"Buttress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a sort of flying buttress which sprung sideways, with a wide span, across the angle the tower made with the hall, from an embrasure of the battlement of the hall to the outer corner of the tower, itself more solidly buttressed. I think it must have been made to resist the outward ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... methods on me. He was too shrewd not to detect in me a curiosity of intellect that only the strongest and deepest prepossessions could restrain; these it was his untiring effort to create in my mind and to buttress till they were impregnable. To some extent he attained his object, but his success was limited; and his teaching affected by what I can only call a modernness of temperament in me, which no force of tradition wholly destroyed ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... trail curved sharply around a rocky buttress, which hid the remainder of it from view. In his eagerness to see what lay beyond, Stratton did not mount but led his horse over the short stretch of level rock. But as he turned the corner, he caught his breath and jerked ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... the old Indian agreed, and dropped back to his respectful position in his master's rear. As they topped the ridge that formed the northern buttress of the San Gregorio, Pablo rode to the left and started down the hill through a draw covered with a thick growth of laurel, purple lilac, a few madone trees and an occasional oak. He knew that a big, five-point buck had its habitat ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... a scorched devil, clawed with one hand at the sticky mass that masked him as he ran blind, wild with pain. He tripped, clutched, and lost his hold, slid on a plane of icy lava, smooth as glass, struck a buttress that sent him off at a tangent down the face of the cliff, bounding from impact with an outthrust elbow of the rock, whirling into space, into the icy turmoil of the waves, ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... temple pile, where the moon dimly flashes O'er gray roof, tall window, sloped buttress, and base, O'erarches the ashes, the now silent ashes, Of the noblest, the bravest, of Scotia's race. How hallow'd yon spot where a hero is lying, Embalm'd in the holiness worship bedews, The lamb watching ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... accounted for the fertility of the hollow and the mildness of the air. But how were we to get out of it? For look as I might, I could see no signs either of an outlet or a current. Gondocori, who acted as pilot, quickly solved the mystery. A buttress of rock, which in the distance looked like a part of the mass, screened the entrance to a narrow waterway. Down this waterway the cacique navigated the canoe. It ran in tortuous course between rocks so high that ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... was comparatively bare, so closely was it placed to the dense crowd of its fellows whose limbs were matted together and enlaced with creepers of endless variety, out from which the sheltering tree stood like a huge, green, smoothly rounded buttress, formed by nature to support the green wall which surrounded ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... when at least forty years had passed over them. She winked to the merchant, touching at the same time her under lip with her forefinger, to announce the propriety of silence and secrecy; then gliding from the crowd, retreated to a small recess formed by a projecting buttress of the chapel, as if to avoid the pressure likely to take place at the moment when the bier should be lifted. The merchant failed not to follow her example, and was soon by her side, when she did not give him the trouble of opening his affairs, but ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... energy, human certitude, what besides Westminster survived? Of Chertsey there is perhaps a gateway and part of a wall; of Sheen nothing; of Reading a few flints built into modern work; of Abingdon a gateway, and a buttress or two that long served to support a brewhouse; of Osney nothing, contrariwise, electric works and the slums of a modern town. All these were Westminsters. In all of these was to be discovered that patient process of production which ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... of the scale, and stood Upon the second buttress of that mount Which healeth him who climbs. A cornice there, Like to the former, girdles round the hill; Save that its arch with sweep less ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... or pavement in the interior of this large building, have long ago been removed. Besides the sepulchral monuments and inscriptions already mentioned we shall note the epitaphs of Erwin of Steinbach, of Husa his wife, and of his son John, at the lower part of the buttress in the little yard behind Saint John's chapel[1]; also the inscription to the memory of Conrad Guertler, who bequeathed to the chapter of the Cathedral his house, a large building in the rue du Dome; this inscription is opposite that of Geiler of Kaysersberg; finally, ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... thunder of the waves as they echoed in the cave under the castle rock. It seemed, as we stood there and looked up, that not a foot further could we go. The great angry cliff beetled over our heads, and on its very edge, far above, we might discern against the gloomy sky the dim corner of a buttress. ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... in stone or brickwork designed to receive and resist the lateral pressure of an arch, vault or strut. When built outside a wall it is termed a buttress. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... according to the most orthodox arctic rules, until, instead of presenting the appearances of a body intended for progress through the water, they resembled nothing so much as very ungainly snuff-boxes; and their bows formed a buttress which rather pushed the water before it than passed through it. The remark made by an old seaman who had grown gray amongst the ice was often recalled to my mind, as with an aching heart for many a long mile I dragged the clumsy "Resolute" about. "Lord, sir! you would think by the quantity ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... the open no sign remained of the dome-roofed settlement of the Sleepers. The huts had served to buttress the snow for the blizzard. They were buried deep under the great white ridges which ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... "Hey, look out! Out of the way!" cries a man, by way of apology, who is being assisted by several others to push a cart towards the wagons. The work is hard, for the ground slopes up, and so soon as they cease to buttress themselves against the cart and adhere to the wheels, it slips back. The sullen men crush themselves against it in the depth of the gloom, grinding their teeth and growling, as though they fell ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... thro th' Jumples cluff, Wor gettin rayther mazy; An' Warkus Ned had supped enuff To turn they're Betty crazy;— An Bob at lives at th' Bogeggs farm, Wi' Nan throo th' Buttress Bottom, Wor treating her to summat wanm, (It's just ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... large ancient building was found standing upon the wall or buttress. At this place the wall appears to be about seventy-nine feet wide, or thick. The site of this building, upon an elevation, together with its solid structure, leave no doubt that it was the grandest building in Troy; nay, that it must have been ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... twigs, and from the blade Of Torquil's knife struck fire, and thus arrayed The grot with torchlight. Wide it was and high, And showed a self-born Gothic canopy; The arch upreared by Nature's architect, The architrave some Earthquake might erect; The buttress from some mountain's bosom hurled, When the Poles crashed, and water was the world; 150 Or hardened from some earth-absorbing fire, While yet the globe reeked from its funeral pyre; The fretted pinnacle, the aisle, the nave,[404] Were there, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of Athena Nike, tho outside the Propylaea—thrust out as it were on a sort of great buttress high on the right—must still be called a part, and a very striking part, of the Acropolis. It is only of late years that it has been cleared of rubbish and modern stone-work, thus destroying, no doubt, some precious traces of Turkish occupation which the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... attraction for the Celtic inhabitants, and the rocks piled up around it stand there as witnesses of a civilization and architecture certainly more primitive than the civilization and architecture of Roman, Saxon, or Norman settlers. We need not look beyond. How long that granite buttress of England has stood there, defying the fury of the Atlantic, the geologist alone, who is not awed by ages, would dare to tell us. But the historian is satisfied with antiquities of a more humble and homely character; and in bespeaking the interest, and, it may be, the active support ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... oriel window, which fills the whole of the space between the centre and the left-hand divisions, is a specimen of pointed architecture in its best and purest style. The arches are lofty and acute. Each angle is formed by a double buttress, and the tabernacles affixed to these are filled with statues. The basement of the oriel, which projects from the flat wall of the house, after the fashion of a bartizan, is divided into compartments, studded with medallions, and intermixed with tracery of great variety and beauty. ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... steep turf found ourselves all at once on the brink of the Curral. It is a huge valley, or rather crater, of immense depth, enclosed on all sides by a range of magnificent mountain precipices, the sides and summit of which are broken in every variety of buttress or pinnacle—now black and craggy and beetling—at other times spread with the richest green turf, and scattered with a profusion of the evergreen forest-trees, indigenous to the island; while far below, in the midst of all these horrors, smiles ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... few words to the people near him before going down the last steps into the launch, and it in the meantime gently and perseveringly smoked the ticket-holders on the buttress of the pier opposite us; and we ticket-holders and G. P. on our buttress smiled at their pained expressions—our time was to come. It stopped smoking, held its breath as it were, and came slowly under us, and Lady Curzon looked up from under the awning in the stern ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... into the hut, and at once turned out of my hammock. I stood contemplating the wild scene for some minutes, admiring the size and variety of the trees which rose up in the forest before me. Some had enormous buttress trunks, which sent down rope-like tendrils from their branches in every direction. There was the gigantic balsam-tree, the india-rubber-tree, and many others. Among them were numerous palms—one towering above the rest with its ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon our folk and the War-duke lying at the foot of a little hill that went up as a buttress to a long ridge high above us, whereon we set a watch; and a little brook came down the dale for ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... hand, if the lateral pressure be slight, it may retain its character of a wall, being supported against the pressure by buttresses at intervals; but if the lateral pressure be very great, it is supported against such pressure by a continuous buttress, loses its wall character, and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... sure-foot along that little ledge," said Nance, pointing as she spoke; "then out through the breach and down by yonder buttress. It is easier coming back, of course, because you see where you are going. From the buttress foot a sheep-walk goes along the scarp—see, you can follow it from here in the dry grass. And now, sir," she added, with a touch of womanly pity, "I would come away from here if I were you, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ilchester, has a small church dedicated to St Vincent. It is remarkable for the large square bell-cot over the W. gable (cp. Brympton and Chilthorne Domer) which is supported by a massive buttress in the middle of the W. front. Within the building note (1) the three lancets at the E. end; (2) the foliated interior arches of the chancel windows (two of which are very small lancets); (3) the pulpit, dated 1637. The glass in some ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... that we have much reason to be proud of the progress our people are making in mutual understanding—the chief buttress of human and civil rights. Steadily we are moving closer to the goal of fair and equal treatment of citizens without regard to race or color. But unhappily ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... said, somewhat lightened our loads, when all at once it seemed to me that a spasm ran through Jack Penny where he lay. Then, as I watched him, I saw his hand stealing towards his gun, and he looked at me and pointed towards where a dense patch of big trees formed a sort of buttress to the great green ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic like that, and serves the same purpose in the animal economy which that serves in our mechanical contrivances, is as old as the mammalia. The dome, the round and the Gothic arch, the groined roof, the flying buttress, are all familiar to those who have studied the bony frame of man. All forms of the lever and all the principal kinds of hinges are to be met with in our own frames. The valvular arrangements of the blood-vessels are unapproached by any artificial apparatus, and the arrangements for preventing ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... than our own, is more remarkable for its verdure, and for a general appearance of civilisation, than for its natural beauties. The chalky cliffs may seem bold and noble to the American, though compared to the granite piles that buttress the Mediterranean they are but mole-hills; and the travelled eye seeks beauties instead, in the retiring vales, the leafy hedges, and the clustering towns that dot the teeming island. Neither is Portsmouth a very favourable specimen of a British port, considered ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... must be hiding in the hollows, waiting for the others to catch up," whereupon Nolan, looking daggers, had called him a scarehead, and Geordie shouted for Cawker's glass. It was sent up the stairway in less than a minute and focussed on Porphyry Point, a massive buttress overhanging the farther valley. For long seconds Geordie steadied the binocular against the staff and peered silently through. At last he said: "Some riders and two or three livery-rigs are coming, but I see no men afoot." Then, turning over his shoulder to Cawker, standing in ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... accepted the office of Governor of Gelderland, to which he had been elected by the estates of that province on the 11th of March. That important bulwark of Holland, Zealand, and Utrecht on the one side, and of Groningen and Friesland on the other—the main buttress, in short, of the nascent republic, was now in hands which would defend it to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... primary cause of the ruin of the north-western Transept, the great additional weight being more than the four supporting arches (which were lofty) were intended to bear. Of the period when the Transept fell, or was taken down, we have no record; but the character of the buttress on the site of the western wall shows that it must have been at an early period, probably about A.D. 1400, as the strengthening arches placed within the original ones appear to have been erected a ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... reader learn to call it by that name, on occasion? for in these sad Manuscripts of ours the names alternate—is a fine, fertile, useful and beautiful Country. It leans sloping, as we hinted, to the East and to the North; a long curved buttress of Mountains ("RIESENGEBIRGE, Giant Mountains," is their best-known name in foreign countries) holding it up on the South and West sides. This Giant-Mountain Range,—which is a kind of continuation of the Saxon-Bohemian "Metal ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... were poor on earth will be poor in Hades. As to any moral retribution which may overtake evil-doers in the life to come, their ideas are very vague; only they are sure that the ghosts of the niggardly will be punished by being dumped very hard against the buttress-roots of chestnut-trees. They say, too, that all breaches of etiquette or of the ordinary customs of the country will meet with certain appropriate punishments in the spirit land. When the soul has thus done penance, it takes possession of the body of some animal, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... institutions. The Constitution of the United States, on the other hand, is a true Constitution—concerned only with fundamentals, and guarded against change in a manner suited to the preservation of fundamentals. To put into it a regulation of personal habits, to buttress such a regulation by its safeguards, is an atrocity for which no characterization can be too severe. And it is something more than an atrocity; the Eighteenth Amendment is not only a perversion but also a degradation of the Constitution. In what precedes, the emphasis has been placed on the perversion ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... nearest point, the passing blurrs would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third with an empty saddle on its back—a lady's or "side-saddle", if one could have distinguished the horns. They may have struck a soft track or level, or rounded the buttress of the hill higher up, but before they had time to reach or round the foot of the spur, blurs, whispers, stumble and clatter of hoofs, jingle of bridle rings, and the occasional clank together of stirrup irons, seemed shut off as suddenly and completely ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... the venerable Lady of Salisbury, nor you shall not save him from trafficking with Schmalkaldners and Lutherans if it shall serve his monstrous passions and his vanities. And if he do not this yet he will do other villainies. And you will cosset him in them—to save his hoggish dignity and buttress up his heavy pride. All this you stand ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... out for my benefit by his personal staff during dinner, the great soldier told us that stirring tale of how, as Governor of Paris, he despatched its garrison in buses and taxis and any vehicles that he could lay hands upon, to buttress the army which, under Maunoury's stalwart leadership, was to fall upon Von Kluck's flank, and was to usher in ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... to trial and error—holds true of social as well as of individual life. The hunter tries out a new snare or weapon, the machinist constructs a new tool, the chemist works out a new formula, the architect creates a new variety of arch or buttress, the educator writes a new kind of text-book, the sanitary engineer devises new methods for securing and safeguarding a water supply, the statesman plans a new system of roads that will open up the rural districts, the social scientist draws the design for a new type of ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... approach of any animal, or even the shadow of a cloud, arouses the anger of this small creature like a guinea pig, and they back against a stone or rock uttering shrill defiance. Our author found, in most examples, a bare patch on the rump, due to their rubbing against the said buttress of support when at bay. He wonders why a bare patch, and not a callosity, should not result from this innate, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the extreme heat, had become melted at the top and was in great danger of falling to the floor. The bees had noticed this impending calamity long before I had, and had already set about averting it. They rapidly threw out a buttress or supporting pillar from the comb next to the one in danger, and joined it firmly to it, thus shoring it up and preventing its fall in a most effectual manner. When they had made everything strong and secure, they went to the top of the comb and reattached ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... battlement and pinnet high, Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair— So still they blaze, when fate is nigh The lordly line ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moor-land, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... days in shaping and reshaping a phrase, like some sublime mason who—by a prodigy—had built a cathedral single-handed and whose heart bled upon discovering a neglected carving in the shadow of some buttress and expended infinite pains to perfect it, although it was almost invisible amidst the vastness and the beauty of ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... if you did not know that war was in the country you would never suspect it, unless you wondered why a red-hatted, blue-coated guard, with a rifle carelessly swung over his shoulder, is noticeable now and then by a cross-road or near the buttress of an important railroad bridge. You pass trains of troops, but the uniforms are quiet, the men jovial and unwarlike. The wounded are not ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... of a vaulted stone roof must have required consummate capacity and skill. At Eton, where, however, the stone roof was never built, the buttresses planned to carry it appear so enormous that the building seems to be all buttress, but here such an impression could never for a moment be gained, for the chapel filling each bay completely masks the widest portion of the adjoining buttresses. The upper portions are so admirably proportioned that they taper ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... Persian frescoes, and an ardent lounger in the somewhat musty precincts of Chaldea and Byzantium and Babylon. Early Christian Symbolism, a dispute over the site of a Greek temple, the derivation of the lotus column, the restoration of a Gothic buttress—these were the absorbing questions of his youth, with now and then a lighter moment spent in analytical consideration of the extra-mural decorations of St. Mark's. The world buzzed along after its own fashion, not disturbing ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... inscription upon an old headstone, for I thought everybody was gone; when I heard a door open, and shut again before I could turn. I saw at once that it must have been a little door in the tower, almost concealed from where I stood by a deep buttress. I had never seen the door open, and I had never inquired anything about it, supposing it led merely into ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... way," said Alberic. "I scrambled down that wide buttress by the east wall last week, when our ball was caught in a branch of the ivy, and ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... however, had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames's balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains. With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty frieze, buttress, Nor coigne of vantage, but this bird hath made His pendent bed, and procreant cradle: Where they Most breed and haunt, I have observed ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Torre-steps, a singular structure which here connects the shores of the stream. Every one has seen a row of stepping-stones across a shallow brook; now pile other stones on each of these, forming buttresses, and lay flat stones like unhewn planks from buttress to buttress, and you have the plan of this primitive bridge. It has a megalithic appearance, as if associated with the age of rude stone monuments. They say its origin is doubtful; there can be no doubt of the loveliness of the spot. The Barle comes with his natural rush ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved masonry that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze. Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle: Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, The ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... house, a wretched-looking, low, and mud-walled cabin; at one end it was propped by a buttress of loose stones, upon which stood a goat reared on his hind legs, to browse on the grass that grew on the house-top. A dung-hill was before the only window, at the other end of the house, and close to the door was a puddle of the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... the ponderous ram against the walls; Now shake the ramparts, now a buttress falls, But, still no breach—"Once more one mighty swing "Of all your beams, together thundering!" There—the wall shakes—the shouting troops exult, "Quick, quick discharge your weightiest catapult "Right on that spot and NEKSHEB ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and he stood watching his companion's face, and its changes in the glowing light of the magnificent spectacle, as the golden red-hot aspect of the mountain top rapidly increased, displaying every seam, ravine, and buttress, that seemed to be of burning metal, fiery spot after fiery spot, that the minute before was of a deep violet black. And this went on, with the fire appearing to sink gradually down till the whole of the mountain top ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... conform our policy to the spirit of that great law? or shall we, governed by unreasonable and selfish prejudices, initiate a policy which will make this race our hereditary enemy, a mine beneath instead of a buttress to the edifice which you are endeavoring to repair? Sir, I do not hesitate to say that, in my opinion, it were better to follow where conscience and justice point, leaving results to a higher Power, than to shrink from an issue which it is the clear intention of Providence ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... on, with that peculiar gravity age brings to equine hoofs, about a mile, when the buttress of a thick wall came into view abutting on the lane, and perched thereon what at first I deemed a coloured figment of the mist that festooned the branches and clung along the turf. But when I drew near I saw it was indeed a child, pink and gold and palest blue. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... reason, man cannot (as some seemed inclined to suppose) soar up to the God, and quit the ground of human frailty, yet, stripped wholly of it, he sinks at once into the brute. If it cannot stand alone, in its naked simplicity, but requires other props to buttress it up, or ornaments to set it off; yet without it the moral structure would fall flat and dishonoured to the ground. Private reason is that which raises the individual above his mere animal instincts, appetites ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... mouldering walls Of the vast theatre, like the deep roar Of distant waves, or the tumultuous rush Of multitudes: the lichen creeps along Each yawning crevice, and the wild-flower hangs Its long festoons around each crumbling stone. The window's arch and massive buttress glow With time's deep tints, whilst cypress shadows wave On high, and spread a melancholy gloom. Silent forever is the voice Of Tragedy and Eloquence. In climes Far distant, and beneath a cloudy sky, The echo of their harps is heard; but all The ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... for the Picts; and Caerketton—probably Caer-etin, the giant's strong-hold—is one of them. Darkly its cliffs frown down upon you, while all else is flashing white in the winter sunlight. For once, in this last buttress thrown out into the plain of Lothian towards the royal city, the outer folds of the Pentlands loses its boldly-rounded curves, and drops an almost sheer descent of black rock to the little glen below. In a wrinkle of the foothills ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... really was fought, is a ford upon the river Derwent, at the distance of about seven miles from York, and situated in that large and opulent county. A long wooden bridge over the Derwent, the site of which, with one remaining buttress, is still shown to the curious traveller, was furiously contested. One Norwegian long defended it by his single arm, and was at length pierced with a spear thrust through the planks of the bridge ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... let them revolt against Farnese once he has been created their duke and when thus the State shall have been alienated from the Holy See, and then you may count upon the Emperor to step in as your liberator and to buttress up ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Plaza roof with a lounge-lizard breathing winy breaths into her false hair was welcome to her choice. I was at least in the battle of life—and life is a battle which scars you more when you try to keep out of it than when you wade into it. I was a mother and a home-maker and the hope and buttress of the future. And all I wanted was a good night's sleep and some candid friend to tell me not to be a feather-headed idiot, but a sensible woman with a sensible perspective ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... are to follow the course which the Plutocrats have traversed. They have destroyed individual liberty; they have entrenched themselves in our halls of legislature by bribery; our executives are their puppets; our courts are their final buttress. To reclaim the rights of the people we must reach the powers in control; the actual men who engineer the scheme of public loot. These men have sacrificed human lives to attain their ascendency. We must demand, ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... he is but as a pinnacle to a buttress. I acknowledge his weaknesses, and cannot wink upon his crimes: but that which you visit as the heaviest of them perhaps was not so, although the most disastrous to both parties—the bearing of arms against his people. He fought ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... tower, and its own height above the eye. The first stage is panelled so as not to present too great a contrast to the octagon, and the next is also panelled and has narrow canopied slits on alternate sides, with four thin buttress-like projections on each face. These provide the slight entasis to the outline which is found in so many spires, as it is in classic columns, and is designed to correct the appearance of hollowness which would occur in so long a straight line. The ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... mentioned in this provision was an official appointed by the Bakufu for that special purpose. The whole arrangement as to communication with the Throne constituted a powerful buttress of Bakufu influence. Generally, the latter could contrive, as has been shown above, to control the appointment and continuance in office of a regent or a minister, while as for the administrators (bugyo), they were nominees of Yedo. It thus resulted that the Throne was approachable ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of doves were cooing as we filed into the church. There were bas-reliefs of cherubim and seraphim over the doorway, fat, distorted bodies with wings a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation to ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... other side of the bay window a huge buttress cast its mass of shadow. There was something in the appearance of the whole place that invited to contemplation and repose,—something almost monastic. The gayety of the teeming spring-time could not divest the spot of a certain sadness, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the roofs filled with flowers, warbling, and sunlight, with the same pleasure; but to-day it stops at the end of a buttress which separates our ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... rapidly, the enemy pressing hard. The 51st Sikhs were found, hidden by the hollows of the ground; they had been a buttress to the left flank of that handful of adventurous infantry in their forward sweep into the heart of the Turkish position. It was now that Graham and the 56th Rifles checked the counter-attack, which ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... power which Maitre Johannes was obliged to put forth to stem the force that was driving him in from behind. Convulsively grasping the banister with both hands, his broad shoulders formed a mighty buttress against the pressing flood. Like Atlas, I do believe he would have borne the earth upon his back to save his ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... {little-endian}, RISC vs. CISC, etc., etc., etc. As in society at large, the intensity and duration of these debates is usually inversely proportional to the number of objective, factual arguments available to buttress any position. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... to confess that his efforts were fruitless. The tempest raged with such violence that neither the engine of the "Alaska" nor her steel buttress were of much use. Not only did the vessel advance very slowly, but at times she seemed to be fairly driven backward. The snow was so thick that it obscured the sky, blinded the crew, and covered the bridge a foot in depth. The ice driven against the "Alaska" by the fierce wind increased and barred ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... know of a way that's not a hundred yards off," says Mr. Esmond; and leading his kinsman close along the wall, and by the shrubs which had now grown thick on what had been an old moat about the house, they came to the buttress, at the side of which the little window was, which was Father Holt's private door. Esmond climbed up to this easily, broke a pane that had been mended, and touched the spring inside, and the two gentlemen ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... stood serene on Fenner's Ground, indifferent to blisters, While the Buttress of the period Bowled me his peculiar twisters: Sung 'We won't go home till morning'; Striven to part my backhair straight; Drunk (not lavishly) of Miller's ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... had worn a pair of thick moccasins, with soles of parfleche but here I put on a light thin pair, which I had brought for the purpose, as now the use of our toes became necessary to a further advance. I availed myself of a sort of comb of the mountain, which stood against the wall like a buttress, and which the wind and solar radiation, joined to the steepness of the smooth rock, had kept almost entirely free from snow. Up this I made my way rapidly. Our cautious method of advancing in the outset had spared my strength; and, with the exception ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... deliciously quiet after the noise of the Marktplatz, and before her, at the end of the street, she could see one tall buttress of the cathedral, and a corner of the graveyard. She walked up the pathway between the tombs and pushed open the heavy church door. The cathedral nave was dark. Wilhelmine peered about and, thinking there was no one in the church, turned to go, when from the organ, far away near the high altar ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... of the old yew trees a great shaft of noontide sunlight fell full on a patch of the grey walls of the high-roofed nave. At the foot of it, his back comfortably planted against the angle of a projecting buttress, sat a man, evidently fast asleep in the warmth of those powerful rays. His head leaned down and forward over his chest, his hands were folded across his waist, his whole attitude was that of a man who, ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... Along this I advanced, and at a sudden turning, a few yards beyond the canyon's end, the path widened, and at my left I saw the opening to a large cave. Before, the ledge continued until it passed from sight about another projecting buttress of ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with such churches are amongst the earliest instances of Norman work which survive; they are simple in design, square on plan, and are carried up, without break or buttress, to the parapet, where they are finished with a gable roof, forming the saddle-back arrangement still preserved in the Muthill Tower.[14] The break in the height is formed by string courses, which mark the unequal stories. ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... There is a buttress of burnt brick to the southeast of the church, which appears as if it might have been ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... all that we do not know. It is a mere confession of ignorance; it is hollowness, emptiness, a vacuum, a nothing. And this nothing, which Mr. Spencer adorns with endless quasi-scientific rhetoric, is used as a buttress to prop ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... walk shaded with chestnut trees was filled in the yard by a row of outbuildings. An old rust-devoured iron gate in the garden wall balanced the yard gateway, a huge, double-leaved carriage entrance with a buttress on either side, and a mighty shell on the top. The same shell was repeated ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... it a blessedness to solace itself by giving. St. Edmund's Shrine glitters now with diamond flowerages, with a plating of wrought gold. The wooden chapel, as we say, has become a stone temple. Stately masonries, long-drawn arches, cloisters, sounding aisles buttress it, begirdle it far and wide. Regimented companies of men, of whom our Jocelin is one, devote themselves, in every generation, to meditate here on man's Nobleness and Awfulness, and celebrate and show forth the same, as they ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... to the shouts, which came nearer, till Ngati suddenly took a sharp turn round a great buttress of lava, and entered a wild, narrow, forbidding-looking chasm, where on either side the black, jagged masses of rock were piled up several hundred feet, and made glorious by streams which coursed among ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... luck. I will chance another turn of the wheel. Go to that man and tell him the Duc de La Rochefoucauld says he has done splendidly, but that he must not bear so hard on Gaston. Mind that you watch his face closely. I will stay for you yonder in the shadow of the buttress." ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... over to that side, and be there rubbing shoulders with one another. So I went round, and was glad to get out of the cold shade into the sun on the south. But here was a surprise; for when I came round a great buttress which juts out from the wall, what should I see but two men, and these two were Ratsey and Elzevir Block. I came upon them unawares, and, lo and behold, there was Master Ratsey lying also on the ground with his ear to the wall, while Elzevir ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... men, so suddenly made captives by the mutineers, stood with their backs to the strong moonlight, their faces in the shadow. The moon was now sinking behind a buttress of the volcano. As yet, neither had been recognized by their captors. But now Ditty came forward, and first of all thrust his ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... quaint Gothic carving it catches, And upwards from story to story it climbs And scrambles with leaps and with snatches. Now woe to the warder, poor sinner, betides! Like a long-legged spider the skeleton strides From buttress to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... [Footnote 167: Buttress roots are not peculiar to any one species, but common to most of the large trees in the crowded forest, where the lateral growth of the roots is made difficult by the multitude of rivals. The Paxiuba, or big-bellied palm, is ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... own architectural evidence we may safely assume that it was built during the first quarter of the 13th century, and it nearly resembles the contemporary work in the north transept of Lincoln Cathedral. The western facade is supported by a buttress on the south, and a larger buttress on the north in the shape of a staircase turret, the upper portion of which is now lost. Between these is one of the most lovely doorways imaginable. Its jambs are first enriched by an inner pair of pillars, having caps from which spring ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... at the Passeggiata Aretusa, a promenade that runs under shady trees between the Great Harbour and the cliff on which the city is built. It leads south to a garden, and further progress appears to be blocked by a buttress of the cliff; but the buttress is pierced by a tunnel, through which a path leads to another garden lying in an enclosure protected from the harbour by a wall which encircles it; the wall slopes down and on the top of it runs a path up which one can ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... at decoration has been made. It seems a shapeless pile of towers and machicolated and battlemented curtains, falling into almost complete ruin. But on passing through the single entrance, one finds oneself in a well-proportioned church of nave and side aisles, a south chapel, and an apse. Each buttress of the apse is battlemented outside and forms a turret, and two strong towers are adapted internally to serve as a ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... tarry, lodge, remain, continue, abide; support, prop, buttress, brace, uphold, strengthen; delay, obstruct, hinder, restrain, appease, withhold, forbear, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... in good preservation, which accounted for his distended and sleepy state. One day, just after Evensong, when the people were coming out of church, one of the boys heard a hiss, and saw a cobra in the angle of a buttress. The long bamboo was again equal to ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... shaken from her like froth, was steadying herself to turn the angle of the church. She glanced behind, and with a wild cry of laughter and challenge, veered, poised, and was gone beyond the grey stone buttress. In another instant the bridegroom, bent forward as he ran, had caught the angle of the silent stone with his hand, and had swung himself out of sight, his supple, strong loins vanishing ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... distance the cataract had seemed to actually wash in its descent the edge of the platform. Now I found it to be further away than I had imagined, the ground dropping in a sharp slope to a sort of rocky buttress which lay obliquely on the slant of the ravine, and was the true margin of the torrent. Before I essayed the descent, I glanced back at my companion. He was kneeling where I had left him, his hands pressed to his face, his features hidden; but ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... I have yet visited; so that, if the taste of the inhabitants is to be estimated by the decoration of the religious buildings, this faculty must be rated very low indeed. The exterior of the church is as richly ornamented as the inside; and not a buttress, arch, or canopy is without the remains of crumbled carving, worn by time, or disfigured by the ruder hand of calvinistic or revolutionary violence. Tradition refers the erection of this edifice to the English. From the certainty with which a date may be assigned to ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... foxy ecclesiastic wished two things, both of which his heritors flatly refused: (a) a new manse, and (b) a site with a wide prospect. Finding them intractable, he professed humility, and craved merely a species of scaffolding to buttress up one of the walls of the old manse. The heritors marvelled a little at the strange request, but, glad of being saved from the cost of a new building, authorised the buying of some sturdy joists to prop up a wall that the minister averred was off the plumb. No sooner ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... in reality, but he was always full of admiration for all her words and deeds, and used to boast of her wisdom, her benevolence, her power and dignity, in her absence, as if by this means he could buttress up ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... draws his courage from wine! the same ALAS for the man whose health is its buttress! the touch of a pin on this or that spot of his mortal house, will change him from a leader of armies, or a hunter of tigers in the jungle, to one who shudders at a centipede! That courage also which is mere insensibility crumbles at once before any object of terror able to stir ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... also another string below the sills. In the windows of the north side there is a space or tympanum over the inner arch. Each corner of the tower was strengthened by a pair of flat buttresses, with one shaft at the corner itself and another at the inner side of either buttress, and with the shafts banded half way up and again near the top. These buttresses are received in an overhanging corbel-table, above which runs a hollow moulding, filled with dog-tooth ornament of a large size and continued round the projections that serve for gargoyles. The use of this ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... is always an extremely dangerous line of argument, to represent moral depravity as springing necessarily from certain physical and unalterable circumstances of creation. Finally, to represent The Great Desert as the buttress of the Slave-Trade, is contrary to all our experience. In deserts and mountains we find always the free-men: in soft and luxurious countries we find the slaves. It is not the free-born Touarick who is the slave-dealer, or the stimulator of the slave-traffic, but the Moorish merchant, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... only the aisles were vaulted, and the center compartment covered with a wooden roof. At first this pilaster-like form bore a reminiscence of a classic capital as its termination; a moulded capping under the eaves of the building. Next this capping was almost insensibly dropped, and the buttress became a mere flat strip of wall. As the vaulting became bolder and more ambitious, the buttress had to be made more massive and of greater projection, to afford sufficient abutment to the vault, more especially toward the lower part, where the thrust of the roof is carried to the ground. Hence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... gorge behind us; our last view was out a granite gateway formed of two nearly vertical precipices, sharp-edged, jutting buttress-like, and plunging down into a field of angular boulders which fill ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... dynasty only survived its founder a few years. Hwangti's son Eulchi became emperor, but he reigned no more than three years. He was foolish enough to get rid of the general Moungtien, who might have been the buttress of his throne; and the minister Lisseh was poisoned, either with or without his connivance. Eulchi himself shared the same fate, and his successor, Ing Wang, reigned only six weeks, committing suicide after losing a battle, and with him the Tsin dynasty came ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... hoar Plinlimmon's head. A golden staff His steps supported; powerful talisman, Which whoso feels shall never feel again The tear of Pity, or the throb of Love. Touch'd but by this, the massy gates give way, The buttress trembles, and the guarded wall, Guarded in vain, submits. Him heathens erst Had deified, and bowed the suppliant knee To Plutus. Nor are now his votaries few, Tho' he the Blessed Teacher of mankind Hath said, that easier thro' the needle's eye Shall the huge camel [1] pass, than the rich man Enter ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the kings whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority. But although liberty was not the end ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... into a thick welter of ivy which Time had built into a bulging buttress of greenery against the old grey wall at the end of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates |
