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More "Buttress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... Victory." The "Pechtland Hills"—their elder name—were once a refuge 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 Swanston farm and hamlet are ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... jogged 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 ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... the mate, smiling, 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 was ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... her quivering lips, Marie falls on her face. A dark shadow glides away, past buttress ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... goblins. Although there was not room for more than two to be actually building at once, they managed, by setting all the rest to work in preparing the cement and passing the stones, to finish in the course of the day a huge buttress filling the whole gang, and supported everywhere by the live rock. Before the hour when they usually dropped work, they were satisfied the ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... siege of 1870, Paris was wisely sheltered behind an immense net of impregnable forts; but is it not also indispensable to surround it with a cincture of prayers, to buttress its neighbourhood with conventual houses, to build everywhere in its suburbs convents of Poor Clares, Carmelites, Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, monasteries which will be in some degree powerful citadels, destined ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... infinitely finer 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, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the water, the eyes of both peered intently forward, in an endeavour to pierce the obscurity, and, if possible, discover some low limb of a tree, or projecting buttress, on which they might find a foothold. They had good hope of success, for they had seen many such since starting from the shore. Had rest been necessary, they might have obtained it more than once by grasping a branch above, or clinging to one of the great trunks, ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... 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 ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... Thus strenuous they the toilsome battle waged. But where Tydides fought, whether in aid Of Ilium's host, or on the part of Greece, Might none discern. For as a winter-flood Impetuous, mounds and bridges sweeps away;[6] 105 The buttress'd bridge checks not its sudden force, The firm inclosure of vine-planted fields Luxuriant, falls before it; finish'd works Of youthful hinds, once pleasant to the eye, Now levell'd, after ceaseless rain from Jove; 110 So drove Tydides into sudden ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... of Amphalula, vice-president of Hooligan Gulch and Red Water, secretary of Horse's Neck, Holy Jo, Gargoyle Extension, Cowhide Number Five, Consolidated Bimetallic, Nevada Mastodon, Leaping Frog, Orelady Mine, Why Marry and Sol's Cliff Buttress, and president ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... friars from Holborn, near Lincoln's Inn, to the river-side, south of Ludgate Hill. Yet so conservative is even Time in England, that a recent correspondent of Notes and Queries points out a piece of mediaeval walling and the fragment of a buttress, still standing, at the foot of the Times Office, in Printing House Square, which seem to have formed part of the stronghold of the Mountfiquets. This interesting relic is on the left hand of Queen Victoria Street, going up from the bridge, just where there was formerly a picturesque but dangerous ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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
... Norman bishop, is placed on the pinnacle of one buttress that terminates the splendid facade, or west front of Lincoln Cathedral, and the Swineherd of Stow, with his horn in his hand, on the other. The tradition is in the mouth of every Lincolner, that this effigied honour ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... relativity of human, knowledge. It connotes 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
... capped with a deep sloping weathering. The introduction of ribbed vaulting, extended to the nave in the 12th century, and the concentration of thrusts on definite points of the structure, rendered the buttress an absolute necessity, and from the first this would seem to have been recognized, and the architectural treatment already given to the Romanesque buttress received [v.04 p.0892] a remarkable development. The buttresses of the early English period have considerable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... muscles were as reeds beneath the force of that inhuman power that opposed them. Holding the girl at arm's length in one hand, Number One tore the battling Chinaman from him with the other, and lifting him bodily above his head, hurled him stunned and bleeding against the bole of a giant buttress tree. Then lifting Virginia in his arms once more he dived into the impenetrable mazes of the jungle that lined the more open pathway between the beach ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... girl," came a clear feminine voice, as Sira stepped out from the shelter of a buttress some dozen feet away, "—the girl took advantage of your preoccupation to relieve you of your neuros. As you see I have two of them in my hand. The rest of them are over by that wall. No! Don't try to rush! You are welcome to your swords, ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... 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
... him. All night she lay at his feet to be ready at the first peep of dawn to buttress a purpose that she feared was still weak, and whilst he slept fitfully, she slept not at all, but lay wide-eyed ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... perennial {holy wars} — {EMACS} vs. {vi}, {big-endian} vs. {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 ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Where an inconvenient buttress projected, a narrow passage was cut through it for the channel, and the marks of the chisel look as fresh as if they had been lately made. Much of this aqueduct was destroyed in quite recent days, when ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... on, not unmoved with wonder, though untainted by fear; and the Gothic splendours which he saw were of a kind highly to exalt his idea of the beauty of the mistress for whom a prison-house had been so richly decorated. Guards there were in Eastern dress and arms, upon bulwark and buttress, in readiness, it appeared, to bend their bows; but the warriors were motionless and silent, and took no more notice of the armed step of the knight than if a monk or hermit had approached their guarded post. They were living, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... his engine, the latter darted alone at full speed for London. Notice was immediately given by telegraph to London and other stations; and, while the line was kept clear, an engine and other arrangements were prepared as a buttress to receive the runaway, while all connected with the station awaited in awful suspense the expected shock. The superintendent of the railway also started down the line on an engine, and on passing the runaway he reversed his engine and had it transferred at the next crossing to the up-line, ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... so Origen lays immense stress on the Gnostic, and devotes page after page to a description of him: what he is, what he thinks, what he does; and to the mind of that great Christian teacher, the Gnostic was the strength of the Church, the pillar, the buttress of the faith. And so, coming down through the centuries, since the Christian time, you will find the word Gnostic used every now and again, but more often the term "Theosophist" and "Theosophy"; for this term came into use in the later school, the Neo-Platonists, ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... not debase himself, nor do violence to his convictions, in order to achieve success therein, since he can live and thrive in another (if you choose, humbler) vocation, if driven from that of his choice. This buttress to integrity, this assurance of self-respect, is to be found in a universal training ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... not loud but immensely prevalent. Those wayfarers who had fled came back to the brink of the hill and those who had stood their ground walked out into the grass to look back. Around the curve of a buttress of rock that stood out at the line of the road, the head of a column of Roman cavalry appeared. The superb color-bearer bore on his hip the staff supporting the ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... it aided the poor fugitives at that dead hour of night to find an angle between the church wall and a buttress where the eaves afforded a little shelter from the rain, which slackened a little, when they were a little concealed from the road, so that the light need not betray them in case any passenger was abroad at such an hour, as two chimed from ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... captive!" echoed Paslew. "Mine eyes have often striven to pierce those stone walls, and see him lying there in that narrow chamber, or forcing his way upwards, to catch a glimpse of the blue sky above him. When I have seen the swallows settle on the old buttress, or the thin grass growing between the stones waving there, I ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... impossible to see far enough ahead to lay out a course wisely. On that day we toppled over into the abyss a mass of ice, as big as a two-story house, that must have weighed hundreds of tons. It was poised upon two points of another ice mass and held upright by a flying buttress of wind-hardened snow. Three or four blows from Karstens's axe sent it hurling downward. It passed out of our view into the cloud-smother immediately, but we heard it bound and rebound until it burst with a report like a cannon, and some days later we saw its fragments strewn ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... look busy in a quiet way about the place. Men were at work blasting the rocks in a quarry not far off, whence laden carts went creeping to the castle; but this was oftener in the night. Some of them drove into the paved court, for here and there a buttress was wanted inside, and of the battlements not a few were weather-beaten and out of repair. These the earl would have let alone, on the ground that they were no longer more than ornamental, and therefore had better be repaired AFTER the siege, if such should befall, for the big guns would ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... small tree of this kind, Jack chipped a piece off a buttress with his axe, and found the wood to be firm and easily cut. He then struck the axe into it with all his force, and very soon split it off close to the tree, first, however, having cut it across transversely above and below. By this means he satisfied himself that we could now obtain ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... More prodigal in beauty than the dreams Of fantasy,... beneath the chain Of mingled wood and precipice, that seems To buttress up the wave, whose silvery gleams Stretch far beyond, where ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... achievement than the Cathedral at Bourges was in architecture, spent whole 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 ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... 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 there ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... occurred was this: the rock that held the main supports of our dam, being detached from the cliff as Lumley had surmised, had been undermined by the unusual floods of the previous week. Even in that condition it might have remained fast, so strong was our artificial buttress, but as the foundation wore away the rock heeled over to one side a little; this deranged the direct action of the buttresses, and in an instant they flew aside. The rock was hurled over, and the whole of our dam was dashed in dire confusion into the bed of the stream. It was this choking of the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... staircase, leading to the rooms above and to the top of the castle, which has had a flat roof, surrounded by a parapet and several turrets. The walls of this tower are very strong and firm; a deep buttress is placed at each corner, and one against the middle of each side wall. A small square tower has stood at the southern corner, but the greater part of it has been thrown down by the sea. The foundation of one side wall is also undermined the whole ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... high above the green billows that encircle them with collars of white foam, they repay every trouble taken to inspect them. The Little Skellig, a fantastic rock, with a great arch like a flying buttress under which for centuries the seas have churned deep, is almost inaccessible. It is a great breeding ground for gannet, with which, during the breeding season, its sides are white as ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... unknown purpose, resorted to the summit of this tremendous peak long before the white men invaded their mountains. Yet neither the Indians nor the whites ever really conquered the Teton, for above the highest point that they attained rises a granite buttress, whose smooth vertical sides seemed to them to defy ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... wholly subterranean, but then it consisted of one room alone. The freshly completed face was cut in freestone, with door and window, and above were sculptured the aces of hearts, spades, and diamonds, an anchor, a cogwheel and a fish. Separated from this mansion was a second, divided from it by a buttress of untrimmed rock, and this other also was newly fronted, occupied by a neat and pleasant-spoken woman who was vastly proud of her cavern residence. "Mais c'est tout ce qu'on peut desirer. Enfin ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... a buttress to the north; against it the Susquehanna flows swift and straight for a little space, vainly chafing. Just where the high ridge breaks sharp and steep to the river's edge there is a grassy level, lulled by the sound of pleasant ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... did not go into any argument, but still, at the same time, he rather defied anybody to make an assault upon it; he believed that it would not succeed, and that it was very wrong; but what does he really propose? Only this: to add another buttress in the shape of another bribe. He says that he will make an offer to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and people of Ireland— some say that the people do not want it, and that the hierarchy do want it, but I say nothing about that, because ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... all his might. Disputing the ground inch by inch, he manoeuvred so as to draw near one of the lateral walls of the church, and at length succeeded in ensconcing himself in a corner formed by the projection of a buttress, and close by a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... though some may be obtained in that manner. They are made from the buttress of the tapang-tree, which you must ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... happened no one could have said. Was it when they touched the Caskets? Was it off Ortach? Was it when they were whirled about the shallows west of Aurigny? It was most probable that they had touched some rock there. They had struck against some hidden buttress which they had not felt in the midst of the convulsive fury of the wind which was tossing them. In tetanus who would ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... state surveyors came to take a view of their work of measurement, they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress) to support the building, which tottered on that false foundation. It was evident that the goodness of the soil, the number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution, made such infinite variations between square and square as to render ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... nearing this obstacle, I saw that the trace forked into two—one going around the tops of the decaying branches, while the other took the direction of the roots; which, with the soil still adhering to them, formed a rounded buttress-like wall of full ten feet in diameter. The trunk itself was not over five—that being about the thickness of the tree. It was a matter of choice which of the two paths should be followed: since both appeared to come together again on the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... pressure of the plastic filling-in material from the time of its deposition between the slabs until it has become hard enough to form, with the slabs, a solid wall. Besides the system of forming the slabs of L (vertical or horizontal) section, or with a kind of internal buttress and shoring them up from the outside, or of supporting the slabs upon framing fixed against the faces of the wall, several devices have been used to obviate ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... peculiar to Ernulf's work. This chapel was originally dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, and a very interesting relic of this saintly patronage has lately been discovered. Apparently, in order to strengthen the building, two of the three windows in the chapel were blocked up, and a buttress was built across a chord of the apse, in the early part of the thirteenth century. In the course of the restoration of the tower which was recently carried out, this buttress was taken away, and its removal laid bare a fresco painting, representing St. Paul and the viper at ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... varying height and the same width. A round arch of a given span can be only half as high as it is wide, but the pointed arch may have a great diversity of proportions. The development of the Gothic style was greatly forwarded by the invention of the "flying buttress." By means of this graceful outside prop it became possible to lighten the masonry of the hitherto massive walls and pierce them with great windows which let a flood of light into the hitherto ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... so that the gas escaped and the whole craft crashed down on the house-tops. Eyewitnesses of the accident expected to find the gallant young Brazilian crushed to death; but to their great relief he was seen to be hanging to the car, which had been caught upon the buttress of a house. Even now he was in grave peril, but after a long delay he was rescued by means ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... and were absolutely ignorant of the country we were to traverse. From our observations on the previous days, we had decided to strike out on a northeast course, over the gentle slope, until we struck the rocky ridges on the southeast buttress of the dome. On its projecting rocks, which extended nearer to the summit than those of any other part of the mountain, we could avoid the slippery, precipitous snow-beds that stretched far down the mountain at this ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Hilaire, Mont Fortin, Mont aux Malades and Mont Riboudet, and from these the houses grow downwards to the water's edge. Upon the plateau above perch the villages of Mont-Saint-Aignan and of Bois-Guillaume. But between the valley of Darnetal and the Seine, is yet another natural buttress, the promontory on whose summit is Mont Ste. Catherine and the hamlet Bonsecours. From this magnificent height you may take the best view of the natural setting of the town. The western horizon is closed by ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... weather the last bold tooth of rock that gashed into sea and tempest between us and open ocean. So close were we that I looked to see our far-reeling skysail-yards strike the face of the rock. So close were we, no more than a biscuit toss from its iron buttress, that as we sank down into the last great trough between two seas I can swear every one of us held breath and waited for the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the muscular 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 ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... talk, but with, a speed winged by fear got to the school, sprang on the buttress beneath the window, effected their entrance, and vanished after replacing the bar—Eric to his study, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... three domes, two of which, on either loggia, were spherical in form, being 44 feet in diameter, while the apex of the central dome attained a height of 135 feet. The dome was octagonal in shape, having at each corner an exterior buttress, adorned with a large statue at its top. Encircling the same was a gallery from which could be viewed the greater part of the exposition grounds and the surrounding country. Above the cornice of the building was ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... of summer, 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 the ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... E.S.E. of 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
... little longer, and even these faint records will be obliterated and the monument will cease to be a memorial. Whilst I was yet looking down upon the gravestones I was roused by the sound of the abbey clock, reverberating from buttress to buttress and echoing among the cloisters. It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave. I pursued my walk to an arched ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... 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 walk and so enter ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... shouted. "We are over the worse now and shall soon be in calmer water. Get your feet well out in front of you, if you can, and dig your heels into the mud, then you will act as a buttress to me and help me ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... 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 ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... and white of early daybreak had already come. One of them, 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 ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of our Lord, only then, the sole trust of these imposters was in their own statements; but before the coming of Christ again to the earth, when the cry will often be "Lo here is Christ," and "Lo there is Christ," these imposters will buttress their claims with the exhibition of ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... vicinity of Compostela. On one occasion I had made arrangements to meet a Maggugan warrior chief at an appointed trysting place in the forest. Upon arriving at the spot, one of my companions beat the buttress of a tree as a signal that we had arrived, but it was more than an hour before our Maggugan friends made their appearance. Upon being questioned as to the delay, they informed us that they had circled around at ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... who 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 ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... heel, splint, lap, bar, rod, boom, sprit^, outrigger; ratlings^. staff, stick, crutch, alpenstock, baton, staddle^; bourdon^, cowlstaff^, lathi^, mahlstick^. post, pillar, shaft, thill^, column, pilaster; pediment, pedicle; pedestal; plinth, shank, leg, socle^, zocle^; buttress, jamb, mullion, abutment; baluster, banister, stanchion; balustrade; headstone; upright; door post, jamb, door jamb. frame, framework; scaffold, skeleton, beam, rafter, girder, lintel, joist, travis^, trave^, corner stone, summer, transom; rung, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... talents, and the laboured suppression and apparent extinction of his better feelings, with the deepest commiseration and sorrow. We long to see him escape from the black cloud which, by what may fairly be called his "black art," he has conjured up around himself. We hope to know him as a future buttress of his shaken country, and as a friend of his yet "unknown God." Should this change, by the mercy of God, take place, what pangs would many passages of his present work cost him! Happy should we be, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... 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
... ages; while the few fine trees in the grounds of the Caffarelli palace, the present German embassy, set some greenery above the ancient Tarpeian rock now scarcely to be found, lost, hidden as it is, by buttress walls. Yet this was the Mount of the Capitol, the most glorious of the seven hills, with its citadel and its temple, the temple to which universal dominion was promised, the St. Peter's of pagan Rome; this indeed was the hill—steep on the side of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a widespread and lively joy in simple beauty which seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient times it was natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn to build, to make it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it with stone, to bestow care and thought upon coign and window-ledge and dripstone, to prop the roof on firm and shapely beams, and to cover it with honest stone tiles, each one of which had an individuality ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... absence: what on earth could he want with him? Never doubting, in his hurry, the genuineness of the message, Ketch pulled his door to, and stepped off, the young messenger having already decamped. The green gates were not one minute's walk from the lodge—though a projecting buttress of the cathedral prevented the one from being in sight of the other—and old Ketch ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... garden by a 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 Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... keep thee, my brother!"—And then, the glad chaunt Of the marriage,—first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.—And then, the great march Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch Naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends? Then, the chorus intoned As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. But I stopped here: for here in the darkness ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... was too cleverly hidden for us to find, so, tiring of the little stream, and knowing that there was one waiting for us in the Gap where we could capture trout, we went on along the cliff path, gossiping as boys will, till we reached the great buttress of rock that formed one side of the entrance to the little ravine, and there perched ourselves upon the great fragments of rock to look down at where the little stream came rushing and sparkling from the inland hills till it nearly reached the sea ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... baton, staddle[obs3]; bourdon[obs3], cowlstaff[obs3], lathi[obs3], mahlstick[obs3]. post, pillar, shaft, thill[obs3], column, pilaster; pediment, pedicle; pedestal; plinth, shank, leg, socle[obs3], zocle[obs3]; buttress, jamb, mullion, abutment; baluster, banister, stanchion; balustrade; headstone; upright; door post, jamb, door jamb. frame, framework; scaffold, skeleton, beam, rafter, girder, lintel, joist, travis[obs3], trave[obs3], corner stone, summer, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to 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 ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins grey. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower, When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... 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 Old dry wines ...
— English Satires • Various
... trot—that easy, limping shuffle that eats up its forty miles a day—and rode on together like brothers, heading for a distant pass in the mountains where the painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the river. To the east rose Superstition Mountain, that huge buttress upon which, since the day that a war party of Pimas disappeared within the shadow of its pinnacles, hot upon the trail of the Apaches, and never returned again, the Indians of the valley have always looked with ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... storm o'er horizons unseen, that will lay them in dust, Crashings of plunder'd cloisters, and royal insatiate lust:— Far, unseen, unheard!—Meanwhile the great Minster on high Like a stream of music, aspiring, harmonious, springs to the sky:— Story on story ascending their buttress'd beauty unfold, Till the highest height is attain'd, and the Cross shines star-like in gold, Set as a meteor in heaven; a sign of health and release:— And the land rejoices below, and the heart-song of ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... like a blown-out water-skin, With thighs like the pillars of stone that buttress a mountain's head, Lo, if she walk in the West, so cumbrous her corpulence is The Eastern hemisphere hears the sound of her ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... signal to her, and that the man was none other than McEwan, sprucely tailored and trimmed in the American fashion, but unmistakable for all that. She crossed the street and shook hands with him warmly, delighted to see any one connected with the romantic days of her voyage. McEwan's smile seemed to buttress his whole face with teeth, but to her amazement he greeted her without a ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... interests of New England. Laws are going to be violated, Hood, both in actual letter and in spirit. But that's your end of the business. It's up to you to get around the Interstate Commerce Commission in any way you can, and buttress this little monopoly against competition and reform-infected legislatures. I ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... looked a long time. He had already learned from Boyd not to advance an opinion until he had something with which to buttress it, and he kept his glasses glued upon the great cleft in the mountains, where the trees grew so thick and high. At last he saw a column of grayish vapor rising against the green leaves, and, following it with the glasses to its base, he thought ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... the Geological Bank deemed Churm's deposits the fundamental stratum of its wealth. They lay there in the vaults, like underlying granite. When hot times came, they boiled up in a mountain to buttress ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... on its western side," says a sentimental voyager long ago, "where it faces the black buttress of Albemarle. I walked beneath groves of trees—not very lofty, and not palm trees, or orange trees, or peach trees, to be sure—but, for all that, after long sea-faring, very beautiful to walk under, even though they supplied ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... of the Maharaja of the Punjaub, should attempt the recovery of his throne without any stiffening of British bayonets at his back. Then it was urged, and the representation was indeed accepted, that the Shah would need the buttress afforded by English troops, and that a couple of regiments only would suffice to afford this prestige. But Sir Harry Fane, the Commander-in-Chief, judiciously interposed his veto on the despatch of a handful of ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... outstanding evidence of new ideas in regard to caste is furnished by the Hindu revivalists who, under the leading of Mrs. Annie Besant and the Theosophists, have established the Hindu College, Benares, as a buttress of Hinduism. From the Text-book of Hindu Religion prepared for the College, we learn that these representatives and champions of orthodoxy defend caste only to the extent of the ancient fourfold division of society ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... narrow, thread-like road, which has barely room to draw itself along between the rocky bank of the River Inn, and the base of a frowning buttress of the Solstein, which towers many hundred feet perpendicularly above you. You throw your head far back and look up; and there you have a vision of a plumed hunter, lofty and chivalrous in his bearing, who is bounding heedlessly on after a chamois ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... ground. Though much bruised, her senses did not leave her; she uttered no cry; nay, she hailed the accident that had led her to something like a screen; and creeping close up to the angle formed by the buttress, so that on one side at least she was sheltered from view, she gathered her slight and small form into its smallest compass, and breathlessly awaited ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 Mountains (ERZGEBIRGE)" and of the straggling ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... slender grace of the Giralda, it does not look a thing of bricks and mortar, it is so straight and light that it reminds one vaguely of some beautiful human thing. The great height is astonishing, there is no buttress or projection to break the very long straight line as it rises, with a kind of breathless speed, to the belfry platform. And then the renaissance building begins, ascending still more, a sort of filigree work, excessively rich, and elegant beyond ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... three months, 100 of the others were invalided, and only 25 remained fit for duty. From a further body of 150 men sent as a reinforcement, half were reported on the sick list the day after their arrival. The main buttress of the Khedive's authority in this region was therefore hollow and erected on an insecure foundation. The Egyptian soldiers possessed firearms, and the natives, in their ignorance that they could not shoot straight, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... that. To see nothing but the swirls of mist-color, listen to disembodied voices from it, was disconcerting. Part of the stage dressing, he decided, for building their prestige with the other races with whom they dealt. Three women alone would have to buttress their authority ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... head of the cove, and then, turning to the right, climbed the almost precipitous side of the Morro promontory, in a long, steep slant, to a height of one hundred and fifty feet. There it made another turn which carried it out of sight behind a buttress of rock under the northwestern corner of the castle. Near the mouth of the cove, on my right, rose the white, crenellated, half-ruined wall of the Estrella battery—a dilapidated open stone fort of the eighteenth ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... westward, and then begins to slope toward the Atlantic Ocean in the far distance. Sometimes, as in Central Africa, the slope to the west is very sudden, and another range of mountains forms the western buttress of the great central plateau. All the great rivers of Africa, with the exception of the Niger, rise on this plateau or on its mountain-flanks, which have a very high rainfall. The bush, or great forest, which is almost impenetrable in the coastal belt, becomes somewhat more open ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... heads. My cargador must have gone down, for when I got my gear later it was soaking wet. On the other side we began to climb, and sharply; we now could look back on Kiangan. Rounding the nose of a gigantic, buttress-like spur, covered with camote patches, we descended to a small affluent of the Ibilao, where we halted and rested, and, crossing it, again began to climb, the trail being cut out of the side of another ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... aisles, and it has a square end. It is lit by thirteen large windows, all of the same design, of which the five at the east end, and the two most western of the sides, are of four lights each, the remaining four having three lights each. Between each pair of the latter there is no buttress; there are thus in all twelve buttresses, six being at the east end. These are massive, having to support the heavy fan-tracery within. Each buttress has a seated figure at the top, commonly believed to represent an Apostle; but the outlines are much worn, and it is not possible to distinguish ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... connected 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 ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... Empire or the Holy See. But let the people rise and show themselves ill-governed, 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 your revolt." ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... rising slowly from where he had lounged upon the mossy, buttress-like roots. "Who came and helped himself ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... turning to the left, the guerillas quitted the defile and entered the smaller of the two valleys connected by it. Guided by the Tuerto, they presently approached a projecting hill, jutting out into the valley like some huge buttress placed there to support the mountain wall. It was of small elevation, but its sides were too perpendicular to be climbed, although that circumstance was partially concealed by the trees growing at its base. Its summit also was covered with trees, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... sledges. It took some time to pass, as the track was narrow and the horses floundered in the deep snow when passing each other. After we had got by and were continuing on our way down to Sues, we turned along an outstanding buttress of cliff and saw that some two miles of steep slope ahead had avalanched. The whole surface of the snow had slipped to the bottom of the valley and if either of the diligences had been on this slope when it happened, horses, sledges and all ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... "this is a very fine house you've got over you;" throwing his eye again towards a wooden buttress which supported one of ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... 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, we must enforce ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... least some recompense That we return from airy Eastern domes Glittering in blank sunlight, unto lands Where men erect their temples to the gods In forms whose light and shadow, stress and play Of arch and buttress, satisfies my blood Better than does barbaric loveliness. The dome that poises its clear perfect curves Rising above the palm-trees, with the look As of a winged bubble lightly resting On needless masonry—that symbolled form Of heavenly perfection never fills My ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... imagined it would be earlier. The hours dragged interminably. Louis walked the stone buttress where the flag which he had raised in signal to Lapas flapped and whipped against its staff. At last his binoculars, fixed on the rock, caught the dip of the colors there. With a great sigh of relief the Duke watched ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 is our own!" 'Tis done—the battlements ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of Europe is at its height, she still groans under the unrestricted despotism of an autocrat. Here the effects of progress that obtain elsewhere seem inverted. Such advance as is made in civilization and knowledge is used to buttress imperial tyranny and the knout is wielded more cruelly than ever before. We behold liberal institutions overthrown and a whole people held in bondage worse than slavery. We hear of families torn asunder, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... 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 moorland, 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 ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... natural bridge in the world yet discovered is the Nonnezoshi. It is in Nonnezoshiboko Canyon, Utah, not far from the place where the San Juan River enters the Colorado. This mammoth arch is more of a flying buttress spanning the canyon than a real bridge. Its height is three hundred and eight feet and its span ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... grows so quick in the Bushland!—steps, though as light as ever brushed the dew from the harebell! I crept under the shadow of the huge buttress mantled with ivy. A form comes from the little door at an angle in the ruins,—a woman's form. Is it my mother? It is too tall, and the step is more bounding. It winds round the building, it turns to look back, and a sweet voice—a voice strange, yet familiar—calls, tender but chiding, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is,' said Waterloo. 'If people jump off straight forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they are seldom killed by drowning, but are smashed, poor things; that's what THEY are; they dash themselves upon the buttress of the bridge. But you jump off,' said Waterloo to me, putting his fore- finger in a button-hole of my great-coat; 'you jump off from the side of the bay, and you'll tumble, true, into the stream under the arch. What you ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... and pinnet high, Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair; So still they blaze when Fate is nigh The lordly line ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... earlier days, Might learn from WILHELM KAISER. They risked their lives in Paynim frays, We moderns have grown wiser. 'Tis not enough by Big Bazaars To buttress Churches tottery; We, with the dice "financing" wars, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... just broad enough for three men to walk abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls that scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct in all these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by no buttress, has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combined with such prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense of science and self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None but Romans could have built such a monument, and have set it in such a place—a wilderness of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... to give relief to his own. Though now well on the wrong side of sixty, John Knott was hale and vigorous as ever. His rough-hewn countenance bore even closer resemblance, perhaps, to that of some stone gargoyle carved on cathedral buttress or spout. But his hand was no less skilful, his tongue no less ready in denunciation of all he reckoned humbug, his heart no less deeply touched, for all his superficial irascibility, by the pains, and sins, and grinding miseries, of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... reason. The second is that healthy employment conditions stand equally with healthy agricultural conditions as a buttress of national prosperity. Dependable employment at fair wages is just as important to the people in the towns and cities as good farm income is to agriculture. Our people must have the ability to buy the goods they manufacture ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... similar cases further to buttress my position. I told him that almost the skinniest human being I ever knew had been one of the largest eaters. I was speaking now of John Wesley Bass, the champion raw-egg eater of Massac Precinct, whose triumphant career knew not pause or discomfiture until one day at the McCracken ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... superimposed on the old. Above and beyond this, supported between each bay by flying buttresses, comes the transitional Decorated to Perpendicular clerestory, considerably higher than the original Norman clerestory remaining to the nave. At the base of each flying buttress are figures of saints. The roof and Norman clerestory were damaged by the falling tower in 1361, but were rebuilt by Bishop Percy, 1355-69. This work is transitional Decorated to Perpendicular. The presbytery was then re-roofed with a framed timber construction, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... the reduction of the forts was not of immediate importance, though it was immediately and successfully achieved. For the German business was not here, as at Liege, to grasp a railway within the zone of the fortifications, but to destroy the buttress upon which the French depended for their defensive position, and to prevent the French from holding the crossings over the two rivers Sambre and Meuse ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... 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 ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... beauty's sake. By no means. But they knew the immense weight of their vaulted roofs, and anticipated the outward thrust of the walls. That was the problem, and most fairly was it met. They counteracted the outward pressure from within by an inward pressure from without, and there was the buttress. But what if they had said, We are not going to spoil our fine churches by sticking props all around them, and had resorted to concealed bedplates and invisible rods of iron, would their structures have been better or nobler or more enduring? Fortunately, they gave themselves no concern, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... quite untenable now, as the real lines of the transept have been traced. In 1872, when the south end of the present transept was underpinned, parts of the foundations of its predecessor's east and south walls were uncovered, and the footings of the clasping pilaster buttress of its south-west angle exposed. These showed that the transept occupied the position which we have assigned to it, and that its entire length was 120 feet, while it was only 14 feet wide. This width being ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... a broadish wall, with an inch or two of powdery snow on it, and then up a sloping buttress on to the flat roof of the house. It was a miserable business for Blenkiron, who would certainly have fallen if he could have seen what was below him, and Peter and I had to stand to attention all the time. Then began a more difficult job. Hussin pointed out a ledge which took us past ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... looked, and shouted aloud, for in truth Niobe and her children were like unto gods, their queen said, "Do not waste thy worship, my people. Rather make the prayers to thy king and to me and to my children who buttress us round and make our strength so great, that fearlessly ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... by us possessed; Lord, rear around the blest abode, The buttress of a holy breast, The rampart of ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... fact 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... medical purple hurried to and fro. From this room came groans and wailing. He had an impression of an empty blood-stained couch, of men on other couches, bandaged and blood-stained. It was just a glimpse from a railed footway and then a buttress hid the place and they were going ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... of late both in grain and cheese, and the lawsuit with Gibson had crippled him. It was well for him that property in Barbie had increased in value; the House with the Green Shutters was to prove the buttress of his fortune. Already he had borrowed considerably upon that security; he was now dressing to go to Skeighan and ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the rocky way, watching the trail with secondary sense, for every other was strained to catch the sounds from above. But she heard nothing but the screams of the squaws. The trail twisted violently near the desert floor. She sped about one last jutting buttress, then stopped abruptly, one hand ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... reached the old bridge, with the tall osiers standing by the buttress, and looked back at poor Knowl—the places we love and are leaving look so fairy-like and so sad in the clear distance, and this is the finest view of the gabled old house, with its slanting meadow-lands ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Berberah with sound skins. [25] Coasting with a light breeze, early after noon on the next day we arrived at Siyaro, a noted watering-place for shipping, about nineteen miles east of the emporium. The roadstead is open to the north, but a bluff buttress of limestone rock defends it from the north-east gales. Upon a barren strip of sand lies the material of the town; two houses of stone and mud, one yet unfinished, the other completed about thirty years ago by Farih Binni, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... East Anglian winds. Close by, the gabled houses leaned out over the streets, planted fair upon sturdy timbers that grew in the olden time, all glorying among themselves upon their beauty. And out of them, buttress by buttress, growing and going upwards, aspiring tower by ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... out" with James. That might be rather dreadful; it might take her where she must refuse to go—but on the whole, she didn't think it need. The certainty that she couldn't go to Norway, that James must be made to see it, was a moral buttress. Timidity of James would not prevail against it. Besides that, deeply within herself, lay the conviction that James was kind if you took him the right way. He was irritable, and very annoying when he was sarcastic; but he was good at heart. And it was odd, she thought, that ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the nose had changed its shape considerably, and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's white breast and whisper soft ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... government ever known in that region, and giving promise to the nation of order, peace, and prosperity, word was brought us, in the moment of our deepest affliction, that the French Emperor, moved by a desire to erect in North America a buttress for imperialism, would transform the republic of Mexico into a secundo-geniture for the house of Hapsburg. America might complain; she could not then interpose, and delay seemed justifiable. It was seen that Mexico could not, with all its wealth ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... skeletons a difference, but not of much importance, may be observed, which commences a the fourth cervical vertebra, and is greatest at about the sixth, seventh, or eighth vertebra; this consists in the haemal descending processes being united to the body of the vertebra by a sort of buttress. This structure may be observed in Cochins, Polish, some Hamburgh, and probably other breeds; but is absent, or barely developed, in Game, Dorking, Spanish, Bantam, and {268} several other breeds examined by me. On the dorsal surface of the sixth cervical vertebra in Cochins three prominent ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... become dominant in Charles's Court. Such were Ormonde, now Lord Steward, whose loyalty was as untarnished as his position was above the assaults of slander and envy, and whose unbroken friendship was a powerful buttress to Hyde, and warded off the slights to which his own more humble birth might have subjected him. Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, represented the very best type of courtier of an older generation, and his acceptance of the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... like 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 ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recess, he thrust his head between the bar and jamb, so far out as to give him a view of the ground below. This was solid rock, the crest of a steep slope, from which the wall rose as above a buttress. But there was a ledge, some ten or twelve feet under the sill, narrow, but wide enough to afford footing, which led off to more level ground. How was he to ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... the reveille from the turret. Telramund conceals himself behind a buttress of the minster. The business of the day is gradually taken up in the citadel court. The porter unlocks the tower-gate that lets out on to the city-road; servants come and go about their work, drawing water, hanging festive garlands. At a summons from the King's ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... buttress of the gate of the Mediterranean, the base of the northern Pillar of Hercules, and esteemed one of the gates of Spain. By it five hundred years previously had the Moorish enemy first entered Spain at the summons of Count Julian, under their leader Tarif- abu-Zearah, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... plot of ground Clips a ruin'd chapel round, Buttress'd with a grassy mound; Where Day and Night and Day go by, And bring no touch of ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... seemed 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 ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... illustrate the early strength of Margaret's character—a strength concealed under a hundred freakish whims and humours, as an ancient and massive buttress is disguised by its fantastic covering of ivy and wildflowers. In truth, if the damsel had told all she heard or saw within the Foljambe apartments, she would have said but little to gratify the curiosity ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... fulfilled, for that evening the Colonel was rowing in his boat with his son, who had a mackerel line trailing astern, and when they came opposite to the great buttress the Colonel lay on his oars, and let his boat rise and fall ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... it was now dusk, and, according to their own account, they all lost sight of each other in the water. One swam ashore in Middlesex, another in Surrey, a third got to the chains of a barge, and was taken up much exhausted, and Robert Martin laid hold of the buttress itself, and cried loudly for assistance. They asked anxiously after each other, but their anxiety appeared to subside in an hour or two, when they found there was nobody missing but Richard Martin. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... old bridge, with the tall osiers standing by the buttress, and looked back at poor Knowl—the places we love and are leaving look so fairy-like and so sad in the clear distance, and this is the finest view of the gabled old house, with its slanting meadow-lands and noble timber reposing in solemn groups—I gazed at the ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... have 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 Old dry ...
— English Satires • Various
... 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 ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... threatened and Minorca taken, with the Bourbon arms victorious in India and the Bourbon fleet unchecked upon the sea, with a million and a half of colonists seemingly helpless before eighty thousand French in America, it was clear at last that ministers who employed organized corruption to buttress the throne, who rarely read the American dispatches, and were not quite sure where Nova Scotia was, had endangered that very peace and material prosperity with which they had been so long and so exclusively occupied. In this crisis many plans were forthcoming, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... nave vault began to spring away from the vertical plane of the walls. The other series was the immediate counter-poise to any direct thrust exerted by the arching of the vault against the upper section of the same walls. There was, in fact, a large buttress added to support these nave walls at that point from which each set of vault-carrying ribs began to rise. This buttress, though apparently sub-divided, was one thing, but of composite structure. It was pierced first by the aisle, next by the triforium, and then ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... muscular 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 ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... me, and from where I sat I watched Simon anxiously, for all depended on his object in being here. He took no notice of the little group observing him, however, but, drawing his men up against the wall, leaned against a buttress, moodily ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... 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
... of the qualities which Lincoln exhibited in the White House: "Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind; it is not aggressive so much as passive; and among passive things, it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that, to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end.... Slow and careful in coming ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... striven to pierce those stone walls, and see him lying there in that narrow chamber, or forcing his way upwards, to catch a glimpse of the blue sky above him. When I have seen the swallows settle on the old buttress, or the thin grass growing between the stones waving there, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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 ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... argument, but still, at the same time, he rather defied anybody to make an assault upon it; he believed that it would not succeed, and that it was very wrong; but what does he really propose? Only this: to add another buttress in the shape of another bribe. He says that he will make an offer to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and people of Ireland— some say that the people do not want it, and that the hierarchy do want it, but I say nothing about ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... in such admirable harmony. It is impossible to give in words an idea of the slender grace of the Giralda, it does not look a thing of bricks and mortar, it is so straight and light that it reminds one vaguely of some beautiful human thing. The great height is astonishing, there is no buttress or projection to break the very long straight line as it rises, with a kind of breathless speed, to the belfry platform. And then the renaissance building begins, ascending still more, a sort of filigree work, excessively rich, and elegant beyond all praise. It is surmounted ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... 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 ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... the main supports of our dam, being detached from the cliff as Lumley had surmised, had been undermined by the unusual floods of the previous week. Even in that condition it might have remained fast, so strong was our artificial buttress, but as the foundation wore away the rock heeled over to one side a little; this deranged the direct action of the buttresses, and in an instant they flew aside. The rock was hurled over, and the whole of our dam was dashed in dire confusion into the bed of ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... tongue, which long continued to be used by scholars, were formed the vernacular languages—German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.—that gave a wealth of variety to reviving popular literature. Majestic cathedrals with pointed arch and flying buttress, with lofty spire and delicate tracery, wonderful wood carvings, illuminated manuscripts, quaint gargoyles, myriad statues of saints and martyrs, delicately colored paintings of surpassing beauty—all betokened the great Christian, or Gothic, art of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... shiver involuntarily, and for a moment the architect fancied that he discerned the figure of a man standing in the shadow of the end buttress. But, as he took a few steps nearer, he saw that he had been deceived by a shadow, and that ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... These things seemed to stand for a widespread and lively joy in simple beauty which seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient times it was natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn to build, to make it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it with stone, to bestow care and thought upon coign and window-ledge and dripstone, to prop the roof on firm and shapely beams, and to cover it with honest stone tiles, each one of which had an individuality ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... reinforcements with sufficient strength to take the thrust 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 up to a ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... across the way was the Guild House of the Arte della Lana, or Wool-combers, and is now the head-quarters of the Italian Dante Society, who hold a conference every Thursday in the large room over Or San Michele, gained by the flying buttress-bridge. The dark picture on the outer wall is the very Madonna to which, when its position was at the Mercato Vecchio, condemned criminals used to pray on ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gazing, a slight stir among the bushes attracted his attention. Slipping behind a corner of the buttress, he waited, somewhat sheltered from the dripping rain by the overhanging ivy. He had not long to stand shivering there. A hurried whisper ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... tossed it from echo to echo. It was not loud but immensely prevalent. Those wayfarers who had fled came back to the brink of the hill and those who had stood their ground walked out into the grass to look back. Around the curve of a buttress of rock that stood out at the line of the road, the head of a column of Roman cavalry appeared. The superb color-bearer bore on his hip the ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... 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 ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... 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, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... the shore, a plot of ground Clips a ruin'd chapel round, Buttress'd with a grassy mound; Where Day and Night and Day go by, And bring no touch of ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... go 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... world establish churches sometimes out of piety and sometimes out of policy. Sometimes their motive is the good of their people and the glory of God, and sometimes their sole motive is to buttress up their own Royal House, and to have a clergy around them on whom they can count. Prince Emmanuel had His motive, too, in setting up an establishment in Mansoul. As thus: When this was over, the Prince sent again for the ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... the rest of our watery journey we were conscious only of that lighting. Behind the Mont, lay a vast sea of saffron. But it was in the sky; against it the great rock was as black as if the night were upon it. Here and there, through the curve of a flying buttress, or the apertures of a pierced parapet, gay bits of this yellow world were caught and framed. The sea lay beneath like a quiet carpet; and over this carpet ships and sloops swam with easy gliding motion, with sails and cordage dipped in gold. The smaller craft, moored close to shore, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... ground, while the other side 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 her ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... shadows bleeding, As from behind, the moon, ascending, Lights its dim aisles and paths unknown! The wind is rising; but the boughs Rise not and fall not with the wind That through their foliage sobs and soughs; Only the cloudy rack behind, Drifting onward, wild and ragged, Gives to each spire and buttress jagged A seeming motion undefined. Below on the square, an armed knight, Still as a statue and as white, Sits on his steed, and the moonbeams quiver Upon the points of his armor bright As on the ripples of a river. ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... The arrangement is almost too clever for gravity, as is the case with more than one arrangement in the Merveille. From the outside one can see that at this corner the architect had to provide a heavy buttress against a double strain, and he built up from the rock below a square corner tower as support, into which he worked a spiral staircase leading from the cellar up to the cloisters. Just above the level of the great hall he managed to construct this little room, a gem. The place was near and ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... forms as it were a cornice, perched three thousand feet above the valley, over which it commands a view of mountain and bay and inlet, but never a house, never a church, and the farthest point is beyond Calvi, thirty miles away. There is but one spur—a vast buttress of fertile land thrown against the mountain, as a buttress may be thrown against a ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... born at St. Malo, the white buttress of Brittany. Daring Breton fishing-boats had often sailed as far as the cod-banks of Newfoundland, and it is not impossible that Cartier himself had already crossed the Atlantic before he was commissioned by Chabot. From a ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... of the tree, and passed under its trailing parasites. The pirogue touched its trunk. Mechanically I climbed along the sloping buttress—mechanically ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... 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 ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delay in lighting the fire was brief, yet by the time we had reached the base and had mounted the horses, the Colonel, Ulyate, and the dogs had already passed out of sight beyond a farther out-jutting buttress of rock. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... 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 and passions: public reason in its gradual progress separates the savage ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... 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 ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... which cut it about midway. On nearing this obstacle, I saw that the trace forked into two—one going around the tops of the decaying branches, while the other took the direction of the roots; which, with the soil still adhering to them, formed a rounded buttress-like wall of full ten feet in diameter. The trunk itself was not over five—that being about the thickness of the tree. It was a matter of choice which of the two paths should be followed: since both appeared to come together again on the opposite side of the tree; ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... with you, 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 for what he considered his hereditary property; ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... avail himself of the assistance of the trees—pines and trailing junipers—that grew over the steep so thickly as to conceal the greater portion of its rocky facade. Here and there only, a bare spot might be observed—a little buttress of white laminated gypsum, mingled with sparkling selenite; while at other places a miniature torrent, leaping over the rocks, and dancing among the dark cedars, presented a very similar appearance. These little torrents, plashing down to the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... tell General Gallieni exactly how matters stood. (Adroitly drawn 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 the victory ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... little older, came more clay; and poured itself upon him here, at the side; and he has laid crystal over that, and lived on, in his purity. Then the clay came on at his angles, and tried to cover them, and round them away; but upon that he threw out buttress-crystals at his angles, all as true to his own central line as chapels round a cathedral apse; and clustered them round the clay; and conquered it again. At last the clay came on at his summit, and tried to blunt his summit; ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... energy of the whole chase is thrown into the long and carefully calculated aim. A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a sharp report echoes "from peak to peak the rattling crags among;" half a dozen chamois whisk around the next rock-buttress, and "one more unfortunate" tumbles from the verge into vacancy. The labor of days is rewarded. Securing the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for his hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant jodel of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... 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, The air is delicate. Macbeth, ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... forbidding. We found inside him a frog, dead but otherwise 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 ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... buttresses that here and there jutted boldly forth, she fell to the ground. Though much bruised, her senses did not leave her; she uttered no cry; nay, she hailed the accident that had led her to something like a screen; and creeping close up to the angle formed by the buttress, so that on one side at least she was sheltered from view, she gathered her slight and small form into its smallest compass, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... over 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
... we met the up-coming post, also consisting of a number of one-horse sledges. It took some time to pass, as the track was narrow and the horses floundered in the deep snow when passing each other. After we had got by and were continuing on our way down to Sues, we turned along an outstanding buttress of cliff and saw that some two miles of steep slope ahead had avalanched. The whole surface of the snow had slipped to the bottom of the valley and if either of the diligences had been on this slope when it happened, horses, ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... I 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 the 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 ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... tribe living in the vicinity of Compostela. On one occasion I had made arrangements to meet a Maggugan warrior chief at an appointed trysting place in the forest. Upon arriving at the spot, one of my companions beat the buttress of a tree as a signal that we had arrived, but it was more than an hour before our Maggugan friends made their appearance. Upon being questioned as to the delay, they informed us that they had circled around at a considerable distance, examining the number and shape of our footprints ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... 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 ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the interval the importance of a star turn, and Xavier in this respect surpassed his rivals, though he perhaps regarded his cloak-rooms, which were organised to cause the largest possible amount of inconvenience to the largest possible number of people, as his surest financial buttress. Xavier could or would never see the close resemblance of intervals to wet blankets, extinguishers, palls and hostile critics. The Allegro movement of the Concerto was a real success, and the audience ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... hoped," he said, "Mr. Reding, that so good a young man as you once were would have gained a place on some foundation, and been settled here, and been a useful man in his generation, sir; and a column, a buttress of the Church of England, sir. Well, sir, here are my best wishes for you, sir. When you come up for your Master's degree, sir—no, I think it is your Bachelor's—which is it, Mr. Reding, are you yet a Bachelor? oh, I see ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... to walk abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls that scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct in all these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by no buttress, has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combined with such prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense of science and self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None but Romans could have built such a monument, and have ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... replied Wildrake; "only getting upon a sort of buttress, (for I can climb like any cat that ever mewed in any gutter,) and holding on by the vines and creepers which grew around, I obtained a station where I could see into the inside of that same parlour thou ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... village orchards and the sheen of cultivation, extending to the long black sinuous line which denotes the fringe of trees bordering the Indus. Such is the scene which Solomon is said to have invited his Indian bride to gaze upon for the last time, as they rested on the crags of the southern buttress of the Takht—where his shrine exists to this day. To that shrine thousands of pilgrims, Mahommedans and Hindus alike, resort on their yearly pilgrimages, in spite of its dangerous approach. All this country, so far, is independent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... which I have referred—the law that liberty is progress—and 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 we ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... could he want with him? Never doubting, in his hurry, the genuineness of the message, Ketch pulled his door to, and stepped off, the young messenger having already decamped. The green gates were not one minute's walk from the lodge—though a projecting buttress of the cathedral prevented the one from being in sight of the other—and old Ketch gained ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... he shouted. "We are over the worse now and shall soon be in calmer water. Get your feet well out in front of you, if you can, and dig your heels into the mud, then you will act as a buttress to me and help ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... Bourges was in architecture, spent whole 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
... 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 ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... 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 threatened to drive a wedge between the Leicestershires and the river. The whole front was now connected ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... crag and every wave of glacier. It is strange if they do not affect him rather more powerfully than the casual visitor who has never been initiated by practical experience into their difficulties. To him, the huge buttress which runs down from the Moench is something more than an irregular pyramid, purple with white patches at the bottom and pure white at the top. He fills up the bare outline supplied by the senses with a thousand lively images. He sees tier above tier of rock, rising in a gradually ascending ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the top of the north transept, tearing the lead, breaking a piece of the wooden frame, and smashing by its explosion the crown of the pinnacle which cuts the balustrade at the right of the flying buttress intermediary in the sexpartite vault of the transept. Other effects of the explosion were the striking of some stones and the leads of the dormer window which carries the frame of a clock, as also some small windows. The fragments of the pinnacle fell on the roof of the lower slope, where ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... seems to trouble you very much that inspired writers should be thought capable of making mistakes; but it does not trouble me,—Very likely not. It does not trouble you, perhaps, to see stone after stone, buttress after buttress, foundation after foundation, removed from the walls of Zion, until the whole structure trembles and totters, and is pronounced insecure. Your boasted unconcern is very little to the purpose, unless we may also know how dear to you the safety of Zion is. But if you make indignant ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Sieur de la Verendrye, who with his sons ventured into the region now known as the province of Manitoba and the north-west territory of Canada. He built several forts, including one on the site of the city of Winnipeg. Two of his sons are believed to have reached the Big Horn Range, an "outlying buttress" of the Rocky Mountains, in 1743, and to have taken possession of what is now territory of the United States. The youngest son, Chevalier de la Verendrye, who was the first to see the Rocky Mountains, subsequently discovered the Saskatchewan (Poskoiac) and even ascended it as far as the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... order; and by and by the haughty barons themselves, who had scrambled for the worldly spoil of the church, found that the spiritual influence had been concentrated in hands as haughty as their own, and connected with no feelings likely to buttress their order any more than the Crown—a new and sterner monkery, under a different name, and essentially plebeian. Presently the Scotch were on the verge of republicanism, in state as well as kirk, and I have sometimes thought it was only the accession of King Jamie to the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... tremendous bump. "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
... the "Sportsman" from the convenient buttress of the teapot and substituted "Punch" when he became aware that day had turned to night. Looking up he perceived that his open window, which was rather small and of the casement variety, was completely blocked by a huge, shapeless, and opaque mass. Next moment ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... lore, of choir-screens, of 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 him, and his absorptions permitted only a faint ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... 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
... likely to venture near that part of a coast so full of dangers that no large ship would willingly approach it. The muzzles of some smaller guns appeared through the embrasure of the parapet wall, which was also flanked by a buttress, or rather a circular outwork at either end at the foot of the towers, where pivot guns were placed, so that the one on the west could fire directly up the voe or gulf, and served to flank the western wall. The two principal front towers were connected ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... m. E.S.E. of 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
... comprising as many as forty-eight dozen individual bananas. So great is the weight that to prevent the downfall of the plant a stake sharpened at each end—one to stick in the ground and the other into the soft stem—is needed to buttress it. Before the fruit has fully developed, other shoots have appeared; but each plant bears but one bunch, and when that is removed the plant is decapitated and slowly decays, and the second and third and fourth shoots from the rhizome successively arrive at the bearing stage and are ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... evening, she was waiting eagerly for the sky to deepen, and the light of the stars to sharpen, and the orange to fall over the wall. For the Druze had come many times, and no one had discovered the lovers, screened by masses of roses in the buttress-sheltered corner of the wall. In fact, for the last weeks no one had had time or thought for anything but Buldoula, who lay sick within the palace walls, and attendants waited anxiously or ran hither and thither on various errands, and Ahmed was in the depths of anxiety; ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... hundred as we fought to weather the last bold tooth of rock that gashed into sea and tempest between us and open ocean. So close were we that I looked to see our far-reeling skysail-yards strike the face of the rock. So close were we, no more than a biscuit toss from its iron buttress, that as we sank down into the last great trough between two seas I can swear every one of us held breath and waited ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as these are upon the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their moral ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... day—and rode on together like brothers, heading for a distant pass in the mountains where the painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the river. To the east rose Superstition Mountain, that huge buttress upon which, since the day that a war party of Pimas disappeared within the shadow of its pinnacles, hot upon the trail of the Apaches, and never returned again, the Indians of the valley have always looked ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... work, and to a layman their ingenuity was most marked. Piers were made out of all sorts of things; for instance, a boat would be sunk and used as a buttress, then planks put over it for a wharf. They built a very fine pier which was afterwards named Watson's. Again, the "monkey" of a pile driver they erected was formed out of an unexploded shell from the Goeben. ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... 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 air ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the 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 back ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... by way of Poland Hill, looking down over the Sedgemoor plain, Chedzoy Church, on whose southern buttress the battle axes were sharpened, and Weston Zoyland, with its Dutch-sounding name, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... cases further to buttress my position. I told him that almost the skinniest human being I ever knew had been one of the largest eaters. I was speaking now of John Wesley Bass, the champion raw-egg eater of Massac Precinct, whose triumphant career knew not pause or discomfiture until one day ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town. Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward and bullets were ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... exalted, change to man indeed and I—mount up to heaven—thus!" So saying, Jocelyn began to climb by gnarled ivy and carven buttress. And ever as he mounted she watched him through the silken curtain of her hair, wide of eye ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... 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 looking back once ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... 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
... would be earlier. The hours dragged interminably. Louis walked the stone buttress where the flag which he had raised in signal to Lapas flapped and whipped against its staff. At last his binoculars, fixed on the rock, caught the dip of the colors there. With a great sigh of relief the Duke watched to see them rise and ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... better in that place. For instance, Turner felt the bank on the right ought to be made more solid and rocky, in order to suggest firmer resistance to the stream, and he turns it, as will be seen by comparing the etchings, into a kind of rock buttress, to the wall, instead of a mere bank. Now, the buttress into which he turns it is very nearly a facsimile of one which he had drawn on that very St. Gothard road, far above, at the Devil's Bridge, at least thirty years before, and which he had himself etched and engraved, for the Liber ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... picturesquely clad in boots (gum, high) and a goat's skin, flung himself on the east wing, and became an animated buttress. Albert Edward climbed aloft and sat on the tin lid, which was opening and shutting at every pore. Mactavish put his shoulder to the south wall to keep it from working round to the north. I clung to the pantry, which was coming adrift from ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... wintry snow On 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 ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... Him'—how does that aim bear upon the multitude of inferior and nearer aims which men pursue, and which Christians have to pursue along with other men? How does it bear upon them?—Why thus—as the culminating peak of a mountain-chain bears on the lower hills that for miles and miles buttress it, and hold it up, and aspire towards it, and find their perfection in its calm summit that touches the skies. The more we have in view, as our aim in life, Christ who is 'at the right hand of God,' and assimilation, communion with Him, approbation from Him, the more will all immediate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and beyond this, supported between each bay by flying buttresses, comes the transitional Decorated to Perpendicular clerestory, considerably higher than the original Norman clerestory remaining to the nave. At the base of each flying buttress are figures of saints. The roof and Norman clerestory were damaged by the falling tower in 1361, but were rebuilt by Bishop Percy, 1355-69. This work is transitional Decorated to Perpendicular. The presbytery was then re-roofed with ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... the climate. They died like flies. Of one detachment of 250, half were dead in three months, 100 of the others were invalided, and only 25 remained fit for duty. From a further body of 150 men sent as a reinforcement, half were reported on the sick list the day after their arrival. The main buttress of the Khedive's authority in this region was therefore hollow and erected on an insecure foundation. The Egyptian soldiers possessed firearms, and the natives, in their ignorance that they could not shoot straight, were afraid of them; ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... send down a buttress to the north; against it the Susquehanna flows swift and straight for a little space, vainly chafing. Just where the high ridge breaks sharp and steep to the river's edge there is a grassy level, lulled by the sound of pleasant waters; there ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... them. There was no other. Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union. He was unjust—he was Injustice. The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to Injustice. And if we have the world for the buttress of injustice, then is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible. Laws are necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage's old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... justice should appertain. The rest of the bill related to the return of the writ in three days, and the penalties incurred by those who should neglect or refuse to make the due return, or to comply with any other clause of this regulation. The commons seemed hearty in rearing up this additional buttress to the liberty of their fellow-subjects, and passed the bill with the most laudable alacrity; but in the house of lords such a great number of objections were started, that it sunk at the second reading, and the judges were ordered to prepare a bill for the same ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... this room came groans and wailing. He had an impression of an empty blood-stained couch, of men on other couches, bandaged and blood-stained. It was just a glimpse from a railed footway and then a buttress hid the place and they were going on towards ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... (MS. Tr. 15) contains several small sketches of sections and exterior views of the Dome; some of them show buttress-walls shaped as inverted arches. Respecting these ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... only sound he heard was the labored pumping of his own heart and the swish of the wavelets against the timbered buttress of the Sawdust Pile. The conviction slowly came to his torpid brain that he was seeking admittance to a deserted house, and he leaned against the door and fought for control of himself. Presently, like a stricken animal, he went slowly and uncertainly away in ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... oasis is without a slave. However this may be, it 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, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... through the water, the eyes of both peered intently forward, in an endeavour to pierce the obscurity, and, if possible, discover some low limb of a tree, or projecting buttress, on which they might find a foothold. They had good hope of success, for they had seen many such since starting from the shore. Had rest been necessary, they might have obtained it more than once by grasping a branch above, or clinging to one of the great trunks, whose gnarled ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... derivable from Nature's models. One was in the form of an eagle's nest, and not nearly so large as that in which some eaglets are reared, made by interlacing branchlets of white mangrove until the mass was sufficient to support his weight. With a double ended paddle rudely shaped from the thin buttress roots of the red mangrove, and comic in the crudeness and disproportion of its parts, he felt himself safe miles out to sea. When he approached a passing vessel he presented the illusion, not of walking, but of sitting on the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... click of hoofs, and scrape of pack. On one side towered the iron-stained cliff, not smooth or glistening at close range, but of dull, dead, rotting rock. The trail changed to a zigzag along a seamed and cracked buttress where ledges leaned outward waiting to fall. Then a steeper incline, where the burros crept upward warily, led to a level ledge heading ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... stick, crutch, alpenstock, baton, staddle[obs3]; bourdon[obs3], cowlstaff[obs3], lathi[obs3], mahlstick[obs3]. post, pillar, shaft, thill[obs3], column, pilaster; pediment, pedicle; pedestal; plinth, shank, leg, socle[obs3], zocle[obs3]; buttress, jamb, mullion, abutment; baluster, banister, stanchion; balustrade; headstone; upright; door post, jamb, door jamb. frame, framework; scaffold, skeleton, beam, rafter, girder, lintel, joist, travis[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... which formed the horizon. The sky overhead was so blue and cloudless that it might have formed the background for an Italian landscape, and framed against it was the massive tower of the cathedral, its silver-greys darkening almost to black, as a buttress here and there brought it in shadow. Among its pinnacles a few wise old rooks flapped lazily in the still air, as much a part of their surroundings as the stately swans that floated on the stream which lapped ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... upright the old, And wise to buttress with the new, Prudent, as only are the bold, Clear-eyed, as only are the true, To foes benign, to friendship stern, Intent to imp Law's broken wing, Who would not die, if death might earn The right to kiss ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... this buttress? Dive just beyond it, and swim under water for ten feet. Put up your hands then, and ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... 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, flooding into ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... 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 ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... The second is that healthy employment conditions stand equally with healthy agricultural conditions as a buttress of national prosperity. Dependable employment at fair wages is just as important to the people in the towns and cities as good farm income is to agriculture. Our people must have the ability to buy the goods they manufacture ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... and obvious sense. Thus, men of every school, under the mighty names of men who knew the truth—but who could only give such portion of truth as they deemed man at the time was able to receive—use their names to buttress up mistaken interpretations, and thus walls are continually built up to block ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... man watch the other that neither noted the four men who approached stealthily from rock to rock and finally crouched behind an irregular buttress of rock only a short pistol shot away. Their vantage point did not permit any view of the man who had been knocked down by the galloping horse nor of the contestants themselves, but the exchange of shots could be followed with ease ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... of the houses and churches glittered in the sun and gave a brilliant effect. We returned to the boat and rowed again across the river below the bridge, and here, owing to the strength of the current our boat had to pursue a most zig-zag path, pulling up under the eddy of each buttress, but our boatmen knew well what they were about, as they are in the habit of taking Mr. Hodges daily to the bridge and it was very pretty to hear the warning of doucement! doucement! from the helmsman as we approached any peril. Mr. H. said ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... not wait for me, the instrument was abandoned. Then, with the party complete, we passed to the northward of Khombora, by an indenture of the ground lying between it and a much larger hill, called Sagama, which hill forms the south-eastern buttress of the Usumbara masses; and opening into the valley of Pangani again, we put up at a Wazegura village on its right bank, called Kohode, crossing the river by a ferry. Here my companion, with all the party—save one exceptional ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... engine, the latter darted alone at full speed for London. Notice was immediately given by telegraph to London and other stations; and, while the line was kept clear, an engine and other arrangements were prepared as a buttress to receive the runaway, while all connected with the station awaited in awful suspense the expected shock. The superintendent of the railway also started down the line on an engine, and on passing the runaway he reversed his engine and had it transferred at the next ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... could not have blanched ruddy faces more surely. The Chicago drummer, fat and florid, had disappeared completely behind a buttress ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... again, followed the crest of the ridge where it swept upward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was not difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear spaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his bare feet, bothered him less and less ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... everything had been going on in the usual Saturday fashion—the work of the day which closed the week's labours, being to repeat a certain number of questions of the Shorter Catechism (which term, alas! included the answers), and next to buttress them with a number of suffering caryatids, as it were—texts of Scripture, I mean, first petrified and then dragged into the service. Before Mr Graham returned, every one had done his part except ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... carry nothing, not even the food they were to eat, and were absolutely ignorant of the country we were to traverse. From our observations on the previous days, we had decided to strike out on a northeast course, over the gentle slope, until we struck the rocky ridges on the southeast buttress of the dome. On its projecting rocks, which extended nearer to the summit than those of any other part of the mountain, we could avoid the slippery, precipitous snow-beds that stretched far down the mountain at this time ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... said—Forward! The day he crossed the Rapidan, he said it to Sherman down in Georgia. After the battle of the Wilderness he said it again, and the last brutal resort of hammering down the northern buttress and sea-wall of the rebellion—old Virginia—and Atlanta, the keystone of the Confederate arch, was well under way. Throughout those bloody days Chad was with Grant and Harry Dean was with Sherman on his terrible trisecting march to the sea. For, after the fight between ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... 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 Mountains (ERZGEBIRGE)" and of the straggling Lausitz ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... perhaps had the power to execute such mighty tasks, was more than even I, sanguine as my expectations had been, could have hoped! To rout politicians and extirpate heresy, to pull down a minister and become the buttress of the church, to reform the state and establish the hierarchy, was indeed a glorious office! Honour and power were suspended over my head: I had but to cut the thread and they ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... means to place the borders of Cape Colony in a state of military security. As one detail he had to ensure that, in the event of war, the frontier settlers should not be massacred. A line of men was drawn across country, so as to make a buttress against any advance by the crazy Kaffirs. Each picket had charge of a stretch of ground, and in the morning soldiers would ride sharply to right and left, covering it. They could tell, by footmarks on the dewy grass, whether any Kaffirs had been about in the night. ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... being simultaneously treasurer of Amphalula, vice-president of Hooligan Gulch and Red Water, secretary of Horse's Neck, Holy Jo, Gargoyle Extension, Cowhide Number Five, Consolidated Bimetallic, Nevada Mastodon, Leaping Frog, Orelady Mine, Why Marry and Sol's Cliff Buttress, and ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... yourself that it must have been Mademoiselle Gamard's does not fulfil all the conditions mentioned in BaIzac's de- scription. The edifice in question, however, fulfils con- ditions enough; in particular, its little court offers hospitality to the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept), is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the further side of the little soundless ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... imagined by supposing a small acorn set on the truncated top of a large one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite columnar entourage of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of Pisa. The result of this arrangement is an aerial, yet massive beauty, without parallel in the architecture ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... common enough to see cracks running up the walls. Had the site been properly drained, and the earth consequently always dry, this would not have happened; and it is a matter of consideration for the landlord, who in time may find it necessary to shore up a wall with a buttress. The great difference in the temperature of a drained soil and an undrained one has often been observed, amounting sometimes to as much as twenty degrees—a serious matter where health is concerned. A foolish custom was observed in the building of many old farmhouses, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... a walie hammer; About the knottit buttress clam'er; Alang the steep roof stoyt an' stammer, A gate mis-chancy; On the aul' spire, the bells' hie cha'mer, Dance your ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... performed, at Muna, on the way back to Meccah, the ceremony of stoning the Shaytan el Kabir, or Great Devil, who is represented by a dwarf buttress placed against a rough wall of stones. The buttress was surrounded by a swarm of pilgrims, mounted and on foot, eager to get as near to the Great Devil as possible. I found myself under the stomach of a fallen dromedary, and had great difficulty in extricating ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... northern side. It had been sunny since morning, and the snow had melted from the roads, but the hills across the plain were still white and great drifts were piled against the ramparts, forming a natural buttress from the summit of the steep river bank almost to the deep ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... of face Leaned her at the buttress-base, Heard within her lover dear Weeping and bewailing her; Then she spake the ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... 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 moorland, 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 ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... King's Chamber at Montauban, is a window, at a great height from the ground, a very deep ravine, which is one of the main defences of the city, lying below it. In the adjoining ante-chamber is a similar window, and between the two is a projecting buttress, and outside the sill of each is a stone ledge a foot wide, which runs round the buttress. I do not know who first thought of it, but one day when the King was absent and we pages were lounging in the ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... 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 ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... above the interior, is perfectly continuous (like Copernicus), or only interrupted by narrow passes. It is a suggestive circumstance that gaps, other than valleys, are almost invariably found either in the north or south walls, or in both, and seldom in other positions. The buttress, or long-extending spur, is a feature frequently associated with the ring- plain rampart, as are also numbers of what, for the lack of a better name, must be termed little hillocks, which generally radiate in long rows from the ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... di Su is another Romanesque church—S. Maria. The interior has been modernised, though a few caps resembling those in the cathedral remain; but the tower (at the west end) has two stories, with two circular-headed windows with buttress between unspoilt. At the other side of the road is S. Francesco, which has a tower of five stories near the east end, and long trefoil-headed windows. The high-altar-piece in this church (a Madonna with saints) is ascribed to Pordenone (1531), and there ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... already come. One of them, 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 maniac. He sat astride of it, still in ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... 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
... a difference, but not of much importance, may be observed, which commences at the fourth cervical vertebra, and is greatest at about the sixth, seventh, or eighth vertebra; this consists in the haemal descending processes being united to the body of the vertebra by a sort of buttress. This structure may be observed in Cochins, Polish, some Hamburghs, and probably other breeds; but is absent, or barely developed, in Game, Dorking, Spanish, Bantam, and several other breeds examined by me. On the dorsal surface of the sixth cervical ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... exhibited we stay not to inquire;—finally, and chief of all, the great mechanical discovery of the resistance of lateral pressure by the weight of the superimposed flanking pinnacle. Daring concentrations of pressure upon narrow piers were the immediate consequence, and the recognition of the buttress as a feature in itself agreeable and susceptible of decoration. The glorious art of painting on glass added its temptations; the darkness of northern climes both rendering the typical character of Light more deeply felt than ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... high, Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair; So still they blaze when Fate is nigh The lordly line ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... be overpowered by the fanatics of his tribe, conducted his prisoners to a sacred place, on an abruptly raised plateau at the other end of the "pah." This hut rested against a mound elevated a hundred feet above it, which formed the steep outer buttress of the entrenchment. In this "Ware-Atoua," sacred house, the priests or arikis taught the Maories about a Triune God, father, son, and bird, or spirit. The large, well constructed hut, contained the sacred and choice food which Maoui-Ranga-Rangui ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have its shroud—it must have it betimes— The 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... ant collect its stores, the bee its honey. There could be no life without expectation; and a life without hope in man or woman is that of a machine—not even that of an animal. Hope is the mainspring of every activity; it is the spur to all undertakings; it is the buttress to every building; it runs in all youthful blood; it gives buoyancy to every young heart and vivacity to every brain. Mehetabel had hope in her now. She had no thought for herself save how it concerned her child. In that child ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... menacing. But he was not in a hurry. When he passed off the ledge Rojas was edging farther and farther along the wall. He was clinging now to the lava, creeping inch by inch. Perhaps he had thought to work around the buttress or climb over it. Evidently he went as far as possible, and there he clung, an unscalable ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... worship of a gentleman. How Patrick got acquainted, and, far less, how he got in love with the Mayor of Berwick's daughter, Isabella, we cannot say, nor need antiquarians try to discover; for where there was a Southron to be slain or a lady to be won, Patrick Hume cared no more for bar, buttress, battlement, fire, or water, than did Jove for his own thunder-cloud, under the shade of which he courted the daughter of Inachus. Letting alone the recondite subject of "love's beginning," we shall tread safer ground in stating, that the affection ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... or less stormy times of the First Great War, we of the Navy were always able to buttress our resolution with golden hopes of a future opulence denied to our less fortunate comrades in the trenches. Whenever the struggle was going particularly badly for us—when, for instance, a well-earned shore-leave had been unexpectedly jammed or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... town on horseback by the Puerta de Rochapea which gives exit to the city on the northern side. It had been sunny since morning, and the snow had melted from the roads, but the hills across the plain were still white and great drifts were piled against the ramparts, forming a natural buttress from the summit of the steep river bank almost to the deep embrasures of ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Berlin Papyrus, No. ii. For instance, the peasant who is the hero of the story, says of the lord Miruitensi, that he is "the rudder of heaven, the guide of the earth, the balance which carries the offerings, the buttress of tottering walls, the support of that which falls, the great master who takes whoever is without a master to lavish on him the goods of his house, a jug of beer ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... purple by exhilarating victuals and drinks, though the latter were not at all despised by him. His face was indeed rather pale than otherwise, for he had just come from the mill. It was capable of immense changes of expression: mobility was its essence, a roll of flesh forming a buttress to his nose on each side, and a deep ravine lying between his lower lip and the tumulus represented by his chin. These fleshy lumps moved stealthily, as if of their own accord, whenever ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... and reveal its low-lying outlines. Every little dimple of the hills has its chalice of mountain wine. The mist stretches above the ridge, a long, low, level causeway, solid as the mountains themselves, which buttress its farther side, a via triumpha, meet highway for the returning chariot of an emperor. It rears itself from the valleys, a dragon rampant and with horrid jaws. It flings itself with smothering caresses about the burly mountains, and stifles them in its close embrace. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... so that, as Delaune remarks, "a great many wicked persons capable of the blackest villainies do creep about, as daily and sad experience shows." It was not only those who, with drawn swords, darted from some deep porch or sheltering buttress, in hopes of enriching themselves at their neighbour's expense, that were to be dreaded. It was a fashion of the time for companies of young gentlemen to saunter forth in numbers after route or supper, when, being merry with wine and eager for adventure, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... the "Stone of Victory." The "Pechtland Hills"—their elder name—were once a refuge 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 Swanston ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... 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 ...
— 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
... 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 of a slight disposition to headache, ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... time to pass, as the track was narrow and the horses floundered in the deep snow when passing each other. After we had got by and were continuing on our way down to Sues, we turned along an outstanding buttress of cliff and saw that some two miles of steep slope ahead had avalanched. The whole surface of the snow had slipped to the bottom of the valley and if either of the diligences had been on this slope when it happened, horses, sledges ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... 15) contains several small sketches of sections and exterior views of the Dome; some of them show buttress-walls shaped as inverted arches. Respecting these ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... exactly how matters stood. (Adroitly drawn 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 the ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... is at its height, she still groans under the unrestricted despotism of an autocrat. Here the effects of progress that obtain elsewhere seem inverted. Such advance as is made in civilization and knowledge is used to buttress imperial tyranny and the knout is wielded more cruelly than ever before. We behold liberal institutions overthrown and a whole people held in bondage worse than slavery. We hear of families torn asunder, of innocent men condemned to life-long exile in Siberia, simply because they have aroused the ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... 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 ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... of the others were invalided, and only 25 remained fit for duty. From a further body of 150 men sent as a reinforcement, half were reported on the sick list the day after their arrival. The main buttress of the Khedive's authority in this region was therefore hollow and erected on an insecure foundation. The Egyptian soldiers possessed firearms, and the natives, in their ignorance that they could not shoot straight, were afraid of them; but the natural progress of knowledge would inevitably prove ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... unseen, that will lay them in dust, Crashings of plunder'd cloisters, and royal insatiate lust:— Far, unseen, unheard!—Meanwhile the great Minster on high Like a stream of music, aspiring, harmonious, springs to the sky:— Story on story ascending their buttress'd beauty unfold, Till the highest height is attain'd, and the Cross shines star-like in gold, Set as a meteor in heaven; a sign of health and release:— And the land rejoices below, and the heart-song ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... doubtless remembers, between that coffee shop and the next house is a stone buttress jutting out into the street, forming on its side farthest from the coffee-shop a dark corner, for whose filth and stink the street cleaners ought to be punished. Therein I lurked, while those who pursued ran past me up the street, I counting them; and among ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, buttress, Nor coin of vantage, but this bird hath made His pendent bed, and procreant cradle: where they Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... impeachment of being simultaneously treasurer of Amphalula, vice-president of Hooligan Gulch and Red Water, secretary of Horse's Neck, Holy Jo, Gargoyle Extension, Cowhide Number Five, Consolidated Bimetallic, Nevada Mastodon, Leaping Frog, Orelady Mine, Why Marry and Sol's Cliff Buttress, and president ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... conflict 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 for which ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... involuntarily, and for a moment the architect fancied that he discerned the figure of a man standing in the shadow of the end buttress. But, as he took a few steps nearer, he saw that he had been deceived by a shadow, and that the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... and shouted aloud, for in truth Niobe and her children were like unto gods, their queen said, "Do not waste thy worship, my people. Rather make the prayers to thy king and to me and to my children who buttress us round and make our strength so great, that fearlessly we ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... Although there was not room for more than two to be actually building at once, they managed, by setting all the rest to work in preparing the cement and passing the stones, to finish in the course of the day a huge buttress filling the whole gang, and supported everywhere by the live rock. Before the hour when they usually dropped work, they were satisfied ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... a slight stir among the bushes attracted his attention. Slipping behind a corner of the buttress, he waited, somewhat sheltered from the dripping rain by the overhanging ivy. He had not long to stand shivering there. A hurried whisper caught ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... sailing ships rigged as barks; their hulls strengthened 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
... from Thunder Bay {382} to Lake Winnipeg. These adventurous Frenchmen raised rude posts by the lakes and rivers of this region, and Verendrye's sons are said to have extended their explorations in January, 1743, to what was probably the Bighorn Range, an outlying buttress of the Rocky Mountains, running athwart the sources of the Yellowstone. The wars between France and England, however, stopped French trade in that northwestern region, and the Hudson's Bay Company's posts at the north were the only signs of ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... difference, but not of much importance, may be observed, which commences at the fourth cervical vertebra, and is greatest at about the sixth, seventh, or eighth vertebra; this consists in the haemal descending processes being united to the body of the vertebra by a sort of buttress. This structure may be observed in Cochins, Polish, some Hamburghs, and probably other breeds; but is absent, or barely developed, in Game, Dorking, Spanish, Bantam, and several other breeds examined by me. On the dorsal surface ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... of New England. Laws are going to be violated, Hood, both in actual letter and in spirit. But that's your end of the business. It's up to you to get around the Interstate Commerce Commission in any way you can, and buttress this little monopoly against competition and reform-infected legislatures. I don't care what ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Never doubting, in his hurry, the genuineness of the message, Ketch pulled his door to, and stepped off, the young messenger having already decamped. The green gates were not one minute's walk from the lodge—though a projecting buttress of the cathedral prevented the one from being in sight of the other—and old Ketch ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... pines at their eastern edge, a great crag jutted forth in a sort of shoulder, a vast flying-buttress that supported the pine-clad Ridge above—a mighty stone Atlas carrying the hills on its shoulder. From this rock one looked out eastward over the rolling country below to where, far beyond sloping hills covered with forest, it merged into a soft blue that ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... waist, as if in defiance of the slackness of his build. His eyes, his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face showed a sunburn whitening. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... the White House: "Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind; it is not aggressive so much as passive; and among passive things, it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that, to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end.... Slow and careful in coming to resolutions, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... and destiny severe With shades of death for ever veil'd his eyes. 100 Thus strenuous they the toilsome battle waged. But where Tydides fought, whether in aid Of Ilium's host, or on the part of Greece, Might none discern. For as a winter-flood Impetuous, mounds and bridges sweeps away;[6] 105 The buttress'd bridge checks not its sudden force, The firm inclosure of vine-planted fields Luxuriant, falls before it; finish'd works Of youthful hinds, once pleasant to the eye, Now levell'd, after ceaseless rain from Jove; 110 So drove Tydides into sudden ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... of centralization was going on, of which they but dimly, stupidly, grasped the purport. That competition which they had so long shouted for as the only sensible, true and moral system, and which they had sought to buttress by enacting law after law, was being irreverently ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... was originally dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, and a very interesting relic of this saintly patronage has lately been discovered. Apparently, in order to strengthen the building, two of the three windows in the chapel were blocked up, and a buttress was built across a chord of the apse, in the early part of the thirteenth century. In the course of the restoration of the tower which was recently carried out, this buttress was taken away, and its removal laid bare a fresco painting, representing St. Paul and the viper at Melita. This piece ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... from somewhere higher up there was a heavy report as of a cannon, followed by a loud echoing roar, and, gazing upward over a shoulder of the mountain, he had a good view of what seemed to be a waterfall plunging over a rock, to disappear afterwards behind a buttress-like mass of rock and ice. This was followed by another roar, and another, ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... of St. Malo—thrust out like a buttress into the sea, strange and grim of aspect, breathing war front its walls and battlements of ragged stone, a stronghold of privateers, the home of a race whose intractable and defiant independence neither time nor change has subdued—has been for centuries ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... pointed to 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 ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... be just right. But at last they found, in the very heart of the wilderness, a place where a shallow stream ran over a hard stony bottom, and here they set to work. It was a very desirable situation in every respect. At one side stood a large tree, so close that it could probably be used as a buttress for the dam when the latter was sufficiently lengthened to reach it; while above the shallow the ground was low and flat on both sides for some distance back from the banks, so that the pond would ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... dawn with new desires may net the flushing mountain spires, But my gaunt buttress still rejects the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... occurred to an empty train at Gravesend, and the driver having leaped from his engine, the latter darted alone at full speed for London. Notice was immediately given by telegraph to London and other stations; and, while the line was kept clear, an engine and other arrangements were prepared as a buttress to receive the runaway, while all connected with the station awaited in awful suspense the expected shock. The superintendent of the railway also started down the line on an engine, and on passing the runaway he reversed his engine and had it transferred at the next crossing to ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... utmost stretch of 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 and passions: public reason in its gradual progress separates the savage from the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... mule, now ran forward upon the ledge, and looked around the buttress of rock. Then, turning suddenly, he waved his hand, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... 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 best can,—thinking they will do it better here, in presence of God ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... did each man watch the other that neither noted the four men who approached stealthily from rock to rock and finally crouched behind an irregular buttress of rock only a short pistol shot away. Their vantage point did not permit any view of the man who had been knocked down by the galloping horse nor of the contestants themselves, but the exchange of shots could be ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... the grove they pulled to the steep divide, which was no more than a buttress of Sonoma Mountain. The way led on through rolling uplands and across small dips and canyons, all well wooded and a-drip with water. In places the road was ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... again!" he shouted. "We are over the worse now and shall soon be in calmer water. Get your feet well out in front of you, if you can, and dig your heels into the mud, then you will act as a buttress to me and help me to ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... to us in our life's pilgrimage, but that if we trace it to a sense of our self-interest, we not only vulgarize it, but we turn it into a caricature. For there is in humour this singular property; its aroma is so subtle, delicate and undefinable that the effort to buttress it upon coarse, common utility is doomed to fail, and in the mere attempt humour vanishes. There is something deliciously contagious about laughter that is quite sincere and unthinking; whereas the only people who contrive to be always absurd, but ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... suspicions crowded upon me, and from where I sat I watched Simon anxiously, for all depended on his object in being here. He took no notice of the little group observing him, however, but, drawing his men up against the wall, leaned against a buttress, moodily pulling at ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... 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 vigorously, and yet ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... 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 as though a great sound-proof ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... the elements with which the walls are constructed, from black buttress below to alabaster tower above. All of these elements weather in different forms and are painted in different colors, so that the wall presents a highly complex facade. A wall of homogeneous granite, like that ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... triumph. He had himself been building her up in her foolish faith! But he took consolation in thinking how easily with a word he could any moment destroy that buttress of her phantom house. It was he, the unbeliever, and no God in or out of her Bible, that had helped her! It did not occur to him that she might after all see in him only a reed blown of ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... 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, for instance, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... that their worships might have drifted 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 ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... window. This signal being pointed out to Renaldo, his heart began to throb with great violence; he made a respectful obeisance towards the part in which it appeared, and perceiving the hand beckoning him to approach, advanced to the very buttress of the turret; upon which, seeing something drop, he alighted with great expedition, and took up a picture of his father in miniature, the features of which he no sooner distinguished, than the tears ran down his cheeks; he pressed the little image ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... say here 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
... struck down with his cudgel was sitting up rubbing the back of his head, and Wilkes had gathered his wits enough to crawl to the shelter of the nearest buttress. Myles, peeping around the corner behind which he stood, could see that the bachelors were gathered into a little group consulting together. Suddenly it broke asunder, and ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... widespread and lively joy in simple beauty which seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient times it was natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn to build, to make it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it with stone, to bestow care and thought upon coign and window-ledge and dripstone, to prop the roof on firm and shapely beams, and to cover it with honest stone tiles, each one of which had an individuality ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the fire was brief, yet by the time we had reached the base and had mounted the horses, the Colonel, Ulyate, and the dogs had already passed out of sight beyond a farther out-jutting buttress of rock. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... intermediate apartments. On the left-hand side of the entrance has been a spiral staircase, leading to the rooms above and to the top of the castle, which has had a flat roof, surrounded by a parapet and several turrets. The walls of this tower are very strong and firm; a deep buttress is placed at each corner, and one against the middle of each side wall. A small square tower has stood at the southern corner, but the greater part of it has been thrown down by the sea. The foundation of one side wall is also undermined the whole of its length, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... "that you bring me 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
... was very strong. The French lines were ranged along the steep wooded slope running north and south, with buttress-like projections, intersected by gullies, the whole leading up to a plateau on which stand the village of Froeschweiler and the hamlet of Elsasshausen. Behind is the wood called the Grosser Wald, while the hamlet is flanked on the south and in front ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... East, our determination to consolidate what has already been achieved in the peace process—and to buttress that accomplishment with further progress toward a comprehensive peace settlement—must remain a central goal of our foreign policy. Pursuant to their peace treaty, Egypt and Israel have made steady progress in the normalization of their relations in a variety ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the village his course took him about the base of the crag, and as he rounded the western side he heard the murmur of subdued voices. He slowed and approached cautiously. A jutting buttress of rock masked the talkers until he was almost upon them, and as he turned this corner he halted in a wretched pang of the jealousy ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... it is not only unencumbered by the soil that gave it birth, but is wholly detached and relieved, and set off against the clear blue of his imagination. His thought is not like a rock propped up but still sod-bound, but is like a rock held aloft, or built into a buttress, with ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... boy-populace, and sleep off fumes of liquor: he having ready access to the Cathedral, as contractor for rough repairs. Be this as it may, he does know much about it, and, in the demolition of impedimental fragments of wall, buttress, and pavement, has seen strange sights. He often speaks of himself in the third person; perhaps, being a little misty as to his own identity, when he narrates; perhaps impartially adopting the Cloisterham nomenclature in reference to ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... scale in favor of law and order; and by and by the haughty barons themselves, who had scrambled for the worldly spoil of the church, found that the spiritual influence had been concentrated in hands as haughty as their own, and connected with no feelings likely to buttress their order any more than the Crown—a new and sterner monkery, under a different name, and essentially plebeian. Presently the Scotch were on the verge of republicanism, in state as well as kirk, and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... her to the clouds if she wished to go there, and seeming a mere speck in the sky, she was swept along till she beheld the Arch of St. Martin far below, with the rays of the sun shining on it. Then she swooped down, and, hiding herself behind a buttress so that she could not be detected from below, she set herself to dig out the nearest blue stones with her beak. It was even harder work than she had expected; but at last it was done, and hope arose in her heart. She next drew out a piece of string that she had found hanging from ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... turn, and Xavier in this respect surpassed his rivals, though he perhaps regarded his cloak-rooms, which were organised to cause the largest possible amount of inconvenience to the largest possible number of people, as his surest financial buttress. Xavier could or would never see the close resemblance of intervals to wet blankets, extinguishers, palls and hostile critics. The Allegro movement of the Concerto was a real success, and the audience as a whole ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... a certain relief. At a little 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 looking back once again, when I ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... different places which might naturally be used by a criminal who had opportunity. One of these, concealed from the chance glance of any officer, was back under the apron, behind the half-completed side columns of the spill gate, where a great buttress came out to flank the apron. A charge exploded here would get at the very heart of the dam, for it would open the turbine wells and the spillway passage which had been provided for the ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... followed the crest of the ridge where it swept upward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was not difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear spaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his bare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... livelihood by selling sparrows, small eels, carp, and tortoises, which the worshipper sets free in honour of the deity, within whose territory cocks and hens and doves, tame and unharmed, perch on every jutty, frieze, buttress, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... short in which he could hope to be by my side, binding his principles and rivetting his 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 or stifled. That many things must be treated as beyond question ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... him a frog, dead but otherwise 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 ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... 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
... city, he commanded the army to be drawn out before the gates. No one appeared on the walls; the very portals, though locked and barred, seemed unguarded; above, the many domes and glittering crescents pierced heaven; while the old walls, survivors of ages, with ivy-crowned tower and weed-tangled buttress, stood as rocks in an uninhabited waste. From within the city neither shout nor cry, nor aught except the casual howling of a dog, broke the noon-day stillness. Even our soldiers were awed to silence; the music paused; the clang of arms was hushed. ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... down for a distance of some fifty feet, until only space enough was left for men to pass in single file. And as the first man essayed the passage of this perilous path and attempted to work his precarious way round the perpendicular buttress of rock that formed the elbow, a spear, wielded by an unseen hand, was observed to dart forward and bury itself deep in his naked breast, and the next moment he went hurtling downward off the narrow ledge into the ghastly abyss that yawned beside him. And as it was ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... together and slowly rose, creeping close to the wooden buttress of the bridge and staying well in its shadow. The footsteps grew plainer, and now, into the well-lighted road, a figure swung with long, wavering strides. It was not tall, but very spare, and was crowned with a bullet head set between ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... eyes, and made the group grow indistinct, as though the mist had already gathered between him and them. Then he quickened his steps, and the people of Mont St. Michel lost sight of him behind a great buttress ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... sufficient strength to take the thrust 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 up ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... man who 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 the sluggish ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... was precarious. Yaqui followed slowly. His figure was dark and menacing. But he was not in a hurry. When he passed off the ledge Rojas was edging farther and farther along the wall. He was clinging now to the lava, creeping inch by inch. Perhaps he had thought to work around the buttress or climb over it. Evidently he went as far as possible, and there he clung, an unscalable wall above, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... the spot, though few know why they must. A curse is laid upon the place. An unfaithful wife whom the priests denied repose with her ancestors is entombed yonder." He pointed toward an angle between an outstanding buttress and the limestone wall. "Her soul haunts him who comes here with the plea that her mummy be removed to On, where she dwelt in life, and laid with the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... colouring to a shade) appealed to an eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton who ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... have been the 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 ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... rock that gashed into sea and tempest between us and open ocean. So close were we that I looked to see our far-reeling skysail-yards strike the face of the rock. So close were we, no more than a biscuit toss from its iron buttress, that as we sank down into the last great trough between two seas I can swear every one of us held breath and waited for ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... out a walie hammer; About the knottit buttress clam'er; Alang the steep roof stoyt an' stammer, A gate mis-chancy; On the aul' spire, the bells' hie cha'mer, Dance your ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... every defacement that the alternate neglect and good-will of the Underwoods could perpetrate. The grand tower at the west end was, however, past their power to spoil, and they had not done much damage to the exterior, except in a window or buttress here and there. But within! The brothers, used to the heavy correctness of the St. Oswald's restoration, stood aghast when Abednego admitted them by the door of excommunication, straight into the chancel, magnificently deep, but with the meanest of rails, a reredos where Moses and ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mistaken." In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices, however absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about them! Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave and the theatre. The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this singular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and physical or logical truth. An ethical proposition may be correct or incorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is good as a means, that ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... majority meant nothing; his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf any longer—he had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his every word. Day by day he grew stronger and day by day the sinister ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... which there blocked their course, they had followed the level and open beach at the foot of the cliff, aware, of course, of the gap which Felix had found. While they were talking, Felix saw the cloud of dust raised by the sheep as the flocks wound round a jutting buttress of cliff. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... before, That change they covet makes them suffer more. All other errors but disturb a state; But innovation is the blow of fate. 800 If ancient fabrics nod, and threat to fall, To patch their flaws, and buttress up the wall, Thus far 'tis duty: but here fix the mark; For all beyond it is to touch the ark. To change foundations, cast the frame anew, Is work for rebels, who base ends pursue; At once divine and human laws control, And mend the parts ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... animals, in the familiar drama of coral-building. The coral polyp saturates itself with the lime-salts of the sea-water, much as the bone-corpuscles with those of the blood and lymph, and thus protects itself in life and becomes the flying buttress ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the summit 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 ample bends. Shadow nor image there is seen; all smooth The rampart and the path, reflecting nought But the rock's sullen hue. "If here we ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... arches are not thick; the causeway on the top is only just broad enough for three men to walk abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls that scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct in all these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by no buttress, has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combined with such prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense of science and self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None but Romans could have built such a monument, and have ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the life and safety of our 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 ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... noticed that one of the combs in a beehive, owing to 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 Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... 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 ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... its western side," says a sentimental voyager long ago, "where it faces the black buttress of Albemarle. I walked beneath groves of trees—not very lofty, and not palm trees, or orange trees, or peach trees, to be sure—but, for all that, after long sea-faring, very beautiful to walk under, even though ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... night she lay at his feet to be ready at the first peep of dawn to buttress a purpose that she feared was still weak, and whilst he slept fitfully, she slept not at all, but lay ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... wall, with an inch or two of powdery snow on it, and then up a sloping buttress on to the flat roof of the house. It was a miserable business for Blenkiron, who would certainly have fallen if he could have seen what was below him, and Peter and I had to stand to attention all the time. Then began a more difficult job. Hussin pointed ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, 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, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... some ten feet distant, a little table-land of grass projected from the face of the cliff—the green top of a flying buttress, ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... during its first year; in the second it is apt to deteriorate. Coach to Chtillon, 12 m. S.E. Die, on the Drme, is in a small plain surrounded by mountains, of which the most remarkable is Mont Glandaz, 6648 ft. above the sea, flanked by great buttress cliffs. On the top is an undulating plateau, covered with small stones and grass; 5 hrs. required for the ascent. At the foot of the mountain is the rustic but not uncomfortable establishment of Sallires-les-Bains; ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... slight stir among the bushes attracted his attention. Slipping behind a corner of the buttress, he waited, somewhat sheltered from the dripping rain by the overhanging ivy. He had not long to stand shivering there. A ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... hence in a fresh light. But this reconstruction means travail of thought. Easier than thinking with surrender of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking about for something with which to buttress it against attack. ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... right, some ten feet distant, a little table-land of grass projected from the face of the cliff—the green top of a flying buttress, as ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... 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 ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... we entered a suspicious-looking place. On the right was a stony buttress, along whose base the stream, when there is one, flows; and to this depression was our road limited by the rocks and thorn-trees, which filled the other half of the channel. The left side was a precipice, grim and barren, but not so abrupt as ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... much importance, may be observed, which commences at the fourth cervical vertebra, and is greatest at about the sixth, seventh, or eighth vertebra; this consists in the haemal descending processes being united to the body of the vertebra by a sort of buttress. This structure may be observed in Cochins, Polish, some Hamburghs, and probably other breeds; but is absent, or barely developed, in Game, Dorking, Spanish, Bantam, and several other breeds examined ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... splint, lap, bar, rod, boom, sprit^, outrigger; ratlings^. staff, stick, crutch, alpenstock, baton, staddle^; bourdon^, cowlstaff^, lathi^, mahlstick^. post, pillar, shaft, thill^, column, pilaster; pediment, pedicle; pedestal; plinth, shank, leg, socle^, zocle^; buttress, jamb, mullion, abutment; baluster, banister, stanchion; balustrade; headstone; upright; door post, jamb, door jamb. frame, framework; scaffold, skeleton, beam, rafter, girder, lintel, joist, travis^, trave^, corner stone, summer, transom; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... hand, entitled 'An Everlasting Task for Arminians.' Turning aside for a moment to drive some weary operative with a word as rough as a driver uses to his over-driven horse, he would return to the 'Everlasting Task,' and cull some choice sentence or read some twisted text used to buttress up the Calvinistic creed. Reading aloud to himself the words—'Real Christian charity is swallowed up in the Will of God, nor is it in its nature to extend itself one step beyond, nor desire one thing contrary to, the glory of Jehovah. ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... surveyors came to take a view of their work of measurement, they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress) to support the building, which tottered on that false foundation. It was evident that the goodness of the soil, the number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution, made such ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... did of every project of his wife's. Lady Cumnor's character was perhaps a little too ponderous for him 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 his ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... "have it out" with James. That might be rather dreadful; it might take her where she must refuse to go—but on the whole, she didn't think it need. The certainty that she couldn't go to Norway, that James must be made to see it, was a moral buttress. Timidity of James would not prevail against it. Besides that, deeply within herself, lay the conviction that James was kind if you took him the right way. He was irritable, and very annoying when he was sarcastic; but he was good ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... 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
... having leaped from his engine, the latter darted alone at full speed for London. Notice was immediately given by telegraph to London and other stations; and, while the line was kept clear, an engine and other arrangements were prepared as a buttress to receive the runaway, while all connected with the station awaited in awful suspense the expected shock. The superintendent of the railway also started down the line on an engine, and on passing the runaway he reversed his engine and had it transferred at the next crossing to the up-line, so as ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... the storm o'er horizons unseen, that will lay them in dust, Crashings of plunder'd cloisters, and royal insatiate lust:— Far, unseen, unheard!—Meanwhile the great Minster on high Like a stream of music, aspiring, harmonious, springs to the sky:— Story on story ascending their buttress'd beauty unfold, Till the highest height is attain'd, and the Cross shines star-like in gold, Set as a meteor in heaven; a sign of health and release:— And the land rejoices below, and the heart-song of England ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... produce. It is as clean and smooth as the flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as a Greek statue. It curves out toward the base as if planted there to resist the pressure of worlds—probably the most majestic single granite column or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is over three thousand feet above you. Across the valley, nearly opposite, rise the Cathedral Rocks to nearly the same height, while farther along, beyond El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at about the same dizzy height. Near the head of the great ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... 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 transept and ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... from being bewitched. He knows who has had money and how much, having reasoned out the matter by inference. He could sell himself to-morrow, but is incorruptible, and will remain a strong rock to the faith, will still buttress up the true hierarchy of heaven. He cannot be bought, and this is strange, for he never ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... enormous eel which frequented the upper end of the lake. But he exhausted all his ingenuity in this endeavour without success. The monster had a secure retreat among the submerged roots of an old buttress tree, beneath an overhanging bank, from which Max daily lured him forth by throwing crumbs into the water; but, after devouring the food that was thrown to him, he would immediately return to his stronghold ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Tr. 15) contains several small sketches of sections and exterior views of the Dome; some of them show buttress-walls shaped as inverted arches. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... westward across the desert. The young May moon was sinking to rest, its pure pallid light shining faintly in contrast with the ruddy glow of some distant beacon in the mountains beneath. Ever since nightfall the rock buttress at the pass had been reflecting the lurid glare of the leaping flames as, time and again, unseen but busy hands heaped on fresh fuel and sent the sparks whirling in fiery eddies to the sky. Languid and depressed ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... emotion, as to give relief to his own. Though now well on the wrong side of sixty, John Knott was hale and vigorous as ever. His rough-hewn countenance bore even closer resemblance, perhaps, to that of some stone gargoyle carved on cathedral buttress or spout. But his hand was no less skilful, his tongue no less ready in denunciation of all he reckoned humbug, his heart no less deeply touched, for all his superficial irascibility, by the pains, and sins, and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Fellfoot, we observed six stripes of snow near the top of the cliff, being very conspicuous at a great distance, when viewed from the southward. These stripes, which are formed by the drift of snow between the buttress-like projections before described, and which remained equally conspicuous on our return the following year, have probably at all times much the same appearance, at least about this season of the year, and may, on this ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... 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 is our own!" 'Tis done—the battlements come crashing ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the Gods!—most of the—by your head! Patricius, that was a man, I think; armed too; who looked forth from behind yon buttress of the bridge." ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... build. His eyes, his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face showed a sunburn whitening. It had passed through strange climates. He had the look, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... grass plot before the door, burnished pigeons cooed, and trod their stately minuet, their iridescent plumage showing every opaline splendor as the sunlight smote them; and on a buttress of the clock tower, a lonely hedge-sparrow poured his heart out in that peculiarly pathetic threnody which no other feathered throat contributes to the varied volume of bird lays. Poised on the point of an iron spike in the line that bristled along the wall, a mocking ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... There was a buttress of Notre Dame, a black arch of the Pont Neuf, part of an old courtyard in the Faubourg St. Germain,—all very fresh and striking. Yet, with the recollection of his poverty in her mind, she could not help ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... throb with the fear Of bringing his house about his one ear; And his people came round it, quite a throng, To buttress the walls and make them strong: A full month he sat, and felt like a mome Not daring to shout his Bing, ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Captain Arms, who should surely have known the lay of the land about his childhood's home, had been so interested in their talk that before they were aware of the danger the great vessel had run her nose upon a projecting buttress of the mountain. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... the transept is the choir, with a clerestory of four lofty Perpendicular windows of four lights each, with a bold flying buttress between ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... dome-arches. Their thrust is neutralized by the use of ties and by the barrel vaults of the cross arms, and these in their turn depend on the thickness of the walls. The lower buildings attached to the church in the form of side-chapels and the narthex also helped to stiffen and buttress the cross walls. The system is by no means perfect in these late churches. It was apparently found impossible to construct drum domes of any size, except at the extreme risk of their falling in, and probably it is for this reason that many of the larger domes in late churches, ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... said Waterloo. 'If people jump off straight forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they are seldom killed by drowning, but are smashed, poor things; that's what THEY are; they dash themselves upon the buttress of the bridge. But you jump off,' said Waterloo to me, putting his fore- finger in a button-hole of my great-coat; 'you jump off from the side of the bay, and you'll tumble, true, into the stream under the arch. What you have got to do, is to mind how you jump in! There was poor Tom Steele ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... although the doors and window-shutters were well fastened, every object without was distinctly seen through the jointed beams. Paul, followed by Domingo, went with intrepidity from one cottage to another, notwithstanding the fury of the tempest; here supporting a partition with a buttress, there driving in a stake, and only returning to the family to calm their fears, by the hope that the storm was passing away. Accordingly, in the evening the rains ceased, the trade-winds of the south pursued their ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... bunch weighing as much as 120 lb. to 160 lb. and comprising as many as forty-eight dozen individual bananas. So great is the weight that to prevent the downfall of the plant a stake sharpened at each end—one to stick in the ground and the other into the soft stem—is needed to buttress it. Before the fruit has fully developed, other shoots have appeared; but each plant bears but one bunch, and when that is removed the plant is decapitated and slowly decays, and the second and third and fourth shoots from the rhizome successively arrive ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... 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 ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... they to the Gate, and lo! the Bride thereby, leaning against a buttress, gazing with no dull eyes at the coming throng. She was now clad in her woman's attire again, to wit a light flame- coloured gown over a green kirtle; but she yet bore a gilded helm on her head and a sword girt to her side in token of her oath to the God. ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... 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 as though a great sound-proof door ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... rounded the shoulder of the overhanging cliff. 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 the mountain. ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the light was, it aided the poor fugitives at that dead hour of night to find an angle between the church wall and a buttress where the eaves afforded a little shelter from the rain, which slackened a little, when they were a little concealed from the road, so that the light need not betray them in case any passenger was abroad at such an hour, as two ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... entrance has been a spiral staircase, leading to the rooms above and to the top of the castle, which has had a flat roof, surrounded by a parapet and several turrets. The walls of this tower are very strong and firm; a deep buttress is placed at each corner, and one against the middle of each side wall. A small square tower has stood at the southern corner, but the greater part of it has been thrown down by the sea. The foundation of one side wall is also ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... porter who let Raphael out told him somewhat insolently, that his mistress would see no one, and receive no messages: but he had made up his mind: complained of the sun, quietly ensconced himself behind a buttress, and sat coiled up on the pavement, ready for a desperate spring. The slave stared at him: but he was accustomed to the vagaries of philosophers; and thanking the gods that he was not born in ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... closed.... So long as the stories multiply in various lands, and so few are positively explained away, it is bad method to ignore them.'[13] Here they are not ignored, because, whatever the cause or causes of the phenomena, they would buttress, if they did not originate, the savage belief in spirits tenanting inanimate matter, whence came Fetishism. As to facts, we cannot, of course, 'explain away' events of this kind, which we know only through report. A conjurer cannot ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the brief consideration of a few other words that have been dealt with unfairly, in order, if not to found, at all events to buttress, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... forest that the scene below them seemed to them all to be the most beautiful that had ever gladdened the eyes of men. Imagine a valley about five miles in length, narrowing at each end, and opening out about the centre to a width of two miles, the sides of grass sloping up to a buttress of rock, and rippling along the whole length into folds, with little valleys in between—narrow at the summit, where they joined the rock-wall, and wide at the base, where they opened out on the parent valley, through which flowed a broad stream, fringed ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... more closely, saw the dark shadow of a man's body pressed against the inside buttress of the corner of the Cathedral wall. The shadow crouched, the body all drawn together as though folding in upon itself to hide its ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... It lay nestled within the bosom of this cone at a depth of just where, on the outside, the green began. The sun had set early upon it and it now lay a grayish-blue surface surrounded by a luxuriant tangle of growing things. In a circle about it stood the dark buttress of the lava sides. It was like a turquoise set in stone. The contrast to its surroundings was as startling as a living eye of faultless ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... river, which flows nearly round the cathedral close, being on the side furthest from the town. The London road crosses the river by a pretty one-arched bridge, and, looking from this bridge, the stranger will see the windows of the old men's rooms, each pair of windows separated by a small buttress. A broad gravel walk runs between the building and the river, which is always trim and cared for; and at the end of the walk, under the parapet of the approach to the bridge, is a large and well-worn seat, on which, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... deepest commiseration and sorrow. We long to see him escape from the black cloud which, by what may fairly be called his "black art," he has conjured up around himself. We hope to know him as a future buttress of his shaken country, and as a friend of his yet "unknown God." Should this change, by the mercy of God, take place, what pangs would many passages of his present work cost him! Happy should we be, could we persuade ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... 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 ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... made by cutting out a piece of strong canvas into the shape of the animal, and painting it properly. Loops are sewn in different places, through which sticks are passed, to stretch the curves into shape: a stake, planted in the ground serves as a buttress to support the apparatus: at a proper height, there is a loophole to fire through. It packs up into a roll of canvas and a bundle of five ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... caught it and tossed it from echo to echo. It was not loud but immensely prevalent. Those wayfarers who had fled came back to the brink of the hill and those who had stood their ground walked out into the grass to look back. Around the curve of a buttress of rock that stood out at the line of the road, the head of a column of Roman cavalry appeared. The superb color-bearer bore on his hip the staff supporting ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... mean what they do not mean in their grammatical and obvious sense. Thus, men of every school, under the mighty names of men who knew the truth—but who could only give such portion of truth as they deemed man at the time was able to receive—use their names to buttress up mistaken interpretations, and thus walls are continually built up to block ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... were dead in three months, 100 of the others were invalided, and only 25 remained fit for duty. From a further body of 150 men sent as a reinforcement, half were reported on the sick list the day after their arrival. The main buttress of the Khedive's authority in this region was therefore hollow and erected on an insecure foundation. The Egyptian soldiers possessed firearms, and the natives, in their ignorance that they could not shoot straight, were afraid of them; but the natural progress of knowledge would inevitably ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... But I decided at last upon disembarking Jarl and Samoa, to seek out and conciliate the natives. So, landing them upon a jutting buttress of coral, whence they waded to the shore; I pushed off with Yillah into the water beyond, to ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the center of a devil's drama. It is society's attitude to her that is unthinkable. By men she is used for their pleasure and then despised and scorned. By women she is held an outcast, and yet she is the main buttress of the immunity of ordinary women from danger and temptation. She is the creation of men who traffic in lust and yet is held shameless by her patrons. She is the product of the social sins for which we are all responsible, and ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... 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 ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... in God is not of so detached a character as this advice assumes. In the course of ages the belief in God has acquired associations that give it the character of a highly obstructive force. It has become so entangled with inculcated notions of right and wrong that it is everywhere used as a buttress for institutions which have either outgrown their utility, or are in need of serious modification in the interests of the race. The opposition encountered in any attempt to deal with marriage, divorce, or education, are examples of the way in which religious ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... passes over 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to an eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton who ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... then, the sole trust of these imposters was in their own statements; but before the coming of Christ again to the earth, when the cry will often be "Lo here is Christ," and "Lo there is Christ," these imposters will buttress their claims with the ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooners aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... 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
... Under slow but resistless pressure the strata of the Appalachian trough were thrust against the rigid land, and slowly, steadily bent into long folds whose axes ran northeast-southwest parallel to the ancient coast line. It was on the eastern side next the buttress of the land that the deformation was the greatest, and the folds most steep and close. In central Pennsylvania and West Virginia the folds were for the most part open. South of these states the folds were more closely appressed, the strata were much broken, and the great thrust ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... party of six Englishmen with six Oberland guides, who left the inn at 3 A.M. on July 20, 1862, were not, perhaps, in a specially poetical mood. Yet as the sun rose while we were climbing the huge buttress of the Moench, the dullest of us—I refer, of course, to myself—felt something of the spirit of the scenery. The day was cloudless, and a vast inverted cone of dazzling rays suddenly struck upward into the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... offers us in the pinnacle and flying buttress a striking example of the adoption of a mechanical feature, and its transformation into an element of beauty. Nothing could at first sight be more hopeless than the external half-arch propping the side of a pier, or the chimney-like weight of stones pressing ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... summit 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 ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... for hundreds of miles westward, and then begins to slope toward the Atlantic Ocean in the far distance. Sometimes, as in Central Africa, the slope to the west is very sudden, and another range of mountains forms the western buttress of the great central plateau. All the great rivers of Africa, with the exception of the Niger, rise on this plateau or on its mountain-flanks, which have a very high rainfall. The bush, or great forest, which is almost impenetrable in the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... qualities which Lincoln exhibited in the White House: "Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind; it is not aggressive so much as passive; and among passive things, it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that, to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end.... Slow and careful in coming to resolutions, willing to talk with ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... devices usually referring more to the past, than to the future. There is a large old church, just at the extremity of the village, and just below the castle, on the slope of the hill. The gray wall of the castle extends along the road a considerable distance, in good repair, with here and there a buttress, and the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... men in medical purple hurried to and fro. From this room came groans and wailing. He had an impression of an empty blood-stained couch, of men on other couches, bandaged and blood-stained. It was just a glimpse from a railed footway and then a buttress hid the place and they were going ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... 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 becomes a dyke ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the ground with fragments, and all that remained standing, in addition to a portion of the apse, where five columns of the central nave, still upholding a shred of entablature, and four cyclopean buttress-piers on which the dome had rested—piers which still arose, isolated and superb, looking indestructible among all the surrounding downfall. But a denser mist flowed past, another thousand years no doubt went by, and then nothing whatever ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... succeeded in passing safely round this frowning buttress of the mountains, Alexander turned northward, and advanced into the very heart of Asia Minor. In doing this he had to pass over the range which he had come round before; and, as it was winter, his army were, for a time, enveloped in snows and storms among the wild and frightful defiles. ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray. When the broken arches are dark in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; Wnen silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the howlet to hoot o'er the dead man's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... little temple 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 fastidious historian may ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... noticed Mannering, who, from the position which he had taken to watch Meg Merrilies's incantations, had the appearance of some one who was concealing himself, being half hidden by the buttress behind which he stood. The Captain, for such he styled himself, made a sudden and startled pause, and thrust his right hand into his bosom between his jacket and waistcoat as if to draw some weapon. 'What ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that the trace forked into two—one going around the tops of the decaying branches, while the other took the direction of the roots; which, with the soil still adhering to them, formed a rounded buttress-like wall of full ten feet in diameter. The trunk itself was not over five—that being about the thickness of the tree. It was a matter of choice which of the two paths should be followed: since both appeared to come together ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... "Mine eyes have often striven to pierce those stone walls, and see him lying there in that narrow chamber, or forcing his way upwards, to catch a glimpse of the blue sky above him. When I have seen the swallows settle on the old buttress, or the thin grass growing between the stones waving there, I ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... nose had changed its shape considerably, and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... by the Puerta de Rochapea which gives exit to the city on the northern side. It had been sunny since morning, and the snow had melted from the roads, but the hills across the plain were still white and great drifts were piled against the ramparts, forming a natural buttress from the summit of the steep river bank almost to the deep embrasures ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 drawbridge ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself the task of explaining to the Indians that we wanted to land, a want that they grasped directly; the leader nodding and pointing forward beyond a sudden bend of the river, where it made a sweep to our right round a towering buttress of rock, which projected so far that it seemed to block up the channel, and turn the place into a lake. Then bending once more to their paddles, they set up their monotonous chant, and in about an hour we were round the great rocky buttress, ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... Europe is at its height, she still groans under the unrestricted despotism of an autocrat. Here the effects of progress that obtain elsewhere seem inverted. Such advance as is made in civilization and knowledge is used to buttress imperial tyranny and the knout is wielded more cruelly than ever before. We behold liberal institutions overthrown and a whole people held in bondage worse than slavery. We hear of families torn asunder, of ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... set, and dusk was already falling, when half frantic with fear, I at length made out a crevice which appeared to offer a possible means of saving my life. It ran diagonally across the rock at a steep angle upwards, going out of my sight around a big buttress that overhung me, and I could not tell whether it reached to the actual top or not. But it was my only chance, and with my heart in my mouth I made my way towards it. I could just reach it, and setting my teeth and summoning all my courage, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the 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 ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... was essential for his rescue. The effort now on these icy steeps might cost either man or beast a broken limb, if no more. With an instinct of self-protection the animal had chosen the lee of a great buttress of the cliff, and could stand there safely all night though the temperature should fall still lower. The young pack-man called out a word or two of encouragement, listening fearfully as the sound struck back in the silence from the icy bank of the river, the craggy ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... is a very fine house you've got over you;" throwing his eye again towards a wooden buttress which supported one of ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
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