"Plummet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... line is the level of the sea, from which on the right hand a plummet descends, representing a depth of 200 fathoms, or 1,200 feet. The vertical shading shows the section of the land, and the horizontal shading that of the encircling barrier-reef: from the smallness of the scale, the lagoon-channel could ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... a very quiet, self-possessed sort of man, sitting a moment on top of the wall to sound the damp darkness for warnings of the dangers it might conceal. But the plummet of his hearing brought nothing to him save the moaning of wind through invisible trees and the rustling of leaves on swaying branches. A heavy fog drifted and drove before the wind, and though he could ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... His round nest is under the eaves, he throws himself out of window and begins to fall, and keeps on fall, fall, for twenty hours together. His head is bullet-shaped, his neck short, his body all thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the merest streak of feather. His form is like a plummet—he is not unlike the heavily weighted minnow used in trolling for pike. Before the bend of the firmly elastic rod, the leaded minnow slides out through the air, running true and sinking without splash into the water. It ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... living, when death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying amber. It affords a ballast ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... a plummet of lead. Shawn! Had anything happened to Shawn? Had this stammering, purple-faced gentleman come to prepare her? Her heart gave a cry of anguish, while her eyes rested with apparent calmness on Sir Felix's ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... in the betting-ring and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he had an eternity before ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... breeze, as if he were an ordinary hen hawk, enjoying himself and contemplating the world from an indifferent distance. Suddenly, with one clear, sharp whistle to announce his intention, he would drop like a plummet for a thousand feet, catch himself in mid-air, and zigzag down to the nest in the spruce top, whirling, diving, tumbling, and crying aloud the while in wild, ecstatic exclamations,—just as a woodcock comes whirling, plunging, twittering down from a height to his brown mate in the alders ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... true; that he, the grand, the kind, the gentleman, was beneath the diver's reach, the plummet's sounding, where light could not pierce, nor Hope overtake? Her father, the first gentleman in Somerset, a drunkard, going ever downward towards the gutter, and no ray of heaven to ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... The porter left him. "It is a mystery deeper than the sea below the plummet line! Ah! it must be love; love only is so sagacious, so inventive as this. Ah! I shall ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... impossible that it could rise higher, and many prudent persons sold out to make sure of their spoil. Many of these were noblemen about to accompany the king to Hanover. The buyers were so few on June 3rd, that stock fell at once, like a plummet, from 890 to 640. The directors ordering their agents to still buy, confidence was restored, and the stock rose to 750. By August, the stock culminated at 1,000 per cent., or, as Dr. Mackay observes, "the bubble was then ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of another. The Spirit of Life seeks to express itself in our individuality, through the three avenues of reason, feeling, and will; but as in the Masonic legend of the murder of Hiram Abif, the architect of Solomon's Temple, it is beaten back on the side of reasoning, by the plummet of a logic based on false premises; on the side of feeling, by the level of conventional ideas; and on the side of will, by the hammer of a short-sighted self-will, which gives the finishing blow; and it is not until the true perception of the Principle of Life is resurrected within us, ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... do sit, Like brides at wedding-dinners, with their looks turn'd From the least wanton jests, their puling stomach Sick from the modesty, when their thoughts are loose, Even acting of those hot and lustful sports Are to ensue about midnight: such his cunning! He sounds my depth thus with a golden plummet. I am doubly arm'd now. Now to th' act of blood, There 's but three furies found in spacious hell, But in a great man's ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... theme; you have the start of me; I am dejected; I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel. Ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me; use ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... Hath hid in night from human sense, To narrow bounds our search confined And laughs to see proud mortals try To fathom deep eternity, With the short line and plummet ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... another ship a few yards from her shall have her sails filled. Notwithstanding the calm, yet the wind being by flashes large, they went the last night and the day before twenty leagues up and down, sometimes in their course and sometimes out of it. In the morning, sounding with the plummet, the pilot judged that they were about sixteen leagues from the Texel, and twenty-four from Orfordness, but he did not certainly know whereabouts they were. Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... make one last use of his magic power, "And then," said he, "I'll break my staff and deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... was a goodly sight to see That venerable tree For o'er the lawn, irregularly spread. Fifty straight columns propt its lofty head; And many a long depending shoot, Seeking to strike its root, Straight like a plummet grew towards the ground. Some on the lower boughs which crost their way, Fixing their bearded fibres, round and round, With many a ring and wild contortion wound; Some to the passing wind at times, with sway Of gentle motion swung; Others of younger ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... delver into the mysterious mind of man and Nature, and sunk his intellectual plummet deeper into the ocean of thought than any mortal that ever lived, before or after his glorious advent upon the earth. He was a universal ocean of knowledge, and the ebb and flow of his thoughts pulsated on the shores of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... approached me with an object in his hand. "You neutrals," he said, "have been deceived before now by the ridiculous reports disseminated by our enemies as to the results of these raids. But here is the proof." He then explained to me that to every Zeppelin was attached a large sinker or plummet, which was covered with grease and lowered from a drum to a few yards above the spot where the bomb was destined to fall. To this plummet adhered fragments of various objects, animate or other, which the explosion of the missile hurled into the air. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half-way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... and of setting it aside wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never convict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we never seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of VENUS AND ADONIS seems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the deep-striking intelligence that ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... thought of other people and looked at them as one wakened from sleep. And, similarly, she looked at Nature. Even her vanished lover had not taught her all. There were truths below the formulae of his worship; there were secrets deeper than his intellectual plummet had ever sounded. Without understanding it, Joan yet knew that a change had come to pass in material things. Sunshine on the deep sea hid more matters for wonder than John Barron had taught or ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it there. Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... be paid when the copies arrive, probably a couple of months hence. I have conveyed Herr Naegeli's request, and now I must ask another favor, on his account, from myself. Everything cannot be measured by line and plummet; but Wieland says: "A little book may be well worth a few groschen." Will Y.R.H. therefore honor these poems by permitting your august name to be prefixed to them, as a token of your sympathy for the benefit of this man? the work is not likely to be ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... sought him throughout the field. One of the royal esquires, named Gilbert Harper, wearing the surcoat of his master, was mistaken for him, and slain; but the true leader was at length found by de Maupas, and struck down with the blow of a leaden plummet or slung-shot. After the battle, when the field was searched for his body, it was found under that of de Maupas, who had bravely yielded up life for life. The Hiberno-Scottish forces dispersed in dismay, and when King Robert of Scotland landed a day or two afterwards, he ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... of the sections out of office, when the general election was over, at once fetched forth line and plummet to take their soundings. 'The next few months,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 20), 'are, I apprehend, the crisis of our fate, and will show whether we are equal or unequal to playing out with prudence, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... fish, while most people are of opinion that they will not touch perch on account of their sharp back fin; but we had proof this afternoon that they will. But the most curious thing that I ever knew a pike to take was a leaden plummet, which it seized one day when I was plumbing the depth in a canal previous to bottom fishing, as we have been to-day. As a matter of course I was much surprised, as no doubt the pike was also, when he felt himself hooked, and, ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... Love, Unite you in the grand Design, Beneath th' Omniscient Eye above, The glorious Architect Divine, That you may keep th' unerring line, Still rising by the plummet's law, Till Order bright completely shine, Shall be my pray'r ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... you may readily conceive, was sunk in the Slough of Despond deeper than ever plummet sounded. Margaret thought this very nice of him; it was a delicate tribute to her that he ate nothing; and the fact that Hugh Van Orden and Petheridge Jukesbury—as she believed—acted in precisely the same way for precisely the same reason, ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... glowing south travels the sun of my spring, the glory of my summer." Floating slowly up from the infinite depths of her being, came the conscious woman; up—up from the realms of stillness lying deeper than the plummet of self-knowledge can sound; up from the formless, up into the known, up into the material, up to the windows that look forth on the embodied mysteries around. Her eyelids rose. One look of love all but slew my fear. When I told her my grief, she answered with a smile of pity, yet half ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... I, a mere man, fear to quit The clue God gave me as most fit To guide my footsteps through life's maze, Because himself discerns all ways Open to reach him: I, a man Able to mark where faith began To swerve aside, till from its summit Judgment drops her damning plummet, Pronouncing such a fatal space Departed from the founder's base: He will not bid me enter too, But rather sit, as now I do, Awaiting his return outside. —'Twas thus my reason straight replied And joyously I turned, and pressed The garment's skirt upon my breast, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... see thee follow thy path without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes, wet and sad as a plummet which has returned to the light insatiated out of every depth—what did it seek down there?—with a bosom that never sighs, with lips that conceal their loathing, with a hand which only slowly grasps: who art thou? what hast ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... setting sun. From that sun, clear back to the first avant-courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim—yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven—ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel might climb or sparrow fly,—so broad that it was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,—so lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of mournfulness profound, Unfathomable to plummet cast by man? Alas; for who can tell! Whence comes the wind Heaving the ocean into maddened arms That clutch and dash huge vessels on the rocks, And scatter them, as if compacted slight As little eggs boys star against ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... laboured without intermission amongst the black hills of water, paying with this hard tumbling the price of her life. She rumbled in her depths, shaking a white plummet of steam into the night, and Jukes' thought skimmed like a bird through the engine-room, where Mr. Rout—good man—was ready. When the rumbling ceased it seemed to him that there was a pause of every sound, a dead pause in which Captain MacWhirr's ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... we try to take the sea's mystery by storm. In vain do we search for its meaning with love. It lies beyond our mortal ken, deeper than ever plummet sounded. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... depth; deepness &c adj.; profundity, depression &c (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit^, hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure depth] sonar, side-looking sonar; bathometer^. V. be deep &c adj.; render deep &c adj.; deepen. plunge &c 310; sound, fathom, plumb, cast the lead, heave the lead, take soundings, make soundings; dig ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... though thy sight be dim, Doubt for them is doubt of Him. * * * * * Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen Yearns to reach those souls in prison, Through all depths of sin and loss Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross. Never yet abyss was found Deeper ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... Wealth conspire To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene Which once was called a garden! Britain still Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid From geometric skill, they vainly strove By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears To form with verdure what the builder formed With stone. . . Hence the sidelong walls Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . . The terrace mound ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of the lake is very deep, the plummet having shown an abyss of thirteen hundred feet; but the southern end is ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... founded the city, Menes had created the soil on which the city stood, and preserved it from floods by his dykes. The thoughtful traveller would assent, for had he not himself observed the action of the mud; a day's journey from the coast one could not let down a plummet without drawing it up covered with a blackish slime, a clear proof that the Nile continued to gain upon the sea. Menes, at all events, had really existed; but as to Asychis, Moris, Proteus, Pheron, and most ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... recess, formed by the hills, which are here broken into a circular valley, cut off, to all appearance, from the rest of the habitable world; behind them rose a towering crag, as perpendicular as the drop of a plummet, from the top of which a little rivulet came tumbling down, giving to the scene an appearance of the most delightful coolness, and amusing the ear with the unceasing roar of a waterfall. From the very face of the cliff, where ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... the ground. Each story is divided by rows of columns, so that architecturally it has a resemblance to the other buildings near at hand. There are many theories as to the leaning position of this tower, but no two persons seem to quite agree upon the matter. A plummet and line depending from the top would strike the ground some ten feet from the base of the structure. It has stood here for more than six hundred years, and does not appear to be in any danger of falling. A view from the upper gallery, over which hangs ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Drink! drink! And thy soul shall sink Down into the dark abyss, Into the infinite abyss, From which no plummet nor rope Ever drew up the silver ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... linguistic studies, far more plausible than the real etymology of the word. To plunge is, no doubt, as Mr. Wedgwood says, the French plonger but the French plonger is plumbicare, while in Italian piombare is cadere a piombo, to fall straight like the plummet. To plunge, therefore, has nothing to do with the splashing sound of heavy bodies falling into the water, but with the concept of straightness, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... length is 172 miles; at the widest it measures 59 miles across; the circumference is 467 miles, and the surface is 334 feet below the level of Lake Erie. The depth of Ontario varies very much along the coast, being seldom more than from three to 50 fathoms; and in the center, a plummet, with 300 fathoms of line, has been tried in vain for soundings. A sort of gravel, small pieces of limestone, worn round and smooth by the action of water, covers the shores, lying in long ridges sometimes miles in extent. The waters, like those of the other great lakes, are ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... smooth sea after a storm, is often seen gathered into heaps. Two bullets or plummets, suspended by strings near to each other, are found by the delicate test of the torison balance to attract each other, and therefore not to hang quite perpendicularly. A plummet suspended near the side of a mountain, inclines towards it in a degree proportioned to its magnitude; as was ascertained by the wellknown trials of Dr. Maskeleyne near the mountain Skehalion, in Scotland. And the reason why the plummet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... the boat plummet down, as if the sea was snatched from under her; it was the undertow—the wave was drawing the waters back beneath it. By the gunwale the blue-green sea frothed white as it poured back from the skerries near the entrance ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... justification, and something to have suggested plausible reasons for conjecturing that his worship had a genuine spiritual basis. Yet the sincere critic, at the end of the whole inquiry, will confess that he has only cast a plummet into the unfathomable sea of ignorance. What remains, immortal, indestructible, victorious, is Antinous in art. Against the gloomy background of doubt, calumny, contention, terrible surmise, his statues are illuminated with the dying glory of the classic genius—even as the towers and domes ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... or fifteen miles apart, with a trench or trough between, along a portion of the way, that is nearly fifteen hundred feet deep if we measure from the pass which the stages traverse, which is nearly three thousand feet deep if the plummet is dropped from the highest points of the snowy spires. Down into this trench we look, and opposite upon the eastern wall and crests, as we ride out to the eastern edge of the western summit. In a stretch of forty miles the chasm of it bursts into view at once, half of which is a plain sprinkled ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... still possess your right of feeling, while I, I have no longer any liberty of heart, which I think precious to exercise in love, even though the love itself may be eternal. I have no right now to that privilege of quarrelling in jest to which so many women cling, and justly; for is it not the plummet line with which to sound the hearts of men? I have no threat at my command. I must draw my power henceforth from obedience, from unlimited gentleness; I must make myself imposing by the greatness of my love. I would rather die than leave Gennaro, and my pardon lies in the sanctity ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... "Hoo-ha, ha, ha, ha," and up soared Eliza with the tinkle of bells, on great strokes of those mighty wings, up, up, behind the partridge that fled low down the wind for his life. The two ponies were put to the gallop as the peregrine began to "stoop"; and then down like a plummet she fell with closed wings, "raked" the quarry with her talons as she passed; recovered herself, and as Anthony came up holding out the tabur-stycke, returned to him and was hooded and leashed again; and sat there on his gloved wrist with wet claws, just shivering ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... for which we grope in vain. Do not think," he added to Jenny, "that I undervalue the labours of Mr. Brendon and the police, but they have come to naught, for there are strange forces of evil moving here deeper than the plummet of ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... retreat. Now is he pleas'd the northern blast to hear, And hangs on liquid mountains, void of fear; Or falls immers'd into the depths below, Where the dead silent waters never flow; To the foundation of the hills convey'd, Dwells in the shelving mountain's dreadful shade: Where plummet never reach'd, he draws his breath, And glides serenely thro' the paths of death. Two wondrous days and nights thro' coral groves, Thro' labyrinths of rocks and sands, he roves: When the third morning with its level rays The mountains gilds, and on the billows plays, It sees the king of ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... and there was a long silence. In the damp south corners of the walls a frog began to croak at exact intervals. The little fountain rippled monotonously, and a magnolia flower dropped from one of the trees, falling straight as a plummet through the motionless air, and settling upon the gravelled walk with a faint rustling sound. Otherwise the stillness ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... But how do I know that all truth is not merely subjective? Ages ago, skepticism intrenched itself in an impregnable fortress: 'There is no criterion of truth.' How do I know that my 'true,' 'good,' and 'beautiful' are absolutely so? My reason is no infallible plummet to sound the sea of phenomena and touch noumena. I tell you, Beulah, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... out his commands. He raced downward toward the street. Men seemed to spring up like magic about him. A ship with one wing aflame was tottering in mid-air, and another was dropping like a plummet. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... unafraid, And feel no longing for the air of heaven To fill thy lungs, and send the warm, red blood Along thy veins. But thou shalt pass the hours In dances with the sea-nymphs, or go forth, To look into the mysteries of the abyss Where never plummet reached. And thou shalt sleep Thy weariness away on downy banks Of sea-moss, where the pulses of the tide Shall gently lift thy hair, or thou shalt float On the soft currents that go forth and wind From isle to isle, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... feet. The sunshine of every summer's day takes hold of that mighty pile of granite with its aerial fingers, lengthens the side affected, and bends the whole great mass as easily as one would bend a whipstock. A few years ago we hung a plummet from the top of this monument to the bottom. At 9 A.M. it began to move toward the west; at noon it swung round toward the north; in the afternoon it went east of where it first was, and in the night it settled back to ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... that I should make a decided hit, and cover my temples with unfading laurel. I rehearsed at all times, seasons, and places, until I was a perfect nuisance to everybody, and my acquaintance, I am sure, to a man, wished both me and her bloodthirsty ladyship, deeper than plummet ever sounded, at the bottom of the sea. Even the brute creation did not escape the annoyance. One morning my English pointer "Spot" ran yelping out of the room, panic-stricken by the vehement manner with which I exclaimed, "Out damned spot, out, I say!" and with the full conviction, which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... readily to the same august personages. Doors slammed in his face only flatter his self-importance. He becomes cynical as he sees how easily the spot light is made to flash upon the unworthiest figures by the flimsiest mechanism. He drops his plummet into shoal and deep water and from his contemplation of the wreck-littered shore grows skeptical of ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... and to the poor—to the high and the low, and above all things, with you, gentlemen, here preserve with scrupulons fidelity the sanctity of your oaths, and discharge your whole duty without fear and without favour. Put justice to the line and truth to the plummet, and act up fully to the obligations of that oath, and you will ever enjoy those rich consolations which always flow from a conscientious ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... Timmendiquas, who had followed him down the line, seeking, it seemed, to give a blow on his account. Beside him, a warrior held a heavy club poised to strike. Henry saw that he could not escape it, and his heart sank, like a plummet in a pool. But the great chief, so sure of foot, stumbled and fell against the warrior with the poised club. The blow went wide, and Henry was untouched. He ran on, but ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... [ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me] Though this be perhaps not unintelligible, yet it is an odd way of confessing his dejection. I should wish ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... the Brown, which, slowing down, came on as straight as an arrow in unchanged formation in a line over the castle tower. From the forward Brown aeroplane, as its shadow shot over the garden, pursued by the great, oblong shadows of the dirigibles, a white ball was dropped. It made a plummet streak until about fifty feet above the earth, when it exploded into a fine shower of powder, leaving intact ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... originate; science is clear in assigning a progress, and therefore a beginning, to the solar system: can you find its origin in aught but the self-activity of Spirit, whose modus operandi no man can explain? All origination is inscrutable; the plummet of understanding cannot sound it; but wherefore may not one sleep as sweetly, knowing that the wondrous fact is near at hand, in the bosoms of his contemporaries and in his own being, as if it were pushed well out of sight into the depths of primeval time? To my mind, there is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... feeling of pessimism—she had been knocked down for two thousand five hundred dollars. The newspapers explained that only this ridiculous sum had been realized because experts had decided that in the first blow the steamer would slip off the ledges on which she was impaled and would go down like a plummet in the deep water from which old Razee cropped. Even the most reckless of gambling junkmen could not be expected to dare much of an investment in such ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... scabbard was a mass of jewels, and the handle a flaming ruby. The belt was webbed with pearls and glistening brilliants. Under the sword were the instruments sacred then and ever since to Master Masons—a square, a gavel, a plummet, and an ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... of distance it held visible. It struck first a passing airplane. The two observers in the monoplane were at this time down near the Battery. They saw the giant beam hit the airplane. A moment it clung, and parts of the plane faded. The plane wavered, and then, like a plummet, fell. ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... interpreter, "We now run only one danger; it is a great one. Before us are shifting sandbanks, occasionally displaced by the high tides; the galleys might ground there. It is necessary, then, that I reconnoitre the passage plummet in hand, before bringing the fleet into it. Let them rest as they are on their oars. Order the smallest boat your galley has to be launched, with two rowers. My wife will take the tiller. If you have any suspicion, you and the soldier with the axe may accompany us in the boat. Then, ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... till thou run out thy race, Call on thy lazy, leaden-stepping hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours, Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross; So little is our loss, So little is thy gain. For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb'd, And last of all, ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... kept sinking down, down, like a plummet let into the sea, and his father's heart sank with it, for a child cannot feel a sorrow that does not touch ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... opened, we find ourselves in a narrow passage, open to the heavens, perhaps a couple of hundred feet over-head, but walled in on either hand by rocks, perpendicular as the drop of the plummet. The passage being exceedingly tortuous, does not permit any extensive view to the front; but at each new turn some new wonder presents itself, either in the formation of some particular rock, or in the grotesque and striking combinations of masses. Here the guide stops us ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... his errand sprang The storm-swift Iris; in the dark-blue sea She plung'd, midway 'twixt Imbros' rugged shore And Samos' isle; the parting waters plash'd. As down to ocean's lowest depths she dropp'd, Like to a plummet, which the fisherman Lets fall, encas'd in wild bull's horn, to bear Destruction to the sea's voracious tribes. There found she Thetis in a hollow cave, Around her rang'd the Ocean Goddesses: She, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... you can't help it; that every one has his own difficulties, and must fight them out, and that mine are one sort, and yours another. Well, perhaps you may be right. I hope I'm getting to know that my plummet isn't to measure all the world. But it does seem a pity that men shouldn't be thinking about how to cure some of the wrongs which poor dear old England is pretty near dying of, instead of taking the edge off their brains, and spending all their steam in speculating ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... sank his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the working of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But he recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world affords, the commanding sense of duty,—the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... of Amelia's health served at least to release her from those forced efforts of gaiety which had recoiled so heavily on her feelings. Her day for vivacity was gone.—In an atmosphere whose buoyancy is exhausted, the feather falls as heavily as the plummet. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... gazing so intently at the swift rushing waters below him that you almost fancy he is attracted by the view. Suddenly he darts from his perch and, holds himself poised in mid-air until he sights a fish. He drops like a plummet and disappears. He quickly reappears and flies to a near- by rock with a fish, where he beats it to pieces and ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... helplessly at an elevation of two thousand feet. What had happened I could not conjecture, but even as we looked we saw her bow dip down lower and lower. Then the bulkheads of the various gas-chambers must have burst, for, quite perpendicular, she fell like a plummet to the earth. ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... lifting the mind to lofty heights of thought and passion. We both sat listening for hours, and midnight came before the last strain died away. That music was like a strange story that drops its plummet deep into life's mysteries. ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... deploring strains, and appropriating all their melancholy, intensified through the lens of his own dark imagination, he would sink from one depth of wretchedness to another, till he seemed lost away, where no ray of light could ever penetrate, or plummet sound. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... learned how the weight of the gold around his waist had carried him down like a plummet; and we sensed a little of the desperate horror with which he had torn and struggled to free himself from that ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... was the talk everywhere; it was impossible to avoid it. Every soul in the place had her omen. Jane Restless had a magpie. That very morning the bird had stolen a leaden plummet belonging to Restless and carried it to her cage, where she promptly set to work to hatch it out. And she fought when Zac went to take it away. She made such a racket when it was gone that Jane was sorry, and picked out a small chicken's egg and put it into the bird's cage. "And, my dears," ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... WINGED my bird, Though he flew toward the setting sun; But just as the shot rang out, he soared Up and up through the splinters of golden light, Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled, With some of the down of him floating near, And fell like a plummet into the grass. I tramped about, parting the tangles, Till I saw a splash of blood on a stump, And the quail lying close to the rotten roots. I reached my hand, but saw no brier, But something pricked and stung and numbed it. And then, in a second, I ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... troubles. "He who fully understands this, by storing it within enlarges the heart, and with this enlargement brings all creation to himself. Such a man will bury gold on the hillside, and cast pearls into the sea."— sink a plummet into that, I beseech you; it is one of the grand utterances of wonder and wisdom.—"He will not struggle for wealth or strive for fame; rejoice over longevity, or grieve at an early death. He will get no elation from success, nor chagrin from failure; he will not account ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... for me," Lone Chief was saying. His voice, shrill and piping, ever and again dropped plummet-like into a hoarse and rattling bass, and, just as one became accustomed to it, soaring upward into the thin treble—alternate cricket chirpings and bullfrog croakings, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... Elizabethans in preferring magnificent to commonplace images. It has been often noticed that if he essays to write of buildings in general, he prefers to describe palaces. His knowledge of the intellectual side of human nature is especially remarkable, but, unlike Shakespeare, Bacon never drops his plummet into the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... are getting into deep waters now. That is the point I am making. They show that, dive you ever so deep, young man, present-day statesmanship has depths which not even the plummet of imagination has yet been able to sound. And can we doubt that to-morrow's national and world problems will be ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... simple-minded person, wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like intellectual limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of attaining that position of a representative of average opinion which ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... after the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr. Farange—she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight through her last impression of Mr. Farange a plummet that reached still deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped that impression in silence—a silence that had parted with half its veil to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr. Farange's wife. But if the object in Sir Claude's ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... improvident expenditure of reputation, but no inference advantageous to Rowley can be deduced from this circumstance. The eccentricities and aberrations of genius, have rarely been restricted by line and plummet, and the present is a memorable example of perverted talent; but all this may be conceded, without shaking ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... speak of Herschel's pioneering work in the skies. To explore with line and plummet the shining zone of the Milky Way, to delineate its form, measure its dimensions, and search out the intricacies of its construction, was the primary task of his life, which he never lost sight of, and to which all his other investigations were subordinate. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... were moved by anything—a trick which, with his light eyelashes, had won for him the name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on to the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... overstaffed, one reflection of the socialist economic structure of Yugoslavia. TITO had pushed the development of military industries in the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a large share of Yugoslavia's defense plants. The bitter interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1990 to 1995, unemployment to soar, and human misery to multiply. With an uneasy peace in place, output recovered in 1996-99 at high percentage rates from a low base; but output growth slowed ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... evening he dropped from the heavens in one straight plummet dive which brought him three miles in a little ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... end of which is fastened, not a bait, but a piece of lead two or three inches in length. To this large hooks are fixed, which barbs turned in all directions. The man, whose eyes have become very keen with practice, sees some carp coming up or going down the stream, and, throwing the plummet far out into the river, he draws it rapidly through the water, across the spot where he believes the fish then to be. It is not often that he feels a tug, but he does sometimes, and then follows a deadly ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... signifies the left; but as the two words resemble each other, the word port is always used for larboard to prevent mistakes in shouting orders. Heaving the lead is the act of throwing a heavy leaden plummet, with a line attached, into the sea to ascertain its depth. It is thrown from the chains as far as possible ahead of the ship, so that it may reach the bottom and be perpendicularly beneath the man who heaves it when the ship comes ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... lightly. He understood that Joyce was flirting with him, but he divined that there had been moments when the tide of her emotion had swept the young woman from her feet. She was a coquette, of course, but when his eyes fell like a plummet into hers they sounded depths beneath the surface foam. At such times the beat of the surf sounded in his blood. The spell of sex, with all its fire and passion, drew him to this lovely creature ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... vague accounts of a person called DAEDALUS, who seems to have been a wood-carver. Many cities claimed to have been his birthplace, and no one can give any clear account of this ancient artist. He is called the inventor of the axe, saw, gimlet, plummet-line, and a kind of fish-glue or isinglass. He is also said to have been the first sculptor who separated the arms from the bodies of his statues, or made the feet to step out; he also opened their eyes, and there is a legend that the statues of Daedalus were so full of life that ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I said before, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between the group and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds no bottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500; and out of this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as a small submarine mountain range, whose topmost summits alone ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... nature, and for the instant in which that door stood open, with only the memory of that expectant figure to disturb the faintly lit vista of the hall beyond, she felt that grip upon the throat which comes from an indefinable fear which no words can explain and no plummet sound. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... be our streets, how dark and dingy our shops, how dismal our dwellings, how inconvenient our hotels! A new style was needed, at least as a supplement of the old,—as lances and shields were giving place to fire-arms, and the line and the plummet for the mariner's compass; as a new civilization was creating new wants and developing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... direct became our fall. Now we were dropping as though at the end of an unreeling plummet cord; the floor of the valley was no more than two hundred ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... to use the plummet, take levels, hew the stone, wield the axes! And what a delight it was when the work was finished and we saw our own building! Perhaps we might not have accomplished it without the sapper, but every boy believed that if he were cast, like Robinson Crusoe, on a desert island, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that the Lord Advocate, or some modern counterpart of Braxfield, the hanging judge, would summon Susanna Crum as a witness in an important case. He would need his longest plummet to sound the depths ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... light line, the Doctor attached it to a plummet. Throwing the plummet across the space, he drew the line taut. He then marked the point where the ice-line crossed it. Then for five minutes he divided his attention between the line and his watch. As he ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... beautiful cylinder of eight stories, each adorned with a round of columns, rising one above another. It stands by the cathedral, and inclines so far on one side from the perpendicular, that in dropping a plummet from the top, which is one hundred and eighty-eight feet high, it falls sixteen feet from the base. For my part, I should never have dreamed that this inclination proceeded from any other cause, than an accidental subsidence of the foundation on this side, if some connoisseurs had not ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... marked around it, and cut it out with shears. Pencils were not common, but the glovemaker was fully equal to making his own. He melted some lead, ran it into a crack in the kitchen floor—and cracks were plentiful—and then used this "plummet," as it was called, for a marker. After cutting the large piece for the front and back of the glove, he cut out from the scraps remaining the "fourchettes," or forks; that is, the narrow strips that ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... you express this sentiment!" said the artist. "I can understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to the full depth of my plummet-line!" ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which then awakes in the child, is the purest and deepest love. It is the love which embraces the whole world; which shines resplendent wherever the eyes of men beam upon it, which exults wherever it hears the human voice. It is the old, immeasurable love, a deep well which no plummet has ever sounded; a fountain of perennial richness. Whoever knows it also knows that in love there is no More and no Less; but that he who loves can only love with the whole heart, and with the whole soul; with all his strength and ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... confounded with a tyrannical disposition—we refer to an exaggerated sense of justice. This is the abuse of a right feeling, and requires to be kept in vigilant check. Nothing is easier than to be one-sided in judging of the actions of others. How agreeable the task of applying the line and plummet! How quiet and complete the assumption of our own superior excellence which we make in doing it! But if the task is in some respects easy, it is most difficult if we take into account the necessity of being just in our decisions. In domestic life especially, in ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... just told them was substantiated by a number of witnesses, and now that they had heard from these men that a plummet, a camera, and a car had been lowered fourteen miles into the bowels of the earth, they had no reason to suppose that the great shaft had existed only in the imagination of one crazy man, and they could not believe that all these assistants and workmen were lunatics or liars. Still they doubted. ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... sunshine and the storm! Climbing down from the bridge to the end of the rock, leaning tremblingly over and looking down into the misty gulf below with that Jacob's Ladder of faith set therein—it is not strange that the journalist for one moment wished for a line and plummet to drop into that reservoir of golden glory and bring up some memento of what seemed so near to the celestial;—just as one wishes, sometimes when the midnight heaven is darkest and the stars are burning most purely there, to be able to stretch ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... side to side as he watched the invader of his eyrie. And at each turn of his head Denver caught the flash of gold, though he was loath to accept it as a sign. He waited, fighting against it, marshaling reasons to sustain him; and then, folding his wings, the eagle descended like a plummet, shooting past him with a shrill, defiant scream. Denver flinched and stepped back, then he leaned forward eagerly to watch where the bird's flight would take him. No Roman legionary, going into unequal ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... seek to try this cause," he said. "It was brought before us by the wish of this sinful man himself. But if we must judge, let us judge like God! We read of Him—that he 'lays righteousness to the line and judgment to the plummet.' Let us do the same. That a great wrong hath been done is evident to every mind. It is not meet that such wrongs should go unpunished! These two transgressors have suffered; but who believes that such wrongs may justly be so soon followed by felicity? It would ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... few minutes afterward, I found myself. The hand of change had been here also. The first object that attracted my attention was the sign-post, which at my earlier arrival, some eight or nine years before, stood up in its new white garment of paint, as straight as a plummet-line, bearing proudly aloft the golden sheaf and gleaming sickle. Now, the post, dingy and shattered and worn from the frequent contact of wheels, and gnawing of restless horses, leaned from its trim perpendicular at ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it, and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... experiences. They are to consolidate and make practical vagrant emotions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and rouse the soul to a knowledge of its need of harmony with divine law. Into the real soul depths can no divulging line and plummet reach. This domain belongs to its Creator alone. It is only as the tests of living and doing manifest hidden motives and meanings that we catch glimpses of the ego that abides within and through this life, submerged as it is in the flesh. We can know but little of what is now, ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... Lugard. They look most respectable, their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and there by the white line of an aerial root, coming straight down into the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the strange, knowing way an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level, and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the water and grasp the mud. Banks indeed at high water can hardly ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... seer-like power to show The secrets of the hear and mind; To drop the plummet-line below Our common world of joy and woe, A more intense despair or ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... them on with the lash of the whip; and descending along the steep air, he stood on the summit of the hill of the woody Palatium; and he took away the son of Ilia, that moment giving out his royal ordinances to his own Quirites. His mortal body glided through the yielding air; just as the leaden plummet, discharged from the broad sling, is wont to dissolve itself[62] in mid air. A beauteous appearance succeeded, one more suitable to the lofty couches[63] of heaven, and a form, such as that of Quirinus arrayed in his regal robe. His wife was lamenting him as lost; when the royal ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... redemption from all petty troubles; it sinks all trivial annoyances into nothingness, and grants the man lifelong freedom from all petty, corroding cares. His feelings have been sounded to their depths—the plummet has touched bottom. Fate has done her worst: she has brought him face to face with the Supreme Calamity, and thereafter there is nothing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... mountains do not really draw clouds and invisible vapors to them, they are an exception to the universal law of attraction. The attraction of the small Mount Shehallien was found sufficient to deflect from the perpendicular, by a measurable quantity, a plummet weighing but a few ounces. Why, then, should not greater masses attract to them volumes of vapor weighing many tons, and floating freely in the atmosphere within moderate distances of the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... herdsmen," answered the man. "In yonder lake, which is so profound that no plummet has ever reached the bottom, there dwell huge monsters, neither beasts nor fish. No man has ever seen one near; but at night, when the moon is shining, they have been descried at a distance, prowling about in search of prey. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... again into his chair, burying his face in his hands. He plunged into a reverie so deep and so self-searching that it could have been fathomed by no plummet. ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... opened the small packet of rice, on which he placed a sort of compass. A cord was then handed to him. He placed it over the middle of the compass, and altered its position until it lay exactly in the same direction as the needle. A second cord, with a plummet attached, was then held to the first and let down into the grave, and the coffin moved backwards and forwards according to this line, until the middle was in the same direction as the needle: this arrangement consumed at least another quarter of ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... sail two or three days out and as many home again, and resolved if possible to fathom the depth as I went. With this view I prepared a very long line with a large shot tied in a rag at the end of it, by way of plummet, but I felt no ground till the second night The next morning I came into thirty fathom water, then twenty, then sixteen. In both tours I could perceive no abatement in the height or steepness ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... economy is dominated by the bauxite industry, which accounts for upwards of 15% of GDP and more than 65% of export earnings. Following a dismal year in 1994 which saw the value of the Surinamese currency plummet by about 80%, inflation rise to more than 600%, and national output fall for the fifth consecutive year, nearly all economic indicators improved in 1995-96. The government unified the exchange rate and maintained a fairly tight monetary policy. Inflation apparently ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... time we may rest assured that no valuable gems or lumps of gold have yet been brought up by the plummet. Indeed, so far as is shown by the soundings, the bottom of the ocean is covered with microscopic shells, so wonderfully minute that thousands may be counted on the surface of a single square inch. We know also that the bed of ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely. It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... from the Sergeant, headed in a weaving, crazy line to westward. Then things screamed downward and the Sergeant clapped hands over his ears once more. The ground quivered underfoot, though the eggs landed a good three-quarters of a mile away. The training-plane dropped like a plummet. The sharpness of a hexynitrate explosion carries its effect to quite incredible distances. The fabric of its wings split to ribbons. The ship landed somewhere and ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... sudden, he stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and tossed it away. Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked at me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of his hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry of violence and swearing horribly, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... 20,000 square miles, and is therefore, with the exception of the Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and the group of large lakes in North America, the largest piece of inland water in the world. It is larger than the whole of the kingdom of Bavaria, and its depth is proportionate to its size, for the plummet in places does not touch the ground until it has sunk 250 fathoms; it lies 4,400 feet above the sea-level—more than 650 feet above the Brocken, the highest hill in Middle Germany. This lake is nearly encircled by ranges ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it were to watch for the passing of a man,—the man of her dreams, the expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac |
