact and beautiful shapes of subtlest power and most divine suggestion. But the last state contains nothing more than was either obvious or latent in the first. Man's imagination, like every other known power, works by fixed ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... to be "aussi fade que celle d'Amadis." Now to some of us the reading of Amadis is not "fade" at all. But he finds some philosophical and psychological passages of merit. Over the Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite—that huge and unwieldy galleon to which the frail shallop of Manon was originally attached, and which has long been stranded on the reefs of oblivion, while its fly-boat sails for ever more—he is quite enthusiastic, finds ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of storming, battering or otherwise capturing Eugen's Camp, not to speak of Heyde's town, Romanzow finds, on trial after trial, that he can do as good as nothing; and his unwieldy sea-comrades (equinoctial gales coming on them, too) are equally worthless. September 19th [a week after this of Werner, tenth day after Bunzelwitz had ended], Romanzow made his fiercest attempt that way; fiercest and last: furious extremely, from 2 in the morning onwards; had for some time ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... packed in strong canvas bags, were, as you may fancy, very quickly transferred to the cutter. We did not trouble ourselves with the unwieldy chest, and it remains, I suppose, in the cabin of the sloop, which I observed as we crossed the cove to have been washed up ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... spoke of the matter, and he was all the more incensed an instant later when, rather anticipating some fun—for to the German comrades of this officer the ill-treatment of a prisoner was certainly fun—these men drew nearer, and, hearing his words, one of them—a huge, fat, unwieldy person, with flabby cheeks and pendulous chin, to say nothing of the huge girth which he presented—giggled and chortled loudly, and suddenly placed a heavy hand on the lieutenant's shoulder—a hand the weight of ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... He has no fear or shame. He can curse, and swear, and break things. "He is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils." He fears no consequences, and can accomplish impossibilities. If he is a cripple, he fancies he can dance like a satyr; if he is slow and unwieldy, he can run like a hart; if he is weak and feeble in strength, he can lift like Samson, and fight like Hercules; if he is poor and pennyless, he is rich as Croesus on his throne, and has money to lend. This is all a correct representation. It is what happens universally with the drunkard. ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... close as the Keokuk, they would probably have shared her fate. He thought that both flat-headed rifled 7-inch bolts and solid 10-inch balls penetrated the ironclads when within 1200 yards. He agreed with General Ripley that the 15-inch gun is rather a failure; it is so unwieldy that it can only be fired very slowly, and the velocity of the ball is so small that it is very difficult to strike a moving object. He told me that Fort Sumter was to be covered by degrees with the long green moss which in this ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... he pushed out to me between the bars his wrists, lashed with many turns of rope. His hands, very swollen, with knotted veins, looked enormous and unwieldy. I saw his bent back. It was very broad. His voice was like the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... You inevitable, Unwieldy with enormous births, Lying on your back, eyes open, sucking down stars, Or you kissing and picking over fresh deaths... Filth... worms... flowers... Green and succulent pods... Tremulous gestation Of dark water ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... growth effected without even temporary dislocation or waste. The tactical unit of the Military Wing—the squadron, consisting of three flights, each of four machines with two in reserve—had the advantage that it was of sufficient size to act independently, while it was not too unwieldy for a single command. It was equally suitable for independent or co-operative action, and the full complement of seven squadrons would, in addition to a reserve, furnish one squadron for each division ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... armed. It is now known that these imposing forces were rarely, if ever, up to their nominal strength; that part of the flotilla was unseaworthy; that the difficulties of getting under way were never overcome; and that the unwieldy mass would probably have been routed, if not destroyed, by the cruisers and gunboats stationed on the Kentish coast. Still, even if part of it made land, the crisis would be serious in view of the paucity and want of organization of the British forces. As bearing on this ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the earth. When they had feasted, as two grateful-tempered giants might have done, they stirred the fire, drew back the glowing curtain from the window, and making each a sofa for himself, by union of the great unwieldy chairs, gazed blissfully into ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... fringe of gray moustache. "Shaky" Pindle, the carpenter, was a sad-eyed man who looked as gentle as a disguised wolf. His big, scarred face never smiled, because, his friends said, it was a physical impossibility for it to do so, and his huge, rough body was as uncouth as his manners, and as unwieldy as his slow-moving tongue. Taylor, otherwise "Twirly," the butcher, was a man so genial and rubicund that in five minutes you began to wish that he was built like the lower animals that have no means of giving audible expression to their good humor, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... nothing. Always his face was blank, but his grip on Hito's wrists was iron. Up and down the room he went, leaping, dancing; and up and down went Hito after him, struggling, sobbing for breath, his unwieldy bulk trembling with fright and weariness. When his steps slackened, through sheer inability to keep up, Nicanor, with a bound forward, dragged him after, so that, to save himself from falling on his face, he bounded also, on his fat legs, with explosive ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... imagine filled the fisherman with astonishment. When the smoke was all out of the vessel, it re-united and became a solid body, of which was formed a genie twice as high as the greatest of giants. At the sight of a monster of such an unwieldy bulk, the fisherman would fain have fled, but was so frightened, that he ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... eleven-inch balls bounded without apparent effect from the sloping roof of the Merrimac, so, in turn, the Merrimac's broadsides passed harmlessly over the low deck of the Monitor, or rebounded from the round sides of her iron turret. When the unwieldy rebel turtleback, with her slow, awkward movement, tried to ram the pointed raft that carried the cheese-box, the little vessel, obedient to her rudder, easily glided out of ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... a varied form the sight beguiles, In rusty broadcloth decked and shocking hat, And there the unwieldy Lambert sits and smiles, In the majestic plenitude ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... time on this unwieldy passenger, surveying the arrival of various drays laden with tackle, shovels, mysterious boxes, and baled hay, and then took Hiram aside, deep ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... I must have it to-day, as to-morrow I sail for Calcutta." Haydn agreed, the sailor quitted him, the composer opened his piano, and in a few minutes the march was written. He appears, however, to have had a delicacy rare among the musical birds of passage and of prey who come to feed on the unwieldy wealth of England. Conceiving that the receipt of a sum so large as thirty guineas for a labour so slight, would be a species of plunder, he came home early in the evening, and composed other two marches, in order to allow the liberal ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... the size of her body was unwieldy for the embraces of a mortal, since doubtless her nature was framed in conformity to ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... took two days to do this, for Mr. Bittacy insisted on the branches being moved entire. He would not allow them to be chopped; also, he would not consent to their use as firewood. Under his superintendence the unwieldy masses were dragged to the edge of the garden and arranged upon the frontier line between the Forest and the lawn. The children were delighted with the scheme. They entered into it with enthusiasm. At all costs this ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... each woman wears a huge rosary, sometimes so large as to be uncomfortable. I saw several that were so unwieldy that they went over the shoulders and formed a huge line, larger indeed than a string of sleigh bells. These are ornamental rosaries and are not used for prayer. The praying rosary is as small and dainty ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... piety towards God. He was also in friendship with Ahab's son, who was king of Israel; and he joined with him in the building of ships that were to sail to Pontus, and the traffic cities of Thrace [3] but he failed of his gains, for the ships were destroyed by being so great [and unwieldy]; on which account he was no longer concerned about shipping. And this is the history of Jehoshaphat, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... door of the shop and drew her unwieldy burden carefully inside. A girl stood back of ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... break; he had grown large and unwieldy, but his spirit was as fiery as ever, and wherever there was war, there was he. At last, in 1087, there was an insurrection at Mantes, supported by King Philippe. William complained, but received no redress. Rude, scornful jests were reported ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... 1494 when he returned from an early visit to Venice, where he had been apprenticed to Cima. He was appointed to decorate S. Antonino. His early work there is hard and coarse, ill-drawn, the figures unwieldy and shapeless, and the colour dusky and uniform; but owing to the Turkish raid, he had to take flight, and it was many a year before the monks gained sufficient courage and saved enough money to continue the embellishment of their church. In the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... collapse. It is an alarming process because those huge and heavily armed monsters of primeval days who furnish the zoological types corresponding to our modern over-armed states, themselves died out from the world when their unwieldy armament had reached its final point of expansion. Will our own modern states, one wonders, more fortunately succeed in escaping from the tough hides that ever more closely constrict them, and finally save their ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... was pleading for the right of Ireland to govern herself, Mr. Nathaniel Kingsnorth was endeavouring to understand how to manage so unwieldy ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... They may be of different sizes, the former varying from twelve to twenty-four or thirty feet, the latter from sixty to one hundred and twenty or one hundred and eighty feet. (11) If larger they will be unwieldy and hard to manage. Both should be thirty-knotted, and the interval of the nooses the same as in the ordinary small nets. At the elbow ends (12) the road net should be furnished with nipples (13) (or eyes), and the larger sort (the haye) with rings, and both alike with a running line ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... in a dispute with the King of France about some territory. While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with that King, he kept his bed and took medicines: being advised by his physicians to do so, on account of having grown to an unwieldy size. Word being brought to him that the King of France made light of this, and joked about it, he swore in a great rage that he should rue his jests. He assembled his army, marched into the disputed territory, burnt—his old way!—the ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... pillow, and his nails became loose on his fingers and toes." Clarendon, who, by the way, was a partisan of the duke's, gives a totally different account of James's death. He says, "It was occasioned by an ague (after a short indisposition by the gout), which, meeting many humours in a fat unwieldy body of fifty-eight years old, in four or five fits carried him out of the world,—after whose death many scandalous and libellous discourses were raised, without the least colour or ground, as appeared upon ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... never came, and after a lapse of thirty-one years Veraci keeps them still. He was one of the strangest poets I have ever met. He affected eccentricity to make himself notorious, and opposed the great Metastasio in everything, writing unwieldy verses which he said gave more scope for the person who set them to music. He had got ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... officer who accompanied it, and was in personal attendance upon the Egyptian monarch. It appears that in the time of Thothmes III. the elephant haunted the woods and jungles of the Mesopotamian region, as he now does those of the peninsula of Hindustan. The huge unwieldy beasts were especially abundant in the neighbourhood of Ni or Nini, the country between the middle Tigris and the Zagros range. As Amenemhat I. had delighted in the chase of the lion and the crocodile, so Thothmes III. no sooner found a number of elephants within his reach than he proceeded to ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... thing which interested him most and to which he gave all his strength and time was the placing of unfortunate children in good homes. It was through his labor and influence the Children's Home Society had been established and struggled for existence. He was hampered in his work by an unwieldy board of women managers, but he realized the importance of having a large board, because the more persons interested the more money it was possible to raise for his pet charity. At the time of Mary Louise's call funds were ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... felt restless. A strange impulse seemed drawing her up town, and the machine seemed to run slow, slow, before it would stitch the endless number of jean belts. Her fingers trembled with nervous haste as she pinned up the unwieldy black bundle of the finished work, and her feet fairly tripped over each other in their eagerness to get to Claiborne Street, where she could board the up-town car. There was a feverish desire to go somewhere, a sense of elation,—foolish happiness that brought a faint ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... the feats. The passage which tells of the encounter is curious. A great spear, heavy and keen, was brought forth for Brunhild's use. It was more a weapon for a hero of might than for a maiden, but, unwieldy as it was, she was able to brandish it as easily as if it had been a willow wand. Three and a half weights of iron went to the making of this mighty spear, which scarce three of her men could carry. Sore ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... disadvantage is amply compensated by making the limbs move with greater velocity; besides, if room had been given for the muscles to act with greater advantage, the limbs must have been exceedingly deformed and unwieldy. [1] ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... again, little 'un," the Maluka cried encouragingly, as I punched and pummelled at the unwieldy mass. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... to recede from the shore, cutting diagonally across the decidedly swift current. Once beyond the protection of the point the star-gleam revealed the sturdy rush of the waters, occasionally flecked with bubbles of foam. Sam handled the unwieldy craft with the skill of a practiced boatman and the laboring engine made far less racket than I had anticipated. Ahead, nothing was visible but the turbulent expanse of desolate water, the Illinois shore being still too far away for the eye to perceive through the darkness. Behind ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... 'nescience' (Glanvill){152}; 'to know', but not 'to unknow' (Wiclif); 'to give', but not 'to ungive'. Or once more, with a curious variation from this, the negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus 'wieldy' (Chaucer) survives only in 'unwieldy'; 'couth' and 'couthly' (both in Spenser), only in 'uncouth' and 'uncouthly'; 'rule' (Foxe) only in 'unruly'; 'gainly' (Henry More) in 'ungainly'; these last two were both of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; 'gainly' is indeed still common in the West Riding ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... of editions the immortal Pickwick can hold its own with any modern of its "weight, age, and size." From the splendid yet unwieldy edition de luxe, all but Bible-like in its proportions, to the one penny edition sold on barrows in Cheapside, every form and pattern ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... we see the busts of Lord Macaulay and of Thackeray, and the medallion heads of Sir Walter Scott and of John Ruskin; below them is the grave of Charles Dickens. The lovers of music raise their eyes meantime to the unwieldy figure of Handel, whose personality remained essentially German although the greater part of his life was spent in England, at the Court of the first three Georges. Beneath his monument is the medallion of that ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... as Brand's fleeting mental picture of one of Earth's unwieldy, long-discarded war ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... ordinary kind. She was by no means a sprightly, clever woman, rather fond of a joke than otherwise, as the term might lead you to suppose. Her corporeal frame was very large, excessively fat, and remarkably unwieldy; being an appropriate casket in which to enshrine a mind of the heaviest and most sluggish nature. She spoke little, ate largely, and slept much—the latter recreation being very frequently enjoyed in a large arm-chair of a peculiar kind. It had been ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... and the unwieldy barge, as it advanced, disturbed the sleeping stars upon the water and set them into a mad dance, which gradually calmed down after they had passed. They touched the other shore and disembarked beneath the great trees. A cool freshness of damp earth permeated the air under the lofty and ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant |
