"Ponderous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... problem: By whom is Africa to be redeemed? The answer comes rumbling back to us, over the towering billows of the Atlantic, from the Republic of Liberia, with a voice that starts our inmost souls, falling with ponderous weight upon the ears of the free colored people of this Union—"thou art the man, thou ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... idea, do you, Boyne?" Anson lunged at me in his ponderous way. "The rest of us thought 'twas a poor joke, but Knapp and Whipple had both seen that suitcase before—and ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... that was this girl's particular genius—not giving up when everyone else could see that she was talking half-witted. Anyway, she was as certain as ever, and I guess Oswald believed her in spite of himself. His ponderous scientific brain told him one thing in plain terms, and yet he was leaning on the words of a chit that wouldn't know a carboniferous vertebra from ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... him left naked by the master whom he had served so well, crying out for a beggarly obolus! Now this, you must know, was one of the least respectable coins of ancient times, being of about the value of one farthing sterling. If the poor man had got his battered old helmet full of them, the ponderous alms would not have driven the wolf gaunt and grinning many paces from his squalid home,—always admitting that he had any home, however squalid, to crawl into at sunset. And how often he crouched and whined, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... conducted them beyond, into the city, did he speak: "We know not what echoes there may be within those walls," he said, pointing back to the ponderous gateway with its many ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... and severe-eyed women, arrayed in orderly procession along the walls, and scowling a contemptuous enmity against the degenerate invader of their gloomy bowers and venerable halls; from the vast, dusky, ponderous, and complicated draperies that concealed the windows, and hung with the gloomy grandeur of funereal trappings about the hearse-like piece of furniture that was destined for his bed,—Lord L., on entering his apartment, might be conscious of some mental depression, and surrounded by such ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... spectacle than when these two paladins rushed to the onset and met in mid-career. Each gave a yell and dug his heels into his charger, and whacked her with the butt end of his lance, and forced her into a ponderous gallop for the meeting. It matters not now what was the precise intent of either jouster, which of them aimed at gorget or head-piece, or at shield, for—either because the flour bags made the lances difficult to manage or of some unevenness ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Bradley's Absolute—feeling in which all distinctions are transcended and merged—seems to be something of that kind; but there would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... on the problems of logic and evidence. Books about these formed his sole reading; for belles lettres he cared not a straw. Wimp, with his flexible intellect, had a great contempt for Grodman and his slow, laborious, ponderous, almost Teutonic methods. Worse, he almost threatened to eclipse the radiant tradition of Grodman by some wonderfully ingenious bits of workmanship. Wimp was at his greatest in collecting circumstantial evidence; in putting two and two together to make five. He would ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... before the voracious railway marched victoriously in and swallowed diligence, horses, postilions—bells, boots and all! The gay crowd passing across the place was making for the huge iron-gray cathedral, quite ponderous and fortress-like in its character. Here is the grand messe going on, the Swiss being seen afar off, standing with his halbert under the great arch, while between, down to the door, are the crowded congregation and the convenient chairs. Overhead the ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... business premises, they were, and, in fact, are, of the usual pattern; an office with its rows of desks, clerks, and cashiers, and beyond, through a glass door, the manager's private room, with the ponderous safe, ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... procession, all hurrying market-wards. And what a lively scene the market presents now, full of cattle and sheep and pigs and crowds of people standing round the shouting auctioneers! And horses, too, the beribboned hacks, and ponderous draught horses with manes and tails decorated with golden straw, thundering over the stone pavement as they are trotted up and down! And what a profusion of fruit and vegetables, fish and meat, and all ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... o'clock exactly when I hooked him, and a quarter of an hour sped by. My first big thrill came when he leaped. This was a surprise. He was fooling round, and then, all of a sudden, he broke water clear. It was an awkward, ponderous action, and looked as if he had come up backward, like a bucking bronco. His size and his long, sinister sword amazed me and frightened me. It gave me a cold sensation to realize I was hooked to a huge, dangerous fish. But that ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... two ledges of ponderous rock, extends a smooth level of greensward.... The Hermitage, its cell, chapel, and refectory, are all scooped out of the native marble, and lined with the bark of the cork tree. Several of the passages ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... should listen to the service of the new teacher, and, in their common-sense way, reckon what chance the dapper talker might have,—as compared with the solemn soberness of the old pastor,—in opening the ponderous doors for them upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... a heavier piece than this," said young Mark, frowning, equally with the exertion and with the instigations of his aspiring spirit, as he held out the ponderous weapon in a single hand; "we have guns that might tame a wolf with greater certainty than any barrel of a bore less than my own height. Tell, me grand'ther; at what distance do the mounted warriors, you so often ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... one that Grace recognized, though she had never before heard in it the note of agitation and undignified excitement. There were no ponderous pauses and "Hum—ha's" now. ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was grave and calm; but it was impossible to doubt the firmness of her purpose, though what that purpose might be, Marie had no power to read. She stood leaning against the back of one of the ponderous chairs; her head bent down, and her heart so loudly and thickly throbbing that it choked her ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... the contrast is between this filmy material and the ponderous blocks tossed into the air by Cotopaxi and Etna, it is not greater than that between the latter and other masses which have from time to time been upheaved by volcanic forces. Instances have occurred of ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... when the narrow ancient side-streets of Florence, with their ponderous prison-like palaces with iron-barred windows are so ill-lit and cavernous, the place seems a city of evil deeds, as indeed it was in the days of the Medici and ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... strange inconsistency, for why should the Edinburgh Review, if the work be really what he asserts it to be, "light and trifling," etcetera, waste so much powder and shot upon a tomtit? Why has he dedicated twenty-seven pages of ponderous verbosity to so light and trifling a work? How seldom is it that the pages of the Quarterly or Edinburgh condescend to notice even the very best of light literature! Do they not, in their majesty, consider it infra dig. to review such works, and have not two or three pages ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... lifting high his ponderous spear, A mailed man came forth with scornful pride, I saw him, towering in his proud career, Along the valley with a giant stride: Upon his helm, in letters of bright gold, That to the sun's meridian splendour shone, Ambition's name far off I might behold. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Of his mental condition we learn something from these words: "In the enormous machine of the universe, amid the incessant whirl and hiss of its jagged iron wheels, amid the deafening crash of its ponderous stamps and hammers—in the midst of this whole terrific commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless creature, finds himself placed, not secure for a moment, that on an imprudent motion a wheel may not seize ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... latest, of the agents of destruction. In our island various cherished antiquities have been often most unnecessarily swept away in constructing these race-courses for the daily rush and career of the iron horse. His rough and ponderous hoof, for example, has kicked down, at one extremity of a railway connected with Edinburgh (marvellously and righteously to the dispeace of the whole city), that fine old specimen of Scottish Second-Pointed architecture, the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... verdure extended, a refreshment to the vision; there Olivet ceased and Moriah began—a wall of bluff boldness, white as snow, founded by Solomon, completed by Herod. Up, up the wall the eye climbed course by course of the ponderous rocks composing it—up to Solomon's Porch, which was as the pedestal of the monument, the hill being the plinth. Lingering there a moment, the eye resumed its climbing, going next to the Gentiles' Court, then to the Israelites' Court, then to the Women's Court, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... was left to lie there a moment while Mrs. Yates finished her conversation, the cat, stretched out on the high window ledge above the table, decided to have his breakfast without waiting to be called. He was an enormous cat by the name of "Grandpa," and because he was old and ponderous, and no longer light on his feet, when he leaped from the windowsill he came down clumsily in the middle of the very table full of the old lamps which were set aside for the ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... first the seeds terrene, since ponderous most And most perplext, in close embraces clung, And towards the centre conglobating sunk. And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth Pressed they the fluid essences that reared Sun, moon, and stars, and main, and heaven's high wall. For those of atoms lighter ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... choices simultaneously. Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there a creative fever such as mine from which the patient escaped fatal results. The way I worked was enough to soften my brain and send me to a mad-house. I wrote, I wrote everything—ponderous essays, scientific and sociological short stories, humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and sonnets to blank verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian stanzas. On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the reach of that relentless trunk—she would be dragged down and tossed. Korak could picture the whole frightful scene. Then Tantor would follow her up, goring the frail, little body with his relentless tusks, or trampling it into an unrecognizable mass beneath his ponderous feet. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... heapy wreath, the branching elk Lies slumbering sullen in the white abyss. The ruthless hunter wants nor dogs nor toils, Nor with the dread of sounding bows he drives The fearful flying race: with ponderous clubs, As weak against the mountain-heaps they push Their beating breast in vain, and piteous bray, He lays them quivering on the ensanguined snows, And with loud shouts rejoicing ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... when the Argonauts, as these fifty brave adventurers were called, had prepared everything for the voyage, an unforeseen difficulty threatened to end it before it was begun. The vessel, you must understand, was so long and broad and ponderous that the united force of all the fifty was insufficient to shove her into the water. Hercules, I suppose, had not grown to his full strength, else he might have set her afloat as easily as a little boy launches his boat upon a puddle. But here were ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... frothy outpourings of heavier taps. A two of clubs may be a good, handy little card sometimes, and able to tackle a king of diamonds, if it is a little trump. Some philosophers get their wisdom with deep thought and out of ponderous libraries; I pick up my small crumbs of cogitation at a dinner-table; or from Mrs. Mary and Miss Louisa, as they are ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... obeyed. Bringing his head down until it was on a level with the animal's own, he opened the ponderous jaws. The beast was as passive as before; and, finding no trace of the coming of the mysterious and dreaded "smile," he laid his face between the double row of gleaming teeth, held it there a moment, and then ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose reading the list of heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace'; my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon Sunflower, the Assassin, and the flash grazier; the Dollar, hellite, billiard-marker, and bacon-factor; the ringletted O'Bluster, double-jointed publican, Leather lungs, and ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the garden and sauntered round to the front of the house. There, standing in the roadway, they beheld a ponderous lorry with a rough-looking driver standing at the horses' heads. The front door of the house was open, so the mummy case had apparently arrived before its time, and had been taken to Braddock's museum while they were chatting in ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... spectacle are plainly observable. The gradual mustering of the forces is near the Rockies to the westward, then the skirmish-line of fleecy cloudlets comes rolling and tumbling in advance, bringing a current of air that causes the ponderous wind-mill at the railway tank to "about face" sharply, and sets its giant arms to whirling vigorously around. Behind comes the compact, inky veil that spreads itself over the whole blue canopy above, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... has remained either as if it was benumbed, in a state of stupid apathy, or else he has become furious with fanaticism: sometimes, desponding with fear, man cringed like a slave who bends under the scourge of an inexorable master, always ready to strike him; he trembled under a yoke made too ponderous for his strength: he lived in continual dread of a vengeance he was unceasingly striving to appease, without ever knowing when he had succeeded: as he was always bathed in tears, continually enveloped in misery—as he was never permitted to lose sight of his fears—as he was continually ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... box of a house in a mill town on the Merrimac. He could still hear the clang of the mill-gates, the ringing of the bells, the hum and whir and roar of a hundred thousand spindles, the clacking crash of the ponderous shifting frames. He could still see with the inner eye the hundreds of windows blazing in the reflected fires of the western sun, or twinkling with numberless lights that cast their long reflections on the black waters of the canal. ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... the inner buildings of the fortress, the ponderous thickness of whose walls made itself felt like a physical pressure. An internal stone staircase, ranged round four sides of a square, was next revealed, leading at the top of one flight into a spacious hall, which ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... church, to be sure, regards the Bible as the word of God. The army does not question the infallibility of the Manual of Arms. Our written Constitution has been termed "the ark of the covenant." The orthodox Socialist appeals in unquestioning faith to the ponderous tomes of Marx. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... office with the painful uprightness and precise carriage of one who has lunched not wisely but rather too well. His speech, too, was of ponderous brevity. The man of affairs chided him with ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... grounding of arms, of the drawing of bolts and the turning of a key in a complicated lock. The prison was kept locked from within, and very heavy bars had to be moved ere the ponderous door slowly swung ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... speed is the trek-ox, lurching pensively along under his yoke, very exacting about his mealtimes, and with no high notions about supreme efforts, when he has to get his waggon out of a bad drift. He often prefers to die, and while he is making up his ponderous mind he may be blocking up a column, miles in length, of other waggons in single file. We talk of the superior mobility of the Boers; but it puzzles me to know how they got it, for oxen and mules are their standards of speed ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... book, however witty, lively, saltatory, can have the volant effects we covet, if it want substance and seriousness. Substance, however, is to be widely distinguished from ponderability. Oxygen is not so ponderous as lead or granite, but it is far more substantial than either, and, as every one knows, infinitely more serviceable to life. The distinction is equally valid when applied to books and to men. The "airy nothings" of imagination prove to be the most enduring somethings of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... now, where Derwent rolls his dusky floods Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods, The Nymph, GOSSYPIA, treads the velvet sod, And warms with rosy smiles the watery God; His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns, 90 And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns; With playful charms her hoary lover wins, And wields his trident,—while the Monarch spins. —First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull From leathery ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... a sober grandeur, in perfect tone with its architecture. Everything was solid and ponderous, save here and there, where in some lady's bower there appeared the spindle-legged tables and inlaid cabinets of the Chippendale period, which had an air of newness where all else was so old. The upper rooms were low and somewhat dark, the heavily ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... represented the hot current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling, fretting. For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed now by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity, the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid. Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath she represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... Ponderous scientific terms for simple ideas: Since, according to the physicists, the per cent of efficiency of a machine is equal to the amount of energy put in, divided by the amount of useful work performed, it naturally follows that in all human activities, unnecessary ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... out—O enchantment! by the light of two "mould" candles—the regular thing—which required "snuffing" about every ten minutes, and snuffing required dexterity. The snuffers—laid on a long tray—were of ponderous construction; it was generally some one's regular duty to snuff—how odd seems this now! The "plaited wicks" which came later were thought a triumph, and the snuffers disappeared. They also are to be ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... Was this the end of our struggles and adventures? Was this death? All these questions flashed through my mind in the fraction of a second, and a moment later I was engaged in a life and death struggle. The ponderous monolith of ice sank below the surface, and the frigid waters gurgled around me in frenzied anger. I was in a saucer, with the waters pouring in on every side. A moment more and ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... and Wine Office Court, and meditating pleasantly on the curious literary flavour that pervades these little-known regions. For the shade of the author of Rasselas still seems to haunt the scenes of his Titanic labours and his ponderous but homely and temperate rejoicings. Every court and alley whispers of books and of the making of books; forms of type, trundled noisily on trollies by ink-smeared boys, salute the wayfarer at odd corners; piles of strawboard, rolls or bales of paper, drums ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... a Herculean struggle. There was still a ponderous weight of water in the boat. The slight frame sagged and the flexible siding bulged. Glover with difficulty kept his feet, and he could only lift ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... keeping step with the retreat of the armies which were facing west. With strong reenforcements from Kiev and Odessa Brussilov commanded the Dniester front under the direction of General Ivanoff. If only the ponderous advance of Von Mackensen could have been arrested, Brussilov would have had little difficulty in sweeping Von Linsingen back to the Carpathian barrier. A somewhat similar condition existed in the north, where the Austrians ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... would know no triumph but of speed in carrying a burden, no glory other than of a long service, no victory but that of an endless, obscure contest with the sea. The great empty hulls with swept holds, just out of dry-dock, with their paint glistening freshly, sat high-sided with ponderous dignity alongside the wooden jetties, looking more like unmovable buildings than things meant to go afloat; others, half loaded, far on the way to recover the true sea-physiognomy of a ship brought down to her load-line, looked more accessible. Their less steeply slanting gangways ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... is hush'd and still as death,—'Tis dreadful! How reverend is the face of this tall pile, Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, To bear aloft its arch'd and ponderous roof, By its own weight made stedfast and immoveable, Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe And terror on my aching sight; the tombs And monumental caves of death look cold, And shoot a chillness ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... curious shell-fish, some creeping like snails with their heavy houses upon their backs, others were oyster and mussel like, anchored and lying with their valvular shells half open; while a couple of yards away lay one monster about two feet long, a bivalve with ponderous shells, whose edges were waved in three folds, and a glance inside whose opening showed a lining of the most ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... made any inquiries as to Marjolin, who, I doubt not, would strike his ponderous snuff-box until it resounded like the Grecian horse, at hearing such a doctrine associated with his respectable name. I was not aware, when writing to Paris, that this worthy Professor, whose lectures I long attended, was included in these audacious claims; but after the specimens ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hoisted, and the head yards braced forward to help her round more quickly. In the meantime the anchor was catted and fished ready for sea, and as the wind came abaft the beam, the head yards were squared, and the fore-clew-garnets being let run, the ponderous folds of the foresail were allowed to fall towards the deck, just as the wind was brought right aft. Both sheets were then hauled aft, and the increasing breeze no longer finding escape beneath it, blew it out in a graceful swell which made it appear as if it were about to lift ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... university. I have seen him hold a roomful of otherwise restless youths spellbound for an hour, while he discoursed about the respective inhabitants of the earth and sea at a time when nothing walked on fewer than four legs. And I have seen this scholar, his ponderous tomes shelved for a space, turning over and over with cherishing hands a letter-box that he had made out of card-board and paste, and exhibiting it proudly to his friends. For the hand was the first instrument of labor, that distinctive accomplishment ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... mind government is something vast, mysterious, and powerful. It is associated with armies and navies, and an unlimited police force. There are a glittering sword, a ponderous mace, and an argus eye, that reaches to the remotest point of territory like a great big electric search light, ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... revolved swiftly, backing slowly on its fine threads, gripped by the massive gimbals which, as at last the ponderous plug of metal freed itself from its threads, swung the circular door aside, like ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... large number of flies had gathered the alligators would close their capacious jaws, satisfied with the sweet morsel, and roll their eyes with apparent enjoyment. Then they once more slowly opened their ponderous jaws and quietly waited for another meal. We had gone on our way several hours without speaking, there was so much to see and it was all so new. The quaint song of the natives amused us. They never seemed to weary of the same "Yenze, yenze, ah ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... striking 250 Kills for faults of his own liking! Twice treble shame on Angelo, To weed my vice and let his grow! O, what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side! 255 How may likeness made in crimes, Making practice on the times, To draw with idle spiders' strings Most ponderous and substantial things! Craft against vice I must apply: 260 With Angelo to-night shall lie His old betrothed but despised; So disguise shall, by the disguised, Pay with falsehood false exacting, And perform an ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... the Little Corporal, without heeding their account of apparently insurmountable difficulties. England and Austria laughed in scorn at the idea of transporting across the Alps, where "no wheel had ever rolled, or by any possibility could roll," an army of sixty thousand men, with ponderous artillery, tons of cannon balls and baggage, and all the bulky munitions of war. But the besieged Massena was starving in Genoa, and the victorious Austrians thundered at the gates of Nice, and Napoleon was not the man to fail his former comrades ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... or not. It was a legend so adapted to the human mind that it made a habitation for itself in any country. It was an island in the clouds, which might be seen anywhere by the eye of faith. It was a subject especially congenial to the ponderous industry of certain French and Swedish writers, who delighted in heaping up learning of all sorts but were incapable of ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity—gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the previous day was due. There were the rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks and cracks—no quiet about the place from night to morning. Then came the barking of dogs, the noises of the cocks ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the necessary dressings from her store of herbs; but Hermanric waited not to be a witness of her skill. With one final look at the pale, exhausted child, he slowly descended from the waggon, and approaching Goisvintha, drew her towards a sheltered position near the ponderous vehicle. Here he seated himself by her side, prepared to listen with the deepest attention to her recital of the scenes of terror and suffering through which she had ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the poor dear as my boys have learned to be," said Mrs. Jo, quite satisfied with the success of her teaching, as Dick ambled past her, looking like a very happy, but a very feeble little dromedary, beside stout Stuffy, who did the elephant with ponderous propriety. ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... or a stumble, hardly reeling in her ponderous frame, the straining engine plunged headlong into the curve. Only once, she staggered and rolled; once only, three reckless men rose to answer death as it knocked at their hearts; but their hour was not come, and the ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... they thrust the ponderous cheese, And the loaves of wheat and rye; None stinteth him for lack of ease— For each a stintless welcome sees In the Baron's ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... noted all this as he and Ward came in. But his cynical blue eyes went beyond, to a door with a ponderous combination lock. Then they were attracted by something else—the tall, slim figure standing against the black quartz ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... time that rough walk in the ponderous suits across the broken terrain of the asteroid was a short one, measured by the beating of his own heart, Dane thought it much too long. There was no sign of life by the air lock of the bubble—no move on the part of the men stationed there to ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... of the school were enclosed from the rest of the town by a high and thick brick wall, dingy with years, which seemed to frown like a prison wall upon the grassy and pleasantly shaded freedom without. At one corner of this ponderous wall was set a more ponderous gate, riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. As the boy passed through it he trembled with delicious awe which was deepened by the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... lead me to guess that it is a remnant of the old Spanish Barracks, whose extensive structure fell by government sale into private hands a long time ago. At the end toward the swamp a great, oriental-looking passage is left, with an arched entrance, and a pair of ponderous wooden doors. You look at it, and almost see Count O'Reilly's artillery come bumping and trundling out, and dash around into the ancient Plaza to bang away at King St. ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... grisly, when the big bear is in the mood to turn hunter. Wapiti are found in the same places as the grisly, and in some spots they are yet very plentiful; they are less shy and active than deer, while not powerful enough to beat off so ponderous a foe; and they live in cover where there is always a good chance either to stalk or to stumble on them. At almost any season bear will come and feast on an elk carcass; and if the food supply runs short, in early spring, or in a fall when ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... was full of a story. Chantry wanted to listen, though he knew that he could have listened better if Havelock's heel had not been quite so ponderous on the saecular oak. He took refuge in a cosmic point of view. That was the only point of view from which Havelock (it was, by the way, his physical type only that had caused him to be nicknamed the Dane: his ancestors had come over from ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... came to a halt before a low door of solid oak, which was opened with the aid of a ponderous key, when a steep narrow stairway of stone lay before us. It wound upwards, corkscrew fashion, in the thickness of the wall, and, ascending it, we eventually reached a stone landing or short passage, very dimly lighted by ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... has been found in the 'central flowery land,' that it is not surprising to hear of the Chinese having begun to use paper-money as currency in the second century preceding the Christian era. At that time, the coinage of the Celestials was of a more bulky and ponderous nature than it is at the present day; and we may easily believe that a people so cunning and ingenious, would contrive not a few schemes to avoid the burden of carrying it about; as the man did, who scratched the figure of an ox on a piece of leather, and went from door to door with that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... skiadephora."]—Lib. xvi. cp. 18. The comparative silence of the Mahawanso in relation to the coco-nut may probably be referable to the fact that its author resided and wrote in the interior of the island; over which, unlike the light seeds of other plants, its ponderous nuts could not have been distributed accidentally, where down to the present time it has been but partially introduced, and nowhere in any considerable number. Its presence throughout Ceylon is always indicative of the vicinity of man, and at ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... at which it moved—the sound of a mighty tempest. It breathed fitfully, heavily, and as if with labour; but at every breath it blew a fervent heat along, and at every breath there rose the same threatening roar of sound. There was something massive and ponderous in this strange noise. It was as if a sea in unmeasured storm were billowing nearer and nearer. And surely that red glow was brightening. The trunks of giant trees were silhouetted ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... fastened, blown dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... unlocking of the ponderous old inlaid dressing-case, with velvet-lined compartments mostly empty, or only with little labelled papers of first curls, down as far as 'Edward Clement, 1842,' after which stern reality had absorbed sentiment—a sad declension from the blue enamel shrine with a pearl cypher, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the feast. Around the monster swarm the brawny men, Wielding with sinewy arms and savage cries Their flinty spears and tomahawks of stone. Erect old bruin growls upon his foes, And swings with mighty power his ponderous paws— Woe unto him who feels the crushing blow— Till, bleeding from an hundred wounds and blind, With sudden plunge he falls at last, and dies Amid the shouts of his wild enemies. So fought the Spartan few, till one by one, They ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... my astrological reveries, a ponderous bell struck ten, and such a peal of chimes succeeded, as shook the whole edifice, notwithstanding its bulk, and drove me away in a hurry. No mob obstructed my passage, and I ran through a succession of streets, free and unmolested, as if I had been skimming ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... courant, and any little scandal amuses him very much. I observed this to him one day, and added, that I thought his mind had been too great to descend to such trifles! he laughed and said with mock gravity, "Don't you know that the trunk of an elephant that can lift the most ponderous weights, disdains not to take up the most minute? This is the case with my great mind, (laughing anew,) and you must allow the simile is worthy the subject. Jesting apart, I do like a little scandal—I believe all English ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... uneasy beneath his cousin's glance. George, who, as he had heard, had written a letter signed "Patriot" in the middle of the War, complaining of the Government's hysteria in docking the oats of race-horses. Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous, neat, clean-shaven, with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling, no doubt, of the best hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand. Well, he didn't change! And for perhaps the first time in his life ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... were incessantly swept by the seas, insomuch that I never once durst open the door even to look out. But nothing having happened to increase my consternation in this half-hour, though the movement in the schooner was that of a very ponderous and majestical rolling and heaving, showing her bed to be afloat, I began to find my spirits and to listen and wait with some buddings of hope and confidence. At the expiration of this time the seas began to ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... ("the Abode of the Gods"); at the same time he assumed the title of P'hra Rama Thibodi. This capital and stronghold was continually exposed to storms of civil war and foreign invasion; and its turreted battlements and ponderous gates, with the wide deep moat spanned by drawbridges, where now is a forest of great trees, were but the necessary fences behind which court and garrison took shelter from the tempestuous barbarism in the midst ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... of the zest with which he had been imbued when he first raised an objection to Jimmie's action. His sluggish nature had dominated his movements, and now he moved forward with the ponderous motions of the average German agriculturist, although it was plain to the observers standing about that nothing short of a superior force could deter his progress or swerve him ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... for flexibility, and which had never before been employed in such discussions; and Tertullian seems to have often found it necessary to coin unwonted forms of expression, or rather to invent an ecclesiastical nomenclature. The ponderous Latin, hitherto accustomed to speak only of Jupiter and the gods, engages somewhat awkwardly in its new vocation; and yet contrives to proclaim, with wonderful power, the great thoughts for which it must now find utterance. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... entered, shook hands with myself and Lord John, bowed with ponderous insolence to Professor Summerlee, and sank back into a basket-chair, which creaked and swayed beneath ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... book, The Lawyer in History, Literature, and Humour, relates that a leader of the Bar on rising to address the drowsy jury after a ponderous oration by Sir Samuel Prime, said: "Gentlemen, after the long speech of the learned serjeant—" "Sir, I beg your pardon," interrupted Mr. Justice Nares, "you might say—you might say—after the long soliloquy, for my brother Prime has been ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... thought Durtal, the biographers. The depilators! taking all the hair off a real man's chest. They wrote ponderous tomes to prove that Jan Steen was a teetotaler. Somebody had deloused Villon and shown that the Grosse Margot of the ballade was not a woman but an inn sign. Pretty soon they would be representing the poet as a priggishly honest and judicious man. One would say that in writing their ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... human flavour. The first impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He was always in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his broad back; his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. He had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep gurgling gutturals and a decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and farther down into his larynx. Once, when we got to know each other fairly well, I ventured some harmless jest about Barbarossa. He chuckled; ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Italian verse a frivolous amusement. His Latin works of philosophy, poetry, and eloquence, established his serious reputation, which was soon diffused from Avignon over France and Italy: his friends and disciples were multiplied in every city; and if the ponderous volume of his writings [6] be now abandoned to a long repose, our gratitude must applaud the man, who by precept and example revived the spirit and study of the Augustan age. From his earliest youth, Petrarch aspired to the poetic crown. The academical honors of the three faculties had ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... this was highly proper—very useful to him—and his wife seemed to like it—as if she also had derived some distinct and secret advantage from this intellectual connection. She received her mixed and decorous guests with a kind of tall, ponderous grace, peculiarly her own and which awakened in the mind of intimidated strangers incongruous and improper reminiscences of an elephant, a giraffe, a gazelle; of a gothic tower—of an overgrown angel. Her Thursdays were becoming ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... camera-operator, just to show how much at home she felt! Dinky-Dunk must have experienced a distinctly new thrill when he saw his own wife come riding through that pictorial news weekly. He would have preferred not recognizing me, I suppose. But there I was, duly named and labeled—and hence the ponderous little note of disapproval. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... up the delusion, he sent off a detachment to harass the retreat of his ponderous adversary and fill his ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... countrymen? The answer is supplied by Mr. Gooch. Freeman ignored organic evolution. "The world of ideas had no existence for him.... No less philosophic historian has ever lived." For one man who, with effort, has toiled through Freeman's ponderous but severely accurate Norman and Sicilian histories, there are probably a hundred whose imagination has been fired by Carlyle's rhapsody on the French Revolution, or who have pored with interested delight over Froude's account of the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... motor stopped before a house with balconies and ponderous pillars, and she and her companions went up the ample stairway and into several uncomfortably crowded, flower-bedecked rooms. Ida, however, was getting used to the lights and the music, the gleam of gems, the confused hum of voices, and the rustle ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... was exquisitely witty, and though his jokes were always appreciated by his correspondent, yet Hamilton seldom ventured on anything of the same kind in reply; indeed his rare attempts at humour only produced results of the most ponderous description. But never were two scientific correspondents more perfectly in sympathy with each other. Hamilton's work on Quaternions, his labours in Dynamics, his literary tastes, his metaphysics, and his poetry, were all heartily welcomed by his friend, whose letters in reply invariably evince ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... the wrists tiring him, weighing on the pit of his stomach, numbing the back of his brain, making his limbs as heavy as ponderous lead. It seemed to the wearied engineer that there was nothing in this world to be desired but a good sound sleep; he fought against it desperately, but after a long struggle he suddenly succumbed; his head dropped, and he lay prone in the grass, apparently as lifeless, as the unfortunate ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... mountains heav'd their heads Beneath Thy forming hand, Before this ponderous globe ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... few books and pamphlets translated from the German, most of them written in a heavy, ponderous style which the average American worker found exceedingly difficult. The great classics of Socialism were not available to any but those able to read some other language than English. "Socialism is a foreign movement," said the ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... hour, a close carriage drove up to the palace. It contained no less a personage than the Prime Minister, the Marquis de Lutera,—a dark, heavy man, with small furtive eyes, a ponderous jaw, and a curious air of seeming for ever on an irritable watch for offences. His aspect was intellectual, yet always threatening; and his frigid manner was profoundly discouraging to all who sought to win his attention or ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... to have a voice in the choosing of the wedding-dress; and she actually swooped him up, just in a very critical part of a distinction between natural and moral ability, and conveyed him bodily, as fairy sprites knew how to convey the most ponderous of mortals, into the best room, where three specimens of brocade lay spread out upon a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... from his grim face almost to his feet, he seemed yet more so because of the huge black urns that were ranged about him in a circle. The sides of the urns were covered with curious inscriptions, and only the Wizard knew by these signs what deadly mists and vapors were confined under their ponderous lids. ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... Siegmund regretted it. But Helena was on the island, which rode like an anchored ship under the fleets of cloud that had launched whilst Siegmund was on water. As he watched the end of the pier loom higher, large ponderous trains of cloud cast over him the shadows of their bulk, and he shivered in the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... heroes, fought great battles, and performed mighty deeds of valor, childish pranks had no interest. He cared now for nothing in the world but to read all day long, and half the night; to read anything and everything, from the hair-raising cowboy tales Davy Munn loaned him, to the ponderous histories from the minister's book-shelf. Through this selfsame book-shelf the minister had become one of Tim's closest friends, and might have made a pastoral visitation every day in the week and been welcome. He had almost got ahead of the doctor in the eldest orphan's ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... comes in, Though Love, with outstretched arms and wings outspread, Would bar the way—poor Love, whose wings begin To droop, half-torn as are the roses dead Already at his feet—but Death must win, And Love grows faint beneath that ponderous tread! ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... side of the village, happily remains what nature left it, a stony and desolate valley, without a single object to divert the eye from the scene before it. This is a solid mass of limestone, of perhaps equal height with the Cove, cleft asunder by some great convulsion of nature, and opening its "ponderous and marble jaws" on the right and left. The sensation of horror on approaching it is increased by the projection of either side from its base, so that the two connivant rocks, though considerably distant at the bottom, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... higher rose to view The castle, with its battled walls, The ancient monastery's halls— A solemn, huge, and dark-red pile, Placed on the margin of the isle. In Saxon strength that abbey frowned, With massive arches broad and round, That rose alternate, row on row, On ponderous columns, short and low, Built ere the art was known, By pointed aisle, and shafted stalk, The arcades of an alley'd ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... about to drink her husband's ashes from a costly cup reveals a ponderous hand. It is but indifferent Rembrandt, despite several jewelled passages. Van Dyck shows at least one great picture, the Betrayal of Christ. The Brazen Serpent only ranks second to it; both are masterpieces, and Antwerp must envy the Prado. The Crown of Thorns, and the portraits, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... there such a gathering of nations as now followed the standard of Attila, some five hundred thousand warriors—Huns, Alans, Gepidae, Neuvi, Geloni, Bastarnae, Heruli, Lombards, Belloniti, Rugi, some German but chiefly Asiatic tribes, with their long quivers and ponderous lances, and cuirasses of plaited hair, and scythes, and round bucklers, and short swords." This heterogeneous host, from the Sarmatian plains, and the banks of the Vistula and Niemen, extended from Basle to the mouth ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... another personal reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when those four letters, "son b." were written under the date of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... grandest of all mediaeval halls in the kingdom, except only that at Westminster. Let us stand aside here for a moment and picture some of those who have ascended these stairs in days gone by. A fanfare of trumpets sounds, and Henry VIII goes up with ponderous step. Here too comes Queen Elizabeth, jesting in caustic fashion with her courtiers, as she sweeps along to witness a dramatic entertainment in the Hall. Of lesser folk there pass by Dr. Fell ("I do not like thee, Dr. Fell"), who finished the building of Tom Quad in 1665; and then a quiet studious-looking ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... the heaviest of the lot. Its editorial column alone weighs from twelve to eighteen pounds, and if you strike a man with a clubbed copy of it the crime is assault with a dull blunt instrument, with intent to kill. At the end of a ponderous review of the East Indian question I came on a letter written to the editor by a gentleman signing himself with his own name, and ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Nothing that I could think of—mice, rats, drains, currents of air, dropping of water—would explain it. If the noise had been caused by the agency of any one of these causes, it would have been heard in the day time. It never was. Night was the season, and the only season in which the ponderous, but invisible, mallet was wielded. Nothing could exceed the kindness with which I was treated. No words can do justice to the thoughtful and delicate hospitality which I received. But I declare to you this mysterious visitation was too much for me. It was impossible ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane; O, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn'd, Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again! What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... I admitted. "And there again is another sign of wisdom. Your ponderous fool talks pompous sense always. He sees life in only one facet. Your lover sees its many sides, its infinite variety. He can laugh and weep; his imagination lights up dry facts with whimsical fancies; he dives through the crust of conventionality to the realities ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Montgeron, at the twenty-fifth blow, broke an opening through a stone wall,—the executioner-drummer being commanded to deal, with his utmost strength, one hundred and sixty blows in succession, with that ponderous bar, (a bar with rough edges, no cylindrical rod,) not on the back of the culprit, but on his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... London theatric privilege which, so far as occasion favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. The New York familiarities had to drop; going to the play presented itself in London as a serious, ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs over vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance and with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... roar, Fitful and faint from the distance wandering; But 'tis only the blind old ocean maundering, Raking the shingle to and fro, Aimlessly clutching and letting go The kelp-haired sedges of Appledore, Slipping down with a sleepy forgetting, 220 And anon his ponderous shoulder setting, With a deep, hoarse pant ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... possessed of some twenty-six thousand acres of rich Iowa land and seven thriving villages, comfortably housing about 1400 of the faithful. Barbara Heynemann died in 1883, and since her death no "instrument" has been found to disclose the will of God. But many ponderous tomes of "revelations" have survived and these are faithfully read and their naive personal directions and inhibitions are still generally obeyed. The Bible, however, remains the main guide of these people, and they follow its instructions with childish literalism. Until quite recently they ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... York will hardly imagine, for that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the literary situation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... while the mother spoke, wanted to say something to the daughter, who stood there so near him, but he could think of nothing that would do; certain words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases, seemed patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to assent to what she had said; he wished simply to tell her she was delightful, and it was difficult to mark that difference. So he only smiled at her in silence, and she smiled back at him—a smile that seemed to him quite ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Since the parson's exit he has been executing "Norma" with great spirit, and, so far as I am able to judge, with wonderful skill. I doubt not his thoughts are a thousand miles hence, among brown-skinned wenches, dressed in crimson robes, and decorated with ponderous ear-drops. In fact, "Norma" is good, and goes far to carry one out of ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... capacious hood, amused us greatly, for on meeting us, lest our bold eyes should pierce their disguise, they would stop and turn their faces to the wall. What these poor creatures suffer from the heat in these ponderous cloaks can only be imagined, and Dulcigno is by no ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... nights later, in inky blackness, a huge shape descended rapidly in front of the shed, whose ponderous doors opened to receive it and closed quickly after it. The Skylark moved lightly and easily as a wafted feather, betraying its thousands of tons of weight only by the hole it made in the hard-beaten earth of the floor as it settled to rest. Opening one of the heavy ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... masses, in the fact that new and ever new strata of population acquire experience, verify their views of the day before, sweep them aside, work out new ones, desert old leaders and follow new ones in the forward march. During revolutionary times, formally democratic organizations, based upon the ponderous apparatus of universal suffrage, inevitably fall behind the development of the political consciousness of the masses. Quite different are the Soviets. They rely immediately upon organic groupings, such as shop, mill, factory, volost, regiment, etc. ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... firmly united mass of combatants, who were all bundled, or rather locked together in close and deadly strife, was rolling heavily, sometimes one way, and sometimes another, sometimes ending with a thud against a partition, that made the whole house shake, sometimes with a ponderous lodgment against a door, which, unable to resist the shock, flew open, and landed the belligerents at their full length on the floor, where they rolled over one another in a very edifying and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... people's has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass. Think back through history, and you will know it. What will this lowest deep—thieves, Magdalens, negroes—do with the light filtered through ponderous Church creeds, Baconian theories, Goethe schemes? Some day, out of their bitter need will be thrown up their own light-bringer,—their Jean Paul, ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... army advancing, and which it is that Homer compares to a mist on the hills perplexing the shepherd) 'was certainly much denser than to admit of the view extending to such a distance. In the Homeric sense, as allusive to the hurling of the ponderous chermadion, the figure is correct and expressive.' And here, as everywhere, we see the Horatian parenthesis upon Homer, as one, qui nil molitur inepte, who never speaks vaguely, never wants a reason, and never loses ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... glad vhen ve sail again, too. [Then, as she makes no comment, he goes on with a ponderous attempt at sarcasm.] Ay don't see vhy you don't like Boston, dough. You have good time here, Ay tank. You go ashore all time, every day and night veek ve've been here. You go to movies, see show, gat all kinds fun—[His eyes hard with hatred.] All ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... gentleman, with a great, loud voice, and beautiful long curls that touched his velvet coat-collar. His sweeping golden moustache, wide-brimmed white hat, the choice rings on his fingers, his magnificently ponderous gold watch-chain and a watch of the finest silver, all proclaimed him a being of such flawless elegance both in person and attire that the little boy never grew tired of showing him to the village people and to Clytie. He did not stay at the big house, for some reason, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... yarn, Or scarlet crewel in the cushion fixed: If cushion might be called, what harder seemed Than the firm oak of which the frame was formed. No want of timber then was felt or feared In Albion's happy isle. The lumber stood Ponderous, and fixed by its own massy weight. But elbows still were wanting; these, some say, An alderman of Cripplegate contrived, And some ascribe the invention to a priest Burly and big, and studious of his ease. But rude at first, and not with easy slope Receding wide, they pressed against the ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... their bread by the sweat of their brain, at leisure and in scorn. If the graduates in this way condescend to express their thoughts in English, it is understood to be infra dignitatem—such light and unaccustomed essays do not fit the ponderous gravity of their pen—they only draw to advantage and with full justice to themselves in the bow of the ancients. Their native tongue is to them strange, inelegant, unapt, and crude. They 'cannot command it to ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... foot than of a flower or a stem, we are much more likely to presume upon our judgment respecting proportions here, we are very apt to assert that the plesiosaurus and camelopard have necks too long, that the turnspit has legs too short, and the elephant a body too ponderous. ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... lengthy and kept at a singularly high level. In the first of his designs which attracted attention we find the half-grotesque, half-real child that he has made his own—fat, merry little people, that are bubbling over with the joy of mere existence. "Macmillan's Literary Primers" is the rather ponderous title of these booklets which cost but a few pence each, and are worth many a half-dozen high-priced nursery books. Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verse," his first important book, won a new reputation by reason of its pictures. Then came "AEsop's ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... last been spanned. The bridge across it, that was so long seen in dreams and despaired of, has been thrown triumphantly—a solid compact fabric, on which a hundred intellectual masons are still at work, adding stone on ponderous stone to it. Science, to put the matter in other words, has accomplished these three things. Firstly, to use the words of a well-known writer, 'it has established a functional relation to exist between every fact of thinking, willing, or feeling, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... called it, when, with all the vigilance both of herself and Argus-eyed teachers, she failed to keep her young ladies from making the acquaintance of the students, who winked at them in church, bowed to them in the streets, tied notes to stones and threw them over the ponderous wall, while the girls waved their handkerchiefs from their windows, and in various other ways eluded the watchfulness of their teachers. A great acquisition to the fun-loving members of the seminary was ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... the chief justice, a portly, ponderous person, was moving solemnly forward to perform this ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... she was a nice maiden lady, gifted with a bright clear intelligence, diversified with the charms of light wit and fancy, and as she was content to be in art what she was in nature, her books live, while those of her ponderous rival are being very rapidly forgotten. "Romola" and "Daniel Deronda" are dead beyond hope of resurrection; "The Mill on the Floss", being more feminine, still lives, even though its destiny is to be forgotten when ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... old City Hall were used as prisons until Evacuation Day, when O'Keefe threw his ponderous bunch of keys on the floor and retired. The prisoners are said to have asked him where they were ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... of that which is perfectly mature, ponderous and sound; commonly that which is easily shaken from the boughs, or gathered about November, immediately upon its spontaneous fall, or taken from the tops and summities of the fairest and soundest trees, is best, and does (for the most part) direct to the proper season of ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... doubtfully—they were strong, sensible boots with notched and projecting soles of ponderous thickness—'why, what's the matter with them, Flossie, eh? Don't you think they're strong ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... use of the advancing monster. As the bewildering glare passed him, Rod saw that the train was a long, heavy-laden freight, and that some of its cars contained cattle. He stood motionless as it rushed past him, shaking the solid earth with its ponderous weight, and he drew a decided breath of relief at the sight of the blinking red eyes on the rear platform of its caboose. How he wished he was in that caboose, riding comfortably toward New York, instead of plodding wearily along on foot, with nothing but ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... wench?" they shouted, as they stopped the horse, and dragged its two riders down; for they were strong and robust men. The priest had no other weapon than the knife which he had taken from little Helga. With that he now stood on his defence. One of the robbers swung his ponderous axe, but the young Christian fortunately sprang aside in time to avoid the blow, which then fell upon the unfortunate horse, and the sharp edge entered into its neck; blood streamed from the wound, and the poor animal fell to the ground. Helga, who had only ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... have ever spoken highly: they are excellent and marvellously misplaced—non erat his locus. The text of a story-book is too frail to bear so ponderous a burden of classical Arabian lore, and the annotations injure the symmetry of the book as a work of art. They begin with excessive prolixity: in the Introduction these studies fill 27 closely printed pages to 14 of a text broken by cuts ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... suave in the colonel's manner, nothing slow or ponderous or courtly. He spoke rapidly and harshly and revealed the brute that many suspected but ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... which had a depressing effect on my spirits, I seated myself for the first time for many months at my Hartel grand-piano, which had been rescued from the Dresden catastrophe, to see whether I could settle down to composing the music for my ponderous heroic drama. In rapid outline I sketched the music for the Song of the Norns, or Daughters of the Rhine, which in this first draft was only roughly suggested. But when I attempted to turn Brunhilda's first address to Siegfried into song my courage failed me completely, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... each regiment as "battalion guns." At the same time he knew the value of fire concentration, and he frequently massed guns in strong batteries. His plans called for smashing hostile infantry formations with artillery fire, while neutralizing the ponderous, immobile enemy guns with a whirlwind cavalry charge. The ideas were sound. Gustavus smashed the Spanish Squares at ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... the extreme quickness with which an elephant can kick, and the great height that can be reached by this mischievous use of the hind foot. I have frequently seen an elephant kick as sharp as a small pony, and the effect of a blow from so ponderous a mass propelled with extreme velocity may be imagined. This is a peculiar action, as the elephant is devoid of hocks, and it uses the knees of the hind legs in a similar manner to those of a human being, therefore a backward kick would seem ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... endure any unexpected delay, some one from Briar Farm would be sent to trace her and find out where she went. While she thus hesitated, she heard the heavy rumbling of slow cart-wheels, and waited to see what sort of vehicle might be approaching. It was a large waggon drawn by two ponderous horses and driven by a man who, dimly perceived by the light of the lantern fastened in front of him, appeared to be asleep. Innocent hailed him—and after one or two efforts succeeded at last ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... was a steel hull whose sides, opposed to the jaws of the ponderous masses, would have been crushed like an eggshell in a vise. Unlike a wooden ship, the gentlest contact would have sprung her plates, while any considerable collision would have pierced her as if she had been built of paper. Appreciating ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... night a lofty scaffold had been erected on the bridge of Sant' Angelo, and the plank and block were placed thereon. Above the block was hung, from a large cross beam, a ponderous axe, which, guided by two grooves, fell with its whole weight at the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
