"Tumid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... huge appear Emergent, and their broad bare Backs up-heave Into the Clouds, their Tops ascend the Sky: So high as heav'd the tumid Hills, so low Down sunk a hollow Bottom, broad and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... theory that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with gas, did certainly mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more of ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... embellishment is out of the question. The hero puts on his clothes, or refreshes himself with food and wine, or he yokes his steeds, takes a journey, and in the evening preparation is made for his repose. To give relief to subjects prosaic as these without seeming unseasonably tumid is extremely difficult. Mr. Pope abridges some of them, and others he omits; but neither of these liberties was compatible with the nature ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... life, are not equally diligent in writing to me. Dr. Heberden was with me two or three days ago, and told me that nothing ailed me, which I was glad to hear, though I knew it not to be true. My nights are restless, my breath is difficult, and my lower parts continue tumid. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the rain, just when all on board—sick of the calm, the listless monotonous roll of the ship, the flapping of the idle sails against the masts, and the sight of the same cloudless sky and endless expanse of tumid sea, with surface unbroken by the tiniest ripple, save when a dolphin leaped out of the water or a fairy nautilus glided by in his frail shell craft—were longing for the advent of the north-east trades, which Captain Dinks had expected them to "run into" ever since they lost their first favourable ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... air about them was soft and moist after a recent shower. The south-west wind stirred the pulses. Earth was once more tumid, about to bring forth. Already the hedges were green under the brown; bulbs were pushing delicate spears through the sweet-smelling soil; the buds upon a clump of fine beeches had begun to open. In this ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... measured, their tones were measured; and they framed canons of judgment and taste, by which it was pronounced an affront on the intellectual nature of man to assail him with epithets, and exclamations, and varied tones, and emphatic gesture. They censured the free and flowing manner of Cicero as "tumid and exuberant," nec satis pressus, supra modum exultans et superfluens. They cultivated a more guarded and concise style, which might indeed please the critic or the scholar, but was wholly unfitted to instruct or ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... all manner of mimetic, half-original men! Tumid blustering, with more or less of sincerity, which need not be entirely sincere, yet the sincerer the better, is like to go far. Shall we say, the Revolution-element works itself rarer and rarer; so that only lighter and lighter bodies will float in it; till at last the mere blown-bladder is ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... all the duties of his profession and of domestic life. As a poet, he is not entitled to very high commendation. The distinguishing feature of his poetry is the ease of its diction. Johnson has observed, that if blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled prose. To disprove this, it would be sufficient to quote the greater part of that story from the Tatler [1] of the Young Man restored to Sight, which Jago has introduced into his Edge-hill. Nothing can be described more ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... now, without sound, Creeps stealthily Up to the shore— Creeps, creeps and undulates; As one dissimulates Till, swayed by hateful frenzy, Through passion grown immense, he Bursts forth hostilely; And rising, a smooth billow— Its swelling, sunlit dome Thinned to a tumid ledge With keen, curved edge Like the scornful curl Of lips that snarl— O'ertops itself and breaks Into a raving foam; So springs upon the shore With a hungry roar; Its first fierce anger slakes On the stony shallow; And runs up on the land, Licking the ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... with pride, as it appeared in the brilliant lights and gorgeous appointments of the palatial supper-hall, within twenty-four hours the lacerating indignation of Mr. Watterson and the trenchant raillery of Mr. Bryan had let the tumid pretentiousness all out of it, and it had collapsed into a flaccid and "innocuous desuetude." The "star-eyed goddess" turned her back upon it, the "wild-orbed anarch" snapped his fingers at it, and even everyday ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... common species, found on many kinds of stove and other plants, is the Lecanium hibernaculorum, here illustrated on a twig, natural size, and magnified. It is brown, tumid, and commonly somewhat more than hemispherical in shape. Besides this species there is the L. filicum of Ferns, the L. hemisphoericum of Dracaenas, the L. rotundum of the Peach, and the common L. hesperidum, or Orange-tree Bug, which is one of the flat species, and it spreads ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... and the tendency to practical materialism was never wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old religion, and Hegel, to go ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... bandage has been kept on for some short time in this way, let it be slackened a little, brought to that state or term of medium tightness which is used in bleeding, and it will be seen that the whole hand and arm will instantly become deeply coloured and distended, and the veins show themselves tumid and knotted; after ten or twelve pulses of the artery, the hand will be perceived excessively distended, injected, gorged with blood, drawn, as it is said, by this medium ligature, without pain, or heat, or any horror of a vacuum, or any other ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... but surely rather tumid. 'The whole forces of the shaken globe?' But little poets ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... of its flowers and the hardy nature of the plant, is certain to find much favour among growers of Cactuses. The stem is about 9 in. high, by 2 in. to 4 in. in diameter, the base much wider than the apex, the ridges irregular, very thick and rounded, giving the stem a gouty or tumid appearance. Upon the prominent parts of these ridges are stellate tufts of long, pale brown spines, some of them nearly 2 in. long, and each tuft containing about eight spines. When young, the stems are more like some of the Mamillarias than the Cereuses. The flowers are developed ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... bluish gray. Crown and upper part of head greenish blue, with green and golden metallic reflections on sides of neck. A black spot under each ear. Forehead and breast reddish buff; lighter underneath. (General impression of color, bluish fawn.) Bill black, with tumid, fleshy covering; feet red; two middle tail feathers longest; all others banded with black and tipped with ashy white. Wing coverts sparsely spotted with black. Flanks and underneath the wings bluish. Female ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... appeal from the new to the old Whigs, which contains astonishing coincidences with the present times. His definition of the people is somewhat tumid and obscure, and involved in a splendid confusion of generalities and abstruse doctrine; but it is a wonderful monument of his genius, and exhibits that extent of knowledge and accuracy of insight into the nature of parties and the workings of political ambition ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... shade. The Doctor from the boxes, and the son from the stage, have actually endeavoured, it seems, to recite addresses, which they call MONOLOGUES and UNALOGUES; and which, for extravagant folly, tumid meanness, and vulgar affectation, set all the powers of parody ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... appearance, although, if the bandage be kept on for a minute or two, it will begin to look livid and to fall in temperature. But if the bandage be now slackened a little, the hand and the arm will immediately become suffused, and the superficial veins show themselves tumid and knotted, the pulse at the wrist in the same instant beginning to beat as it did before the application of the bandage. The tight bandage not only compresses the veins, but the arteries also, so that blood cannot flow through either. The slacker ligature obstructs the veins only, ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... that the seven ships which retreated into the river Vilaine had received very little damage, and would be soon repaired; and that, by the junction of Bompart's squadron, he should be soon able to give a good account of the English admiral. These tumid assertions, so void of truth, are not to be imputed to an illiberal spirit of vain glory, so much as to a political design of extenuating the national calamity, and supporting the spirit of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... species of Pelargonium, Geranium, Mirabilis, as well as those of Caryophylleae and other orders, have tumid nodes as a normal occurrence. In the genus Pelargonium this swelling is sometimes not confined to the nodes, but extends to the interspaces between them, e.g. P. spinosum. This condition, which happens ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... splendour the picturesque, yet seldom fuses matter and manner into a poetical synthesis. The community of interest between his ideas and images is rather affiliated than cognate. He has a tremendous, though ill-assorted vocabulary. His prose is jolting, rambling, tumid, invertebrate. An "arrant artist," as Mr. Brownell calls him, he lacks formal sense and the diffuseness and vagueness of his supreme effort—the Lincoln burial hymn—serves as a nebulous buffer ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... will kiss my lifeless king, ere thou thy bloody corslet layest aside. Thy hair is, Helgi! tumid with sweat of death; my prince is all bathed in slaughter-dew; cold, clammy are the hands of Hogni's son. How shall I, prince! ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... connected with patriotism, it was immanent; not transitively associated by any links whatever, but immanently intertwisted, indwelling in the idea. Therefore it happened that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing, trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That would have been even ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... for the admirable anatomical researches among marine invertebrata which he conducted during the voyage) is very minute, being not more than the 1/24th of an inch in diameter. It is translucent and of a brownish-white hue. Its aspect is that of a Turbo in miniature. The whorls are tumid, the spire prominent; the body whorl is belted by two prominent keels, one of which is continued on the whorls of the spire: between, above, and below these keels are transverse membranous raised ridges, which in the central division of the body whorl are curved forwards. This curvature ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... moan of hunger o'er the land, Till the sky darken with the face of angels, God's smiling ministers, averted—then! To buy a male soprano they should give His price in gold, that peach-fed lords and dames Might have their senses tickled with the trills Evolv'd from a soft, tumid, warbling throat— Why then farewell ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... been as fortunate in their chroniclers as they deserve. The tumid cant of Nicholas is grotesque enough to be more amusing than the tract-and-water style of Yate and Barret Marshall, or the childishness of Richard Taylor. Much better in every way are Buller's (Wesleyan) "Forty Years In New Zealand," and Tucker's ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... attempted to take it from him; and yet the Italians, who pretend, and with good reason, to more sprightly wits and sounder sense than the other nations of their time, have lately bestowed the same title upon Aretin, in whose writings, save tumid phrases set out with smart periods, ingenious indeed but far-fetched and fantastic, and the eloquence, be it what it may, I see nothing in him above the ordinary writers of his time, so far is he from approaching the ancient divinity. And we make nothing ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne |
