"Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the old casa, stirred with awakened life. Single horsemen and carriages began to arrive; and, mingled with the modern turnouts of the home party and the neighboring Americans, were a few of the cumbrous vehicles and chariots of fifty years ago, drawn by gayly trapped mules with bizarre postilions, and occasionally an outrider. Dark faces looked from the balcony of the patio, a light cloud of cigarette-smoke made the dark corridors the more obscure, and mingled with the forgotten incense. ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... then he began to understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove the Prime Minister into a corner. But in the meantime many weeks had ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... clangorous echo gongs, With a rush the brotherhood hastens to the woods, the bosom of Ide. 30 Then in agony, breathless, errant, flush'd wearily, cometh on Taborine behind him, Attis, thoro' leafy glooms a guide, As a restive heifer yields not to the cumbrous onerous yoke. Thither his the votaress eunuchs with an emulous alacrity. Now faintly sickly plodding to the goddess's holy shrine, 35 They took the rest which easeth long toil, nor ate withal. Slow sleep descends on eyelids ready drowsily to decline, In a soft ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... it as a particular favour. The Duke, with a sigh, owned that it was impossible, because of his cumbrous rank; and Mr. Gresham, when it was offered to him, declared that he was fatigued with the business of the House, and not up to the occasion. How much did she say to you; and what ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... watch, for example; examine its beautiful structure; observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... your scheme for "boycotting" the Government of India under what seems to be the somewhat less offensive (though more cumbrous) name of non-co-operation; but have always given you credit for a genuine desire to carry out revolution by peaceful means and am astonished at the violence of the language you use in describing General Dyer on page 4 of your issue of the 14th July ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... fists. It is worth asking: What is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy? Is it surviving physical excellence which reveals itself in this way, or is it a cumbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove? We see, for instance, enormous crowds gathering at the football matches where professional players show their prowess, and muscles trained and hardened for the fray. We know that there was a crowd looking ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... dedicates its beauty to the sun,"—there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldly masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... for two or three days more, and he wanted me to become his guest. I persuaded him, however, that it would be better for him to let me depart at once. He wanted to add to my baggage a roast lamb and a quantity of other cumbrous viands, but I escaped with half a horse-load of leaven bread, which was very good of its kind, and proved a most useful present. The air with which the Governor’s slaves affected to be almost breaking down under the weight of the gifts ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... and to begin life afresh (so far as regards caution) with a new character. The first step was to find lodgings, and to find them quickly. This was the more needful as Mr. Rowley and I, in our smart clothes and with our cumbrous burthen, made a noticeable appearance in the streets at that time of the day and in that quarter of the town, which was largely given up to fine folk, bucks and dandies and young ladies, or respectable professional men on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... worth recording. More facts than we have space to reproduce, testify to the heroism, religious zeal, and literary industry of the women who helped to build up the early civilization of New England. Their writings, for some presumed on authorship, are quaint and cumbrous; but in those days, when few men published books, it required marked courage for women to appear in print at all. They imitated the style popular among men, and received much attention for their literary ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... front sublime Where speculation reigns. He to the learned seats shall climb, On Science' watch-tower stand sublime; The arid doctrine shall inspire Of wiry teachers with swift fire; And, piled with cumbrous pains, Proud palaces of sounding lies Lay prostrate with a breath. The wise Shall listen to his word; the youth Shall eager seize the new-born truth Where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... solitude hung about the rooms and about their inhabitant. He was much worn, and so were they. Their sloping ceilings, cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a prisoner. Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had a penthouse to itself thrust out among the tiles; ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... freight which the railway carried to Kosheh was the first of the new stern-wheel gunboats. Train after train arrived with its load of steel and iron, or with the cumbrous sections of the hull, and a warship in pieces—engines, armaments, fittings and stores—soon lay stacked by the side of the river. An improvised dockyard, equipped with powerful twenty-ton shears and other appliances, was established, and the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... earth so lately wrapt in sleep. What sweet, elusive odor fills the soil, To rouse the farmer to his yearly toil! Though thick the clouds, and bare the maple bough, With what gay song he guides the cumbrous plough! In him there stirs, like sap within the tree, The joyous call to new activity: The outward scene, however dull and drear, Takes on a splendor from the inward cheer. Prophetic month! Would that I might rehearse Thy hidden beauties in sublimer verse: Thy glorious ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... be?" said Pistias. "I think," answered Socrates, "a suit of armour that is well made does not load the bearer so much as one ill made, even though it weigh as much. For ill-made arms, by pressing too much upon the shoulders, or hanging cumbrous on some other part, become almost insupportable, and greatly incommode the person that weareth them. But those arms which, as they ought, distribute an equal weight to all the parts of the body, that join upon the neck, ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose. 1939 ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... danger is no doubt great. (She was afterwards torpedoed in the Mediterranean with the loss of 402 lives.) All are ordered to put on our life belts, and even as we lie here many are going about with these cumbrous things on, but most are content to ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... but he had the right stuff in him, and hadn't forgotten his early training either, for when he came to the "turn," his head and tail came up, his eye brightened, and, with a playful movement of his huge body, and without the least hint from the deacon, he swung himself and the cumbrous old sleigh into line, and began to straighten ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... the unaccustomed but truly royal occupation of field sports. Once he visited Josephine at Malmaison. The next months he had spent again in Paris conducting the matrimonial negotiations and arranging every detail of the etiquette to be observed in the cumbrous ceremonial which he had devised for the celebration of his marriage in France. When all was completed to his satisfaction he left for Compiegne to supervise the arrangements made for the reception of his new consort, and spent the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... lying between them had been conquered and colonized by the Spaniards before there was a single English settlement in the New World, and while the fleets of the Catholic king still held for him the lordship of the ocean. Then the cumbrous Spanish vessels succumbed to the attacks of the swift war-ships of Holland and England, and the sun of the Spanish world-dominion set as quickly as it had risen. Spain at once came to a standstill; it was only here and there that she even ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the general principle, and before taking up the details. Stated in this way the whole matter is plain and rational enough. It is, in fact, one of the many striking examples of adaptation in the English political system. A collection of rules that appear cumbrous and antiquated, and that even now are well-nigh incomprehensible when described in all their involved technicality, have been pruned away until they furnish a procedure almost as simple, direct, and appropriate as any one could devise." ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... slit between the timbers I could view the country beneath me, far and wide. I saw near at hand the cumbrous gate of the stockade ajar, and at a little distance on the farther side Mr. Gulliver and his half-human servant standing. In front of them was an empty space—a narrow semicircle of which Gulliver was the centre. And beyond—wild-eyed, dishevelled, stretching their necks ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... 'Goodness, how abject is our race, Condemn'd to slavery and disgrace! Shall we our servitude retain, Because our sires have borne the chain? Consider, friends! your strength and might; 'Tis conquest to assert your right. How cumbrous is the gilded coach! The pride of man is our reproach. Were we design'd for daily toil, To drag the ploughshare through the soil, To sweat in harness through the road, To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legg'd kind! What force is in our ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... know, that there seems to me far too cumbrous and expensive and talkative a method employed in England, for raising supplies for that Mission and Columbia, Honolulu, &c. I never think of all that fuss of the four Universities, and all the meetings ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was the state observed by the monarchs who succeeded to portions of the empire of the Caesars. The Merovingian kings, when they employed wheel carriages at all, rode in wains drawn by bullocks; the Bretwaldas of the Saxon kingdoms went to temple or church on high festivals in the same cumbrous fashion; and "slow oxen" dragged the standard of the Italian Republics into ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... declining towards the west, and it was becoming possible to breathe and move about with a little more comfort on board the somewhat cumbrous vessel, fitted with huge lateen sails, which went swinging down the Nile between the lofty black rocks near Samneh. I say fitted with the sails, not borne along by them, for the stream just there took all the carrying power upon itself, rushing along its ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... my domestic water-fiend," sneered Sir Bale, as he lay back in his cumbrous arm-chair. "Cheerful place, pleasant people, delicious fate! The place alone has been enough to set that fool out of his little senses, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... drily, as he looked down at the speaker, a cumbrous matron attired in an over-frilled and over-flounced costume of pale grey, which delicate Quakerish colour rather painfully intensified the mottled purplish-red of her face. "But I am not at all tired, Mrs. Sorrel, I assure you! Don't trouble ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... here literally translated the botanical name of the Virginia creeper,—an appellation too cumbrous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked; that he was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... without going over it before he returned. For all sorts of things, from coir matting and rattan chairs down to waste paper baskets, every one went to the jail; and the rattan chairs the Chinese now sell here so largely, were invented in the jail, beginning with a cumbrous heavy chair, which was the first pattern, down to ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... upon seals, think it sufficient to catch and bring them on shore; and would rather submit to starve than assist their women in skinning, dressing, or dragging home the cumbrous animals to their huts. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... begin her duties at once. Then the farmer, looking at her clothes, said he would give her something more to protect her from the weather on such a bleak day. He got her an old felt hat, a big old frieze overcoat, and a pair of old leather leggings. When she had put on these somewhat cumbrous things, and had tied her hat firmly on with a strip of cloth, and fastened the coat at the waist with a cord, she was told to go to the head-shepherd and ask him to direct her to the field where the rooks were troublesome. Then when she was ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... Anstruthers had, it supervened, several opportunities to obtain a new view of her bridegroom's character before their voyage across the Atlantic was over. At this period of the slower and more cumbrous weaving of the Shuttle, the world had not yet awakened even to the possibilities of the ocean greyhound. An Atlantic voyage at times was capable of offering to a bride and bridegroom days enough to begin ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for such delivery, is more than four times that required at Liverpool for the same purpose. But Liverpool is three times the size of Chicago. The corps of clerks required for the window delivery is very great, and the whole affair is cumbrous in the extreme. The letters at most offices are given out through little windows, to which the inquirer is obliged to stoop. There he finds himself opposite to a pane of glass with a little hole, and when the clerk within shakes his head at him, he rarely believes but what his letters are ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... of the compass—cattle buyers, drovers, station-owners, telegraph people—all bent on business, and all glad to get moving after the long compulsory inaction of the Wet; and lastly that great yearly cumbrous event takes place: the starting of the "waggons," with their ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... a statement A is equivalent to statements B, C, D, or is one of the facts expressed by the statements B, C, D; so that we may know, if B, C, and D are true, then A is true. To many people our inability to understand all that is contained in statements B, C, and D, without the cumbrous process of a mathematical demonstration, proves the feebleness of the human mind as a logical machine. For it required the new point of view imagined by Newton's analysis to enable people to see that, so far as planetary orbits are concerned, Kepler's three ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... sometimes had a nearer observation of them in the study or the parlour. She appeared to me to take great care of the Doctor, and to like him very much, though I never thought her vitally interested in the Dictionary: some cumbrous fragments of which work the Doctor always carried in his pockets, and in the lining of his hat, and generally seemed to be expounding to her ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... pair of bodice of the cumbrous form in vogue at the beginning of the last century." (Jack ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... like a blown-out water-skin, With thighs like the pillars of stone that buttress a mountain's head, Lo, if she walk in the West, so cumbrous her corpulence is The Eastern hemisphere hears the sound ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described by the sailor, "cannot live on land ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... sir. I years study and pore, but honorable English extraordinary difference from Nipponese—no can do. Dictionary useful but ..." he flipped pages dexterously, "extremely cumbrous. If honorable Seaton can do, shall ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... hung a few pictures of female saints, bedecked with garlands of flowers, which showed them to be objects of devotion and respect in the eyes of the possessor. Among all this confusion, space was scarcely left, in the small chamber of the artist, for the pallet-bed and cumbrous press that formed his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... for shield in pelting showers, and this When the hot dog-star chaps the fields with drought. The slips once planted, yet remains to cleave The earth about their roots persistently, And toss the cumbrous hoes, or task the soil With burrowing plough-share, and ply up and down Your labouring bullocks through the vineyard's midst, Then too smooth reeds and shafts of whittled wand, And ashen poles and sturdy forks to shape, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... commander secured him a lieutenancy in the regular service. He was the colonel's henchman, although he never had brains enough to win a place on the regimental staff, and when Mrs. Maynard came he overwhelmed her with cumbrous compliments and incessant calls. He was, to his confident belief, her chosen and accepted knight for full two days after her arrival. Then Jerrold came back from a brief absence, and, as in duty bound, went to pay his respects ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... this London, this England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dim old pile—the Hotel du Hibou. What murderers, and thieves, and Jacobins might not have ascended the tiles of the grand stairway? There was a cumbrous mantel in his chamber, funereal with griffins, and there were portraits with horribly profound eyes. The sofa and the chairs were huge; the deep window-hangings were talking together in a rustling, mocking way; while the bed in its black ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... considered good fish. The standard coin is the Spanish dollar, but one will find every variety of European and American money in circulation among them. The method of clipping and weighing the small change might be thought somewhat cumbrous in European markets, for the dollar is cut up into eight sikajy, (each about sixpence); the sikajy into nine eranambatra, and each eranambatra into ten vary-venty, each of which last is about the weight of a plump grain of rice. Four weights, marked with ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... battalion would be refitted; a brewer's great vat was commandeered for a bathing-place; the village school was turned, every evening, into a recreation room; and a communicants' class was started. Not for the first time I longed for a brief, clear statement of our Church's faith. The cumbrous complicated Catechisms and Confessions are magnificent monuments, but they are worse than useless under such conditions. A Credo which could be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession of ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... hollowed out of one single trunk, and are so shallow that the gunwale is not a span above water when they are loaded. Besides they must be tolerably large to perform that long passage, the small ones being more dangerous, and the largest too heavy and cumbrous for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... through Italy and the sudden and overwhelming popularity of part singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the cumbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction making this impossible. The noble classic figure of Orpheus, with his flowing ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... appeal?—This procedure seems cumbrous, but it is founded in common sense. What one of the foregoing steps, for example, would ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... was a solid mass of public sentiment which had little interest in the ecclesiastical theories of the Bishop of Toronto, and which resented alike attempts to convert the provincial university into an Anglican college, and the cumbrous and unjust form of church establishment, {51} the most obvious evidence of which lay in the undeveloped patches of Clergy Reserve land scattered everywhere throughout the settlements. It was the undoubted desire of a majority in 1840 that the Clergy Reserve system should ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... twelve-year-old boy; and she carried, first, a baby; second, three salmon, each of which weighed not less than twenty pounds; third, a wild goose, weighing six or eight pounds; finally, a huge bundle of some kind of greens. This cumbrous and heavy load the Indian had lashed together with strong thongs, and the squaw carried it on her back, suspended by a strap which passed ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... of the pediment measures eighty-two feet; to the top of the dome two hundred and ten feet. When completed, the building will be surmounted by a large dome, giving a general resemblance to the main portion of the Capitol at Washington. The dome, viewed from the rear, appears something heavy and cumbrous for the general character of the structure which it crowns; but a front view, from Chambers street, when the eye, in its upward sweep, takes in the broad flight of steps, the grand columns, and the general robustness of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... wrist. I uttered a cry, for at the motion which he caused a thrill of agony darted through my arm. "I hope your arm is not broke, my friend," said the surgeon, "allow me to see; first of all, we must divest you of this cumbrous frock." ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of Lancaster. It was northward that the pilgrim turned, with a look of more intense anxiety. The mansion of Haigh stood at the extremity of a broad slope, surmounted by shady woods, now fading into the warm and luxuriant tints of autumn. Dark and cumbrous turrets, projecting from the wings, grimly caught the first gleam of the morning; whilst a tower of considerable strength and elevation rose above what could only be surmised as the principal gateway. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native race ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... athwart the mountain and is consequently terribly steep; indeed it is the steepest ascent for a carriage I ever beheld. All the passengers were obliged to bundle out and ascend on foot; and even then it is a most arduous montee for such a cumbrous machine as a ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... sometimes sinking into mere burlesque, which has not lasted quite so well. And Shakespeare [162] brings a serious effect out of the trifling of his characters. A dainty love-making is interchanged with the more cumbrous play: below the many artifices of Biron's amorous speeches we may trace sometimes the "unutterable longing;" and the lines in which Katherine describes the blighting through love of her younger sister are one of the most touching things in older literature.* ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... fully constituted, it had to regulate its procedure. Sir Samuel Romilly, a friend of Dumont, and occasionally of Mirabeau, sent over an account of the practice of the British Parliament, with the cumbrous forms, the obstacles to prompt action, the contrivances to favour a minority, and to make opposition nearly equal to government. The French required more expeditious methods. They had a single Assembly ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Thelma, they entered, and on the threshold of the parlor, stopped abruptly, in amazement at the sight that presented itself. Two figures were rolling about on the floor, apparently in a close embrace,—one large and cumbrous, the other small and slight. Sometimes they shook each other,—sometimes they lay still,—sometimes they recommenced rolling. Both were perfectly silent, save that the larger personage seemed to breathe somewhat heavily. Lorimer stepped into the room ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... England, once a safer and a happier land, under the law of charity: now fast verging into a despotic centralized system, kept together by bayonets and constables' staves. Home a refuge for all; for queens and princes from their cumbrous state, as well as for clowns from their hedging and ditching. The home of love, and its thousand blessings, founded on mutual confidence, religion, open-heartedness, communion of interest, absence of selfishness, and so on: the honoured father, due subordination, and results; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and cumbrous. High-backed chairs curiously carved, and wrought in needlework; a massive clothes-press of dark oak, well polished, and inlaid with landscapes of various tinted woods; a bed of state, ample and lofty, so as only to be ascended by a movable flight ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... were undergoing drill. Each was a picked, and, to some extent, a proved man. The lightest and least powerful among these men was a sturdy, courageous fellow. He, like the others, had been tried at an old fire-escape which stood in a corner of the yard, and which was unusually large and cumbrous. If he had failed to "work" various portions of that escape single-handed, without assistance, he would have been pronounced physically unfit for the service. Courage and strength alone would not have been sufficient. Weight, to a certain extent, ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... that swayed the junk like a cork lifted the great ship high by the stern. The propeller began to revolve in air—for the third officer had corrected his signal to "full speed ahead" again—and the cumbrous Chinese vessel struck the Sirdar a terrible blow in the counter, smashing off the screw close to the thrust-block and wrenching the rudder from ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... skill Holmes continued to improve the apparatus and to augment its power, until it was finally able to yield a magneto-electric light comparable to that of the voltaic battery. Judged by later knowledge, this first machine would be considered cumbrous and defective in the extreme; but judged by the light of antecedent events, it marked a ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... beautiful of all his poems Wordsworth calls by the cumbrous name of Intimations of Immorality from recollections of Early Childhood. This is his way of saying that when we are small we are nearer the wonder-world than when we grow up, and that when we first open our eyes on this world they have ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... an old-fashioned riding-habit, with a broad-brimmed white beaver hat, such as may be seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings. She rode a sleek white pony, and was followed by a footman in rich livery, mounted on an over-fed hunter. At a little distance in the rear came an ancient cumbrous chariot, drawn by two very corpulent horses, driven by as corpulent a coachman, beside whom sat a page dressed in a fanciful green livery. Inside of the chariot was a starched prim personage, with a look somewhat ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... reading, for the purposes of poetic enjoyment, such a collection is nearly valueless. We must have it for reference, of course; nobody grudges the guineas he has spent for the best part of the last twenty years on Professor Child's stately, if rather cumbrous, volumes. But who can read a dozen versions, say, of 'The Queen's Marie' with any pleasure? What is exquisite in one is watered, messed, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... and size, in London! Evidently the house was still shut up. The people who owned it were now living the same cumbrous, magnificent life in the country which they would soon come up to live in the capital. Honors, parks, money, birth—all were theirs, as naturally as the sun rose. Julie envied and hated the big house and all it stood for; she flung a ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all strangers, but more so from the novelty and singularity of its construction than from its beauty. Utility rather than elegance was consulted by the builder. This far-famed structure is ugly and cumbrous, and a passenger feels a very unpleasing sensation if he happens to stand upon it when a loaded waggon drives along it at low water, at which time there is a considerable descent from the side of the suburbs. An undulatory motion is ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... always exhibited in the presence of a foreign employer. The agitation, now in progress, for the final abolition of the queue may be due to one or all of the following reasons. Intelligent Chinese may have come to realize that the fashion is cumbrous and out of date. Sensitive Chinese may fear that it makes them ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners. Political Chinese, who would gladly see the re-establishment of a native dynasty, may look to its disappearance ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... for more than a minute or two when she suddenly turned and entered Ann Holland's little shop. Well, he could not take her by surprise better in any other house in Upton. Perhaps it might even be better than at Bolton Villa, amid its cumbrous surroundings; he always thought of his aunt's house with a sort of shudder. If Sophy had fortunately fixed upon this quiet house for paying the good old maid a kindly visit, there was not another place except their own home where he would rather receive her first greeting—that is if the ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... philosophically "More rain, more rest," and retired to the shelter of the cook's canvas. His drivers sought cover in and under the wagons, where they had spent the night. But though mud and swollen streams might hold back the cumbrous freight outfit, it did not follow that heavy going would delay the flitting of the thieves, if they planned such a move; nor would it prevent the Mounted Police from descending on the Baker outfit if they thought we had taken refuge there. So we held ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the hospitable house of Baron von Holbach (died 1789), a native of the Palatinate. Its real author was Holbach himself, although his friends Diderot, Naigeon, Lagrange, the mathematician, and the clever Grimm (died 1807) seem to have co-operated in the preparation of certain sections. The cumbrous seriousness and the dry tone of this systematic combination of the radical ideas which the century had produced, were no doubt the chief causes of its unsympathetic reception by the public. Similarly unsuccessful was the popular account ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the slight noise and breaking off her reading turned to look. Hamilton made another effort to enter before he recollected that the wooden key, or notched lever, that controlled the cumbrous wooden lock, hung on a peg beside the door. He felt for it along the wall, and soon laid his hand on it. Then again he peeped through to see Alice, who was now standing upright near the swivel. She had thrown her hair back from her face and neck; the lamp's flickering light seemed ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... of Anne of Austria.—The court of France, though never pure, was much improved during the reign of Louis XIII. and the regency of Anne of Austria. There was a spirit of romance and grace about it, somewhat cumbrous and stately, but outwardly pure and refined, and quite a step out of the gross and open vice of the former reigns. The Duchess de Rambouillet, a lady of great grace and wit, made her house the centre of a brilliant society, which set itself to raise and refine the manners, literature, and language ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... another. Such an author will at one moment write in a dithyrambic vein, as though he were tipsy; at another, nay, on the very next page, he will be pompous, severe, profoundly learned and prolix, stumbling on in the most cumbrous way and chopping up everything very small; like the late Christian Wolf, only in a modern dress. Longest of all lasts the mask of unintelligibility; but this is only in Germany, whither it was introduced by Fichte, perfected by Schelling, and carried ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... cumbrous disjointed sentence, but the thought of it is clear enough. Even Xenophon's style breaks down when he tries to say in a breath more than he naturally can. Is it a sign of senility, or half-thought-out ideas, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... interpenetrated by the musical idea, the musical idea that is interpenetrated by the poetic idea, the two being one and indivisible. As this book proceeds the reader will see how, before Wagner could shape fine music at all, he needed the pictorial-dramatic-musical idea (if so cumbrous a phrase may be allowed). From the very first he never succeeded in the attempt to compose pure music of notable quality. As years went on he tried again and again, but only such things as the Kaisermarsch, the Huldigungsmarsch and the Siegfried Idyll are ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... complaints, sooner than annoy him. And she had her reward. Betty would offer Molly all sorts of small temptations to neglect Miss Eyre's wishes; Molly steadily resisted, and plodded away at her task of sewing or her difficult sum. Betty made cumbrous jokes at Miss Eyre's expense. Molly looked up with the utmost gravity, as if requesting the explanation of an unintelligible speech; and there is nothing so quenching to a wag as to be asked to translate his jest ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... then appealed to by sufferers of other denominations, and advised them to obtain the permission of the king in council, that their names might be inserted in the deed; rendering them all the assistance that was in their power. Great difficulties were encountered in passing the cumbrous deed through the various offices, and then in pleading it in all parts of the country. The number of Quakers thus released from imprisonment was 471, being about the same number as those who had perished in the jails. The rest of the prisoners liberated by this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... first narrowly observed by the crew of the Catamaran upon the distant verge of the horizon, was no longer a mere streak of shadowed water. It had developed during the continuance of the chase, and now covered both sea and sky,—the latter with black cumbrous clouds, the former with quick curling waves, that lashed the water-casks supporting both rafts, and proclaimed the approach, if not of a storm, at least a fresh breeze,—likely to change the character of the chase ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... idea too far, for they admire an article in precisely a corresponding ratio to the money it costs, totally oblivious of all considerations of art or ornament. The first question invariably is, if they are asked to admire anything, "What did it cost?" This results in a heavy and cumbrous style of furniture even in the best farmsteads. Everything must be massive, costly, and strong. Artistic tendencies they have none. They want something durable, and they get it. But on the whole they make marvellously little show for their ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... packed and fastened and stood outside, just beneath the low-silled window that was open. Within the room, and also beneath the window, was another trunk, before which Melicent kneeled, filling it more or less systematically from an abundance of woman's toggery that lay in a cumbrous heap on the floor beside her. Gregoire stopped at the window to tell her, with a sad ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... gathering a royal army in Samoa is cumbrous and dilatory in the extreme. There is here none of the expedition of the fiery cross and the bale-fire; but every step is diplomatic. Each village, with a great expense of eloquence, has to be wiled with promises and spurred by threats, and the greater chieftains ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the German's gun, but he discarded the thought at once. His only salvation lay in hiding. The gun would count for nothing among the innumerable foes that surrounded him. It was heavy and cumbrous, and would only retard his progress through the woods. He must travel light ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... Grenada, that island having been recaptured by General Nicols. Abercromby and his comrades thus saved those possessions from the most imminent danger. His services were almost as great in the quarters as on the field. He adapted the cumbrous uniform to the needs of the tropics, and, by abolishing parades and drills in the noontide heats, and improving the sanitary conditions of the camps, sought to stay the ravages of disease, of which the carelessness or stupidity of officials had been the most potent ally. On ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... mention of writing or education in ancient times, and it seems likely that written records were at first confined to castings or engravings upon metal, and carvings upon stone. In the days when the written character was cumbrous, there would be no great encouragement to use it for daily household purposes. It is a striking fact, not only that writings upon soft clay, afterwards baked, were not only non-existent in China, but have never once been mentioned or conceived of as being a possibility. ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... loved at home, revered abroad; Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man's the noblest work of God:"[30] And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp! a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of hell, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... features by the cap, was in some degree hidden by the forward drooping of his head upon his chest. Hitherto he had moved almost mechanically along, tottering and embarrassing himself at every step under the cumbrous drum that was suspended from a belt round his neck over the left thigh; but now there was a certain indescribable drawing up of the frame, and tension of the whole person, denoting a concentration of all the moral and physical energies,—a sudden working up, as it were, of the intellectual and ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... superfluous officials. The royal household was a complex 'body corporate' founded in the old days of 'purveyance.' There was the mysterious 'Board of Green Cloth' formed by the great officers and supposed to have judicial as well as administrative functions. Cumbrous mediaeval machinery thus remained which had been formed in the time when the distinction between a public trust and private property was not definitely drawn or which had been allowed to remain for the sake of patronage, when its functions had been transferred to officials of more ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... conscious power of numerous verse; and, like an eagle in the middle element, sweeps along majestically on easy wings. In "The Rival Ladies," the rhymed dialogue is exceedingly graceful, the blank verse somewhat cumbrous; and, in his dedication to the Earl of Orrery, he justifies himself "for following the new way; I mean, of writing scenes in verse." It may here, once for all, be remarked, that in all his disquisitions, by "verse" he usually means rhyme as opposed to blank verse. "To speak properly," he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... almost longing for the polar night, for the everlasting wonderland of the stars with the spectral northern lights, and the moon sailing through the profound silence. It is like a dream, like a glimpse into the realms of fantasy. There are no forms, no cumbrous reality—only a vision woven of silver and violet ether, rising up from earth and floating out into infinity.... But this eternal day, with its oppressive actuality, interests me no longer—does not entice me out of my lair. Life is one incessant hurrying from one ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... sufferer; an incident was reported which might have had its foundation in the difficulties described by Miss Martineau as besetting the fair Peeress in the Abbey. It was said that the Queen's crown was too cumbrous, and disturbed the arrangement of those soft braids of hair, the simple, modest fashion of which called forth Sir David Wilkie's praise, and that as her Majesty drove along in her State carriage, she was seen laughingly submitting to the good offices of her beautiful companion seeking ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... whatever of elegance or simplicity is wanting in the intercourse of society, for all that is cumbrous in its proceedings, for any bad taste, and much for any coarseness that it tolerates, woman, as European manners are constituted, is exclusively responsible. The habits of daily intercourse represent her faults and virtues as naturally as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... finished speaking, however, our cumbrous craft seemed suddenly to be lifted high out of the water, and amid the unearthly yells of the whole crew we were swept through a belt of foaming surf, until in a few moments our keel ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... our architectural proportions. With respect to personal ornaments also, ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life. Beauty, it has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... experience meeting rather inclined to scoff, and I stopped, if not altogether to pray, at least to think very seriously of the value of the instrumentality thus brought to bear on such intractable material as the Kensal New Town population. The more cumbrous, even if more perfect or polished, machinery of the Established Church has notoriously failed for a long time to affect such raw material; and if it is beginning to succeed it is really by "taking a leaf ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... on these warm spring days, sat and smoked together, and told of the things they had done and seen long ago. Some remembered a white-faced people who, nearly twenty years before, had come to Roanoke Island from no one knew where,—men with yellow hair, dressed from head to foot in cumbrous garments, and bearing wonderful weapons which spat out fire, with much noise. Many believed them gods, while others thought they were devils. And Pocahontas listened in wonder, ever curious to hear of this strange people so unlike her own. The old priest mournfully prophesied ...
— The Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith • E. Boyd Smith
... Bengal texts read Avinitas. The correct reading, as in the Bombay text, is Abhinitas. Aprabhinna is literally "unrent," i.e. with the temporal juice not trickling down. This juice emanates from several parts of the elephant's body when the season of rut comes. To avoid a cumbrous periphrasis, which again would be unintelligible to the European reader, I have ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... without evident regret) upon the clapboards as Lige fired them. Flames burst forth almost instantly, and the smoke, uniting with that now rolling out of every window of the saloon, went up to heaven in a cumbrous, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... out by the Cabinet, bearing, besides his naval commission from the Admiralty, one from the Foreign Office as envoy to Turkey, conjointly with his brother, Spencer Smith. This unusual and somewhat cumbrous arrangement was adopted with the design that Smith should be senior naval officer in the Levant, where it was thought his hands would be strengthened by the diplomatic functions; but the Government's explanation ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... those of the gold and silver, so designated from being inhabited by smiths cunning in the working of those metals; they are upon the whole very magnificent; the houses are huge and as high as castles; immense pillars defend the causeway at intervals, producing, however, rather a cumbrous effect. These streets are quite level, and are well paved, in which respect they differ from all the others in Lisbon. The most singular street, however, of all is that of the Alemcrin, or Rosemary, which debouches on the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... know in what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of their Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Stevenson, who is the humane artist; and Mr. Ruskin, whose rhythm and colour and fine rhetoric and marvellous music of words are entirely unattainable. But the general prose that one reads in magazines and in newspapers is terribly dull and cumbrous, heavy in movement and uncouth or exaggerated in expression. Possibly some day our women of letters will apply themselves more ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... deceive; some, again, of erroneous philosophical theories. The Tibetan adepts seem to belong either to the second or to the last of these categories,—or, perhaps, to an impartial mingling of all three. They import a cumbrous machinery of auras, astral bodies, and elemental spirits; they divide man into seven principles, nature into seven kingdoms; they regard spirit as a refined form of matter, and matter as the one absolute fact of the universe,—the alpha and omega of all things. ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... which the reader may, if he knows Latin, attach some sort of meaning, but which he would be slow to introduce into his speech or writing. Then he condemns Johnson's reference to writers of the seventeenth century who buried their thoughts beneath cumbrous piles of Latinized English, as ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... hitched his team on and the four horses drew the creaking, cumbrous vehicle spouting down the road. Water gushed in fans from the openings on either side and beneath; and in streams from two holes behind. Not for an instant as long as the flow continued dared the teamsters breathe their horses, for a pause ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... never been countenanced by legislative sanction; it was chiefly resorted to as a measure of police, and was directed more frequently against the disorders of the nobility, than of the sovereign; it was organized with difficulty, and, compared with the union of Aragon, was cumbrous and languid in its operations. While these privileges continued in force, the nation was delivered over to the most frightful anarchy. The least offensive movement on the part of the monarch, the slightest encroachment on personal right or privilege, was the signal for a general ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... sail would never climb up in time, but as it began to yield to the steady pull of the men it mounted more and more rapidly, and at last, feeling the influence of a gentle breeze blowing off the land, it shook out its cumbrous folds and the number stood clearly revealed in huge white letters on ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... Did this cumbrous relic of old-time precision turn traitor at this ingenuous plea? The dial continued to stare, the works to sing, but Violet's face suddenly lost its perplexity. With a wary look about her and a listening ear turned towards the stair top, she stretched ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Morte d'Arthur or Ulysses, where the lines are swift or slow, rise to a point and fall gradually, in cadences arranged to correspond with the dramatic movement, showing that the poet has extended and perfected his metrical resources. The later style is simplified; he has rejected cumbrous metaphor; he is less sententious; he has pruned away the flowery exuberance and lightened the sensuous colour of his earlier ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... life was obliterated by public activity. The men dined together in messes, rich and poor alike, sharing the same coarse and simple food. Servants, dogs, and horses, were regarded as common property. Luxury was strictly forbidden. The only currency in circulation was of iron, so cumbrous that it was impossible to accumulate or conceal it. The houses were as simple as possible, the roofs shaped only with the axe, and the doors with the saw; the furniture and fittings corresponded, plain but perfectly made. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... bumpkin-like in contrast. However, no one did look at anything but the little creature who could just reach to hang upon that resplendent bridegroom's arm. She was in glistening white brocade, too stiff and cumbrous for so tiny a figure, yet together with the diamonds glistening on her head and breast giving her the likeness of a fairy queen. The whiteness was almost startling, for the neck and arms were like pearl in tint, the hair flowing in full curls on ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... compositions have sometimes almost a Titianesque look in this particular. This innovation was a healthy one, and led to very noble results when followed up by succeeding artists: but in many of Giotto's compositions the figures become ludicrously cumbrous, from the exceeding simplicity of the terminal lines, and massiveness of unbroken form. The manner was copied in illuminated manuscripts with great disadvantage, as it was unfavourable to minute ornamentation. The ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... the theory of the secret closet and return to the genuine ground of attack—the unsightliness of so cumbrous a pile, with comments upon the great addition of room to be gained by its demolition, and the fine effect of the projected grand hall, and the convenience resulting from the collateral running in one direction and another of their various partitions. Not more ruthlessly ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... among the dark passages of Time, till, like an old gentleman usher, he seemed to be reporting the secret history of the courts which he had lived in. He had been charmed among their masques and revels, had eyed with astonishment their cumbrous magnificence, when knights and ladies carried on their mantles and their cloth of gold ten thousand pounds' worth of ropes of pearls, and buttons of diamonds; or, descending to the gay court of the second Charles, he tattled merry tales, as in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Fort Scott management made careful selection of essential parts of the processes already used, omitted non-essential and cumbrous processes, availed themselves of all the experience of the past in this country, and secured a fresh infusion of experience from the beet sugar factories of Germany, and attained the success which finally places sorghum sugar making among the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... girls, and tender mothers, into the streets at so early an hour—which, as the day advanced toward ten o'clock of the morning, was tempting forth laced cloaks, and rapiers, and plumed hats, and here and there, in the cumbrous carriages of the day, the proud and luxurious ladies ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... thee all that he swore he would do. But at first there were cares of state, and now for five years I have lived at Germanna, half way to thy mountains, where echoes from the world seldom reach me. Permit me, my dear." With a somewhat cumbrous gallantry, the innocent gentleman, who had just come to town and knew not the gossip thereof, bent and kissed her ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... can appeal against any decision of a Court Martial. In practice these simple methods work admirably and it is difficult to understand why they should not be equally successful in old civilised countries and a good substitute for the complicated and cumbrous machinery ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... The answer is one familiar to us—the revenue would suffer in consequence. No doubt it would, and so it suffers from every commercial change. But these changes have now gone so far, that—especially if you abolish this protective duty upon corn—we are entitled to demand a return from the present cumbrous, perplexing, and expensive mode of taxation, to the natural cheap and simple one of poll or property-tax. At present no man knows what he is paying towards the expense of government. He is reached in every way indirectly through the articles he consumes. The ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... head bent in ecstatic devotion, he matured his treacherous plan. The single sentry he could suborn, or else—if bribery failed—poniard. He realised that single-handed he might not lower the cumbrous drawbridge, nor would it be wise, even if possible, for the noise of it might give the alarm. But there was the postern. Gian Maria must construct him a light, portable bridge, and have it in readiness to span the moat and silently pour ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... comment of 1880. 'Was any other human being,' he asks in 1880, 'ever constructed with such a clumsy, elaborate set of principles, setting his feelings going as if they were clockwork?' This is the comment upon a passage where he has twisted his thoughts into a cumbrous and perfectly needless syllogism. He makes a similar comment on another passage in 1865, but 'I think,' he says in 1880, 'that I was a heavy old man thirty years ago. Fifteen years ago I was at the height of my strength. I am beginning to feel now a little more tolerant ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... withering impress of humanity. Such being the case we, who do not regard them quite so infallible, feel no surprise at a circumstance which sorely perplexed the monks of old, they unchained and unclasped their cumbrous "Works of the Fathers," and pored over those massy expositions with increasing wonder; surrounded by these holy guides, these fathers of infallibility, they were like strangers in a foreign land, did they follow this holy saint they seemed about to forsake ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... scrupled to argue that it covers the entire cost of the war; for, they point out, the entire cost of the war has to be met by taxation, and such taxation is "damaging to the civilian population." They admit that the phrase is cumbrous, and that it would have been simpler to have said "all loss and expenditure of whatever description"; and they allow that the apparent emphasis of damage to the persons and property of civilians is unfortunate; but errors of draftsmanship should not, in their ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... one, but as successful as it was bold. Attended first by the Maria de Gloria alone, and afterwards by the Carolina, the Nitherohy, and a small merchant brig, the Colonel Allen, in which he had placed a few guns, he pursued and harassed the cumbrous crowd of Portuguese warships, troop-ships, and trading vessels, about eighty in all, through fourteen days. The chase, indeed, was practically conducted by his flag-ship, the Pedro Primiero, alone. The other vessels were ordered to look out for any of the enemy's fleet that lagged ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... station. I have served under many admirals, one more eccentric than the other. One of the first, an excellent seaman, had one passion only, music—and his instrument was the double bass. He spent his time performing solos on this cumbrous instrument, which he would then put away in a small apartment known in the old-fashioned navy as la bouteille. Sometimes the sea-water came through the port, and flooded everything. When the admiral fetched his double bass out, and began his tunes, he would notice from ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... passengers could summon courage to step out. At last the youngest of them—a Circassian girl of not more than fifteen or sixteen years of age—ventured upon the ladder, clasping the hand-rail with one hand, while with the other she held together the folds of her cumbrous feridjee. I was standing in the gangway, watching her, when a slight lurch of the steamer caused her to loose her hold of the garment, which, fastened at the neck, was blown back from her shoulders, leaving her body screened but by a single robe of-light, gauzy silk. ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... broken, tangled, cumbrous, Within, it was a little paradise, Where Taste had made her dwelling. Statuary, First-born of human art, moulded her images, And bade men. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... worth little. The camp enriched the soldiers; almost all the valuable effects, not only of that army which was conquered, but of that which was serving with Hannibal in Italy, having been left on this side the Pyrenees, that the baggage might not be cumbrous to those who ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... diction, and sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. Among much tedious rhetoric and cumbrous mythology there is enough imagination and pathos to make the poem interesting ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... warmer now for the road winds between the pines on both sides. The snow ceases gradually but we do not see the least brightness in the sky to show location of old Sol. We are making four versts an hour in spite of the hills and the cumbrous boots. The drivers are keeping up well. Only once is the advance party able to look back to the rear guard, the caravan being extended more than a verst. Here is another steep hill. See the crazy Russki driver give his pony his head to dash down the incline. Disaster hangs in ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated; the field of politics supplies the alchemists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... that "the use of the Mycenaean shield is inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; "the shield" covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." [Footnote: Classical ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... cheroot from Burmah or Trichinopoli, by the cigarette from Egypt, or the more expensive Manilla and Havana cigars. I, however, in an early burst of Oriental enthusiasm, had ventured upon the obsolete fashion, and so charmed was I by the indolent aromatic enjoyment I got from the rather cumbrous machine, that I never gave it up while in the East. So when Mr. Isaacs invited me to come and smoke in his rooms, or rather before his rooms, for the September air was still warm in the hills, I ordered my "bearer" to bring down the apparatus and to prepare ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... inclined to think the safest plan would be to obliterate State lines, and merge them all into an indivisible nation or empire, else there may be incessant conflicts between the different sovereignties themselves, and between them and the General Government. I doubt our ability to maintain the old cumbrous, complicated, and expensive form of government. A national executive and Congress will be sufficiently burdensome to the people without the additional expense of governors, lieutenant-governors, a dozen secretaries of State, as ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... all Gray's Odes, there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away.... The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. "Double, double, toil and trouble." He has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tip-toe. His art ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... one piece, thickly studded with gold and jewelry. No less profusion might be seen in the two closets left apart for the King and the Queen. Images and sacred vessels of solid gold, in gold cloth, cumbrous with pearls and precious stones, attested the rank, the magnificence, and devotion of the occupants. The ceilings of these closets were gilded and painted; the hangings were of tapestry embroidered with fretwork of pearls and gems. The chapel was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... was, I suspect, a whole class of plays then current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. The poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip the cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty as tragic ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... riot in contemporary English verse. A certain number of conceits, few and poor enough, is to be found scattered here and there in his early poems. Bleak Winter, for instance, is represented in three cumbrous stanzas, as the ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... rushing noise as of a loud wind, but could see nothing. Presently a large eagle dropped, as if from the air, upon the otter's carcass. Grasshopper drew his bow, and the arrow passed through under both of his wings. The bird made a convulsive flight upward, with such force that the cumbrous body was borne up several feet from the ground; but with its claws deeply fixed, the heavy otter brought the eagle back to the earth. Grasshopper possessed himself of a handful of the prime feathers, crowned his head ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... heaven, the souls of the reprobate to hell. Here they tarry in bliss and bale until the resurrection; then, coming to the earth, they assume their bodies and return to their respective places. But if the souls live so long in heaven and hell without their flesh, why need they ever resume it? The cumbrous machinery of the scheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still further specimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific and unphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thought by most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to Bishop Burnet's ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... make our ascent in a balloon. It has been thought by some folks, that there were easier methods of ascending into the air than by a cumbrous balloon, but their ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... reckoned, we were within a week's sail of the port of San Domingo for which we were bound, the weather changed, and presently gathered to a furious tempest from the north that grew more terrible every hour. For three days and nights our cumbrous vessel groaned and laboured beneath the stress of the gale, that drove us on rapidly we knew not whither, till at length it became clear that, unless the weather moderated, we must founder. Our ship leaked ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... apparently dozing, guards. One troop is made up entirely of black horses, another of sorrels,—two are of bays. Another herd is grazing close to the stream,—the mules of the wagon-train, and the white tops of these cumbrous vehicles are dotting the left bank of the winding water for two or three hundred yards. Cook-fires are smouldering in little pits dug in the yielding soil, but the cooking is over for the present; the men have had their substantial ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... announced that a new scheme of rule had been prepared in England. This was the work of Lord Shaftesbury and a distinguished philosopher named John Locke. This, familiarly known as "Locke's Grand Model," was called by the Proprietors "The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina," and was a cumbrous and elaborate system, full of titles and dignities. It involved a large expenditure, and was as unsuited to the Carolina wilderness as St. Paul's Cathedral in London was for a meetinghouse for the ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... mistaken, also, those croaking prophets were, who formerly supposed that much addition to the old United States would make a cumbrous and impracticable political aggregate. Since the principle that only honest men shall be placed in public offices has been adopted throughout the nation, local administration of local affairs harmonizes so well with a central ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... dropping gently back into his arm-chair, with the plethoric, soft movement of a subsiding pillow. The puckers of his cumbrous eyelids drew a little closer together; his bilious eyes peered out cautiously between them, like sallow assassins watching through curtained windows; for a minute or so he kept up what might without hyperbole be called a ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... chairs would sound more modern than these thrills of excitement about six cylinders and "smelly petrol." In short, for many reasons Miss Townshend's book provides a far brisker entertainment than its cumbrous ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various |
