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More "Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and size, in London! Evidently the house was still shut up. The people who owned it were now living the same cumbrous, magnificent life in the country which they would soon come up to live in the capital. Honors, parks, money, birth—all were theirs, as naturally as the sun rose. Julie envied and hated the big house and all it stood for; ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the side of the place against which he had been leaning, drew himself up, and applied his eyes to one of the cracks, just as a voice seemed to be calling out in the Malay tongue at three of the great cumbrous-looking beasts which were about a couple of ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... naturally enough to the faults of husbands. Now, although we are inclined to think that these are greatly exaggerated, and that married men are, on the whole, very good—excellent men and citizens, brave men, battling with the world and its difficulties, and carrying forward the cumbrous machine in its path of progress and civilization—although we think that, as a class, their merits are actually not fully appreciated, and that the bachelors (sly fellows!) get very much the best of it—still, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... spread his neckcloth, spotless, enveloping, cumbrous, reverence-compelling, a cravat worthy of a Moderator. And indeed the Doctor—our Doctor, parish minister of Eden Valley, had "passed the Chair" of the General Assembly. We were all proud of the fact, even top-lofty Cameronians ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... We must own ourselves under the law first, own our bodies, our earnings, our genius, and our consciences; then we will turn to the lesser matter of what shall be the garniture of the body. Was the old Roman less a man in his cumbrous toga, than Washington in his tights? Was Christ less a Christ in His vesture, woven without a seam, than He would have been in the suit of a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... artist. Upon the walls hung a few pictures of female saints, bedecked with garlands of flowers, which showed them to be objects of devotion and respect in the eyes of the possessor. Among all this confusion, space was scarcely left, in the small chamber of the artist, for the pallet-bed and cumbrous press that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Liverpool, and settle in that town. The sloop commanded by Newton was found defective in the stern port; and, as it would take some little time to repair her, Newton had obtained leave for a few days to accompany his father on his journey. The trunk picked up at sea, being too cumbrous, was deposited with the articles of least value, in the charge of Mr Dragwell; the remainder was taken away by Newton, until he could find a more secure place for their deposit. On their arrival at Liverpool, with little money ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... tortures, so that the Inquisitor who, for whatever reason, accompanied the victim into the torture chamber, was thereby rendered irregular, and could not exercise his office again, until he had obtained the necessary dispensation. The tribunals complained of this cumbrous mode of administration, and declared that it hindered them from properly interrogating the accused. Every effort was made to have the prohibition against clerics being present in the torture chamber ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... of an advanced KRIYA YOGI is influenced, not by effects of past actions, but solely by directions from the soul. The devotee thus avoids the slow, evolutionary monitors of egoistic actions, good and bad, of common life, cumbrous and snail-like to the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... out of office, and one unfavourable to him came in. The Hon. Malcolm Cameron, a hostile member of the cabinet—although he afterwards became a personal friend of Dr. Ryerson—having concocted a singularly crude and cumbrous school bill, aimed to oust Dr. Ryerson from office, it was (as was afterwards explained) taken on trust, and, without examination or discussion, passed into a law. Dr. Ryerson at once called the attention of the Government ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... essays by Johnson in the Spectator vein, issued in 1750-52, but written in that "stiff and cumbrous style which," as Professor Saintsbury remarks, "has been rather unjustly identified with Johnson's manner ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... removed, the judicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the accession of William IV.] The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly jobbery and purposeless profusion. It retained all "the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment," though all its usage and accommodation had "shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance." The outlay was enormous. The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing unfathomable. Waste was the rule in every ...
— Burke • John Morley
... Cherish the tulip, prune the vine, But freely let the woodbine twine, And leave untrimm'd the eglantine: Nay, my friend, nay,—since oft thy praise Hath given fresh vigour to my lays; Since oft thy judgment could refine My flatten'd thought or cumbrous line, Still kind, as is thy wont, attend, And in the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... of March, Napoleon had been at Compiegne, denouncing the cumbrous machinery of etiquette which was retarding the happy moment when he should at last see his new wife and enfold her in his arms. He had had the castle repaired and richly furnished, that it might be worthy to receive a daughter of the Caesars. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... the half-dozen negresses employed in the work moved with alacrity and precision. But what with beating carpets, scrubbing floors, and turning things topsy-turvy in general, the task was not accomplished with any considerable despatch. A man is a cumbrous article at house-cleaning time, as any housewife will aver, and Mr. Grundy, recognizing this fact, betook himself to the neighboring Little Beach River to fish, and let "the boss" tear up things to her heart's content. His request that I should accompany him was almost a warning, ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... That makes her loved at home, revered abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings; "An honest man's the noblest work of God:"{24} And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp?—a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Titianesque look in this particular. This innovation was a healthy one, and led to very noble results when followed up by succeeding artists: but in many of Giotto's compositions the figures become ludicrously cumbrous, from the exceeding simplicity of the terminal lines, and massiveness of unbroken form. The manner was copied in illuminated manuscripts with great disadvantage, as it was unfavourable to minute ornamentation. The French never adopted it in either branch of art, nor did any other ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... An inscription at Killeen Cormac, Co. Kildare, survives which seems to show that the Roman alphabet was known in Ireland in pagan times. Ogam is an alphabet suitable enough for chiselling upon stones, but too cumbrous for the purposes of literature. For this the Roman alphabet must have been used. The Ogam script consists of a number of short lines straight or slanting, and drawn either below, above, or through one long stem-line. This stem-line ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... troops, who are under the immediate command of the Commander-in-Chief, the Prince of Orange. The English volunteers being the next to the Prince's regiment of Guards, followed close upon the main body of the army, and behind them trailed the long, cumbrous baggage train. The rear-guard, together with some details of various kinds and nations, consisted of the Spanish division, which was commanded by Prince Vaudemont. As they came to higher ground Claverhouse began to see the lie of the country, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... demonstrate to the Philippine people that one of its ends is to combat with a firm hand the inveterate vices of the Spanish administration, substituting for personal luxury and that pompous ostentation which have made it a mere matter of routine, cumbrous and slow in its movements, another administration more modest, simple and prompt in performing the public service: I ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... remain longest, though not perhaps finally, sacred from the grasp of a tyrannical government. But let there be a demand for capital to support a profitable commerce, and the mass is at once consigned to the furnace, and, ceasing to be a vain and cumbrous ornament of the banquet, becomes a potent and active agent for furthering the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... carried down with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists, uncontaminated by the sloughs of superstition. And all that there is of justice, kindness and beauty embodied in our cumbrous forms will live perennially, when the forms themselves have been ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... and ready to perform any more pleasing duties they might be required; they were however so ugly, that not much self-denial was required in declining their offers. They were dressed in red, with abundance of cumbrous silver ornaments, and dirty leggings; one was ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... fire, I see Eight sorry carts, no less a train! 835 Unworthy successors of thee, Come straggling through the wind and rain: And oft, as they pass slowly on, Beneath my windows, [69] one by one, See, perched upon the naked height 840 The summit of a cumbrous freight, A single traveller—and there Another; then perhaps a pair— The lame, the sickly, and the old; Men, women, heartless with the cold; 845 And babes in wet and starveling plight; Which once, [70] be weather as it might, Had still a nest within a nest, Thy shelter—and their ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... giving a less imperfect impression of his powers as a critic than any other piece that could have been chosen The truth is that, great in talk and supreme in poetry, Coleridge was lost directly he sat down to express himself in prose His style is apt to be cumbrous, and his matter involved. We feel that the critic himself was greater than any criticism recorded either in his writings or his lectures The present extract may be defined as an attempt, and an attempt less inadequate than was common with ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... posts; and whilst the cumbrous screw was descending slowly into the water, the stokers had roused the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... by the farmer and the trader as fit only "for women in childbed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly-figured gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to play its part ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... again of what is called intellectual life, the life of thought. It is "of the Father," indeed. We picture to ourselves the pure joy of God in thought. Free from so many of our cumbrous processes, free from the limitations of slow-moving time, free from all imperfection, with an instantaneous thought as is His being, the intellect that is the center of all reason revolves in its unfathomed ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... elegance or simplicity is wanting in the intercourse of society, for all that is cumbrous in its proceedings, for any bad taste, and much for any coarseness that it tolerates, woman, as European manners are constituted, is exclusively responsible. The habits of daily intercourse represent her faults and virtues as naturally as a shadow is cast by the sun, or the image ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... recalls "Men and Women" rather than the "Fifines," the "Hohenstiel-Schwangaus," and the "Red Cotton Nightcap Countries" of a later and less happily-inspired period. "Ferishtah's Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day" was the rather cumbrous title of a still later volume; and last of all appeared "Asolando," a work which displays all the old qualities, the old fire, and the old audacity, apparently untouched by advancing years, or even by imminent death. He died the same month that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... state in which we are forced to present his observations, clearly shews the inherent vices of the Mogul government, through which it so rapidly fell into anarchy, and was torn in pieces by its own cumbrous and ill-managed strength. Perhaps the archives of the East India Company are still able to supply this deficiency in the history of its original establishment; and it were surely worthy of the more than princely grandeur of that great ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... While discarding the cumbrous ceremonial of the Roman Church, on the ground that it was not only overloaded with superfluous ornament, but too fatally disfigured by irrational, superstitious, or impious observances to be susceptible of correction or adaptation to the wants of their infant congregations, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines, or water-sprites. German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting them, in works of fiction, for the more cumbrous mythology of Greece and Rome. The sylphs, more especially, have been the favourites of the bards, and have become so familiar to the popular mind as to be, in a manner, confounded with that other race of ideal beings, the fairies, who can boast of an antiquity much ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... that all the spears and javelins did not fall ineffectual, as when thrown on the same level, (as is generally the case,) but being steadied by their own weight they took effect; and the Gauls weighed down by the weapons, with which they had their bodies transfixed, or their shields rendered too cumbrous by those sticking in them. When they advanced almost up the steep at a run, becoming irresolute, they at first halted; then when the very delay shook the courage of the one party, and raised that of the enemy, being then pushed backwards they fell one upon the other, and produced a ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... Adventures of Roderick Random" (the cumbrous full titles of earlier fiction are for apparent reasons frequently curtailed in the present treatment), published when the author was twenty-seven, he avails himself of a residence of some years in Jamaica to depict life in that quarter of the world at a time when the local color had the charm ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... my feet ran down a crystall spring Which did the cumbrous pebbles hoarsly chide For standing in the way. Though murmuring The broken stream his course did rightly guide And strongly pressing forward with disdain The ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... (Plate 74, Figs. 2 and 3) are thick, heavy, cumbrous weapons, made out of the wood used for making wooden dishes. The outer surfaces are convex, and the inner ones concave, the natural convexity of the circular trunk of the tree from which they are made being retained. These shields are 4 1/2 to 5 feet long, and usually about 15 or ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... emotion,—fluid humanity. Out of this arise his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea, and as man is daily built up out of the liquids of the body. We cannot taste, much less assimilate, a solid until it becomes a liquid; and your great idea, your sermon or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous mass unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emotional power. Herein I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as a poem. It has too much solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not ride the waves buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the sun-scorched backs. What are they? old editions of classics, old volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes, the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take one down: it is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the bumpy page crackles faintly; the ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that are found at full length either in the text or footnotes are omitted here. Many more might have been added, but it is thought best to omit them because of their cumbrous titles, their scant interest to the average reader, and their inaccessibility, being found only in the largest libraries or among rare Americana. For similar reasons, works strictly theological in character are also not listed. Any sizable library ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... essentially modern, Dorothy decided, while she was dressing, to have all the furniture taken out into the back yard, where she could look it over at her leisure. She would make a bonfire of most of it, or, better yet, have it cut into wood for the fireplace. Thus Uncle Ebeneezer's cumbrous bequest might ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... began boat-building, preparatory to resuming their journey. The batteau was too cumbrous for use toward the head waters of the Missouri, and it was to be sent back to St. Louis. To take its place, canoes were fashioned from green cottonwood planks. Cottonwood lumber is full of whims and caprices,—bending, twisting, cracking like brown paper, ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... began. The Frari had taken their position on the right, under the elaborate hanging tomb of Fra Pacifico—a mass of sculpture, rococo, and gilding; the incense rising from the censer swinging below the coffin of the saint carried the eye insensibly upward to the grotesque canopy, where cumbrous marble clouds were compacted of dense masses of saints' and cherubs' heads with uncompromising ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... May. Far down the Beautiful River, Past the Ohio shore and past the mouth of the Wabash, Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi, Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen. It was a band of exiles: a raft, as it were, from the shipwrecked Nation, scattered along the coast, now floating together, Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune; Men and women and children, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of drawing this cumbrous and unmanageable body into an ambuscade. He selected, accordingly, the narrowest and most dangerous part of the defile for the purpose, and stationed vast numbers of Norman soldiers, armed with javelins and arrows, upon the slopes of the hill on either side, concealing ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... immediate problem. He was groping for her hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on. They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was complete. He might as well have been embracing the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... by insisting on retaining certain duplicated formularies which the Committee had very properly dropped in order to find room for fresh material. But of the Book as first presented, it was possible to say that in no degree was it more cumbrous than that to which the people were already accustomed. Doubtless it would have been still more to the Committee's credit could they have brought in an enriched Book smaller by a third than the Book in use; but this ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... having a suit of armour well made." "What do you take that to be?" said Pistias. "I think," answered Socrates, "a suit of armour that is well made does not load the bearer so much as one ill made, even though it weigh as much. For ill-made arms, by pressing too much upon the shoulders, or hanging cumbrous on some other part, become almost insupportable, and greatly incommode the person that weareth them. But those arms which, as they ought, distribute an equal weight to all the parts of the body, that join upon ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... dramatic instinct, almost universal among young people, and which has almost no chance to exercise itself, except in the performance of the farces to which we are treated in "private theatricals." Can it not be put to a better use? It would be a cumbrous matter to represent or listen to the Aulularia, or the Miles Gloriosus, or the [Greek: Eirhene], in which Dr. Dee and his Scarabeus figured so successfully. The world is turned away from that[1]; but here is the magnificent wealth ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... to poetry. Women seem to me to possess just what our literature wants—a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase. We want some one who will do for our prose what Madame de Sevigne did for the prose of France. George Eliot's style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Bronte's too exaggerated. However, one must not forget that amongst the women of England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross's Three Generations of English Women, which ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... chin was embedded in a red comforter that rose to his ears. His trunk was first of all cased in a shirt of worsted stocking—net; over this he had a coarse linen shirt, then a thick cloth waistcoat; a shag jacket was the next layer, and over that was rigged the large cumbrous pea jacket, reaching to his knees. As for his lower spars, the rig was still more peculiar;—first of all, he had on a pair of most comfortable woollen stockings, what we call fleecy hosiery—and the beauties are peculiarly nice in this respect—then ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... dim I hear A thin voice pipingly revived of late, Which saith our India is a cumbrous weight, An idle decoration, bought too dear. The wiser world contemns not gorgeous gear; Just pride is no mean factor in a State; The sense of greatness keeps a nation great; And mighty they who mighty can appear. It may be that if hands of greed could steal From England's ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... produces more the impression of a great church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean and compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold at the apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that he works with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the most cunning of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal screen, covered with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over a series of short columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a sought imitation of goldsmith's ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... before the opening of the session, a "general proclamation" was read in the great hall of Westminster, that hall built by William Rufus, the woodwork of which was replaced by Richard II., and that has been lately cleared of its cumbrous additions.[684] This proclamation forbids each and all to come to the place where Parliament sits, "armed with hoquetons, armor, swords, and long knives or other sorts of weapons;" for such serious troubles have been the result of this wearing of arms that business has been impeded, and ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... broad-brimmed white beaver hat, such as may be seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings. She rode a sleek white pony, and was followed by a footman in rich livery, mounted on an over-fed hunter. At a little distance in the rear came an ancient cumbrous chariot, drawn by two very corpulent horses, driven by as corpulent a coachman, beside whom sat a page dressed in a fanciful green livery. Inside of the chariot was a starched prim personage, with a look somewhat between a lady's ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the tenant of a large cumbrous carriage, which, drawn heavily on by four stout horses wended slowly on the King's Highway, not very far from the spot where the wooden gates that we have described raised their white faces by the side of ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Stoneyhurst, he imbibed from refugee professors French idioms and a French standard of taste, while, strangely enough, O'Connell, to whom he was at first opposed, and of whom he became afterwards the first lieutenant, educated in France by British refugees, acquired the cumbrous English style of the Douay Bible and the Rheims Testament. The contrast between the two men was every way extreme; physically, mentally, and politically; but it is pleasant to know that their differences never degenerated ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... burial-ground with his men, and jumped upon the spot, which immediately gave out the soft notes as before. Africaner ordered an immediate exhumation, when the source of the mystery proved to be the pianoforte of the missionary's wife, which, being too cumbrous an article to take away, had been buried there, with the hope of being one day able to recover it. Never having seen such an instrument before, Africaner had it dissected for the sake of the brass wires; and ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning—flashing, smiting, and gone. In Church ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... help one; and the cheap reproductions of the writings of the earlier centuries, erring, as they do, on the side of indulgence, place it in the power of individuals of modest means to have at their elbows a representative assemblage, not necessarily a cumbrous one, of the literature from Chaucer to the present day, so that they may form a comparative estimate of the intellectual activity and wealth of successive ages, while, at the same time, the Greek and Latin authors are procurable in a collective shape, if they desire to compare notes ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... space to reproduce, testify to the heroism, religious zeal, and literary industry of the women who helped to build up the early civilization of New England. Their writings, for some presumed on authorship, are quaint and cumbrous; but in those days, when few men published books, it required marked courage for women to appear in print at all. They imitated the style popular among men, and received much attention for their literary ability. Charles T. Congdon, as the result of his explorations through ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... these cumbrous gauds, These veils oppress me! What officious hand Has tied these knots, and gather'd o'er my brow These clustering coils? How all conspires to add To ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... wreaths were placed. Ney's had just received its tribute of a beautiful garland of blue cornflowers: and the other a Chaplet of Honeysuckle. By both graves were weeping willows. Mr. Sotheby's friend, the poet Delille,[125] sleeps beneath a cumbrous mass of marble, within which his wife immerses herself once a week, to manifest sorrow for one whose incessant tormentor I am told she was during his life. The inscriptions were for the most part commonplace. I copied out a few of ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... Though Superstition and her wolfish brood Bay his mild radiance, impotent and fell; Calm in his halls of brightness he shall dwell! 5 For lo! RELIGION at his strong behest Starts with mild anger from the Papal spell, And flings to Earth her tinsel-glittering vest, Her mitred State and cumbrous Pomp unholy; And JUSTICE wakes to bid th' Oppressor wail 10 Insulting aye the wrongs of patient Folly; And from her dark retreat by Wisdom won Meek NATURE slowly lifts her matron veil To smile with fondness on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a striking picture is accorded, and no more. For this London, this England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... or tenth of July, in the afternoon; and the day being very sultry, the heat had oppressed me with langour, and I was all day as one laden with sleep. But no sooner had Mrs Aird told me this, than I felt the langour depart from me, as if a cumbrous cloak had been taken away, and I rose up a recruited and reanimated man. It was so much the end of my debility of body and sorrowing of mind, that she was loquacious with her surprise when she saw me, as it were, with a miraculous restoration, prepare myself to ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... of a few odd steps, diverging from the main staircase nearly opposite to Mrs Clennam's door. It could scarcely be said to be within call, the walls, doors, and panelling of the old place were so cumbrous; but it was within easy reach, in any undress, at any hour of the night, in any temperature. At the head of the bed and within a foot of Mrs Flintwinch's ear, was a bell, the line of which hung ready to Mrs Clennam's hand. Whenever this bell rang, up started Affery, and was ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... examine its beautiful structure; observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as ichthyosauri, while the watch, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... coinage. All silver that comes to their net is considered good fish. The standard coin is the Spanish dollar, but one will find every variety of European and American money in circulation among them. The method of clipping and weighing the small change might be thought somewhat cumbrous in European markets, for the dollar is cut up into eight sikajy, (each about sixpence); the sikajy into nine eranambatra, and each eranambatra into ten vary-venty, each of which last is about the weight of a plump grain of rice. ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... be too thankful to the Arabs their inventors) have made it. It is difficult to imagine how any thing like a long sum in multiplication or division could have been done with the Roman numerals, so cumbrous were they. The number, for instance, which we represent by the figures 89 would require for its expression no less than nine figures, LXXXVIIII. The boy was helped by using the fingers, the left hand being used to signify numbers below a hundred, and the right numbers above it. Sometimes his ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... Loud snores the cumbrous Poustiakoff With better half as cumbersome; Gvozdine, Bouyanoff, Petoushkoff And Flianoff, somewhat indisposed, On chairs in the saloon reposed, Whilst on the floor Monsieur Triquet In jersey and in nightcap lay. In Olga's and Tattiana's rooms Lay all ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... object of attraction to all strangers, but more so from the novelty and singularity of its construction than from its beauty. Utility rather than elegance was consulted by the builder. This far-famed structure is ugly and cumbrous, and a passenger feels a very unpleasing sensation if he happens to stand upon it when a loaded waggon drives along it at low water, at which time there is a considerable descent from the side of the suburbs. An undulatory motion is then occasioned, which goes on gradually ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... legislative work on drainage should be to revise and consolidate the law. On some points the law is duplicate, and on one triplicate. It is generally demanded that the law shall be less cumbrous and more summary. This can be done to some extent when it shall be found that the courts favor drainage. So far they have had a very tender feeling for complaints. When drainage shall be acknowledged to be lawful, laudable, and ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Indeed, we at the West, particularly, need a good, cheap, steam plow that can be made practicable for at least the better grade of farmers. The English plan of moldboards, that overcome all possible traction and necessitate the duplex stationary engines, with the cumbrous "artillery of attachments," may do for sluggish people but will never meet the wants of the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... twelve-year-old boy; and she carried, first, a baby; second, three salmon, each of which weighed not less than twenty pounds; third, a wild goose, weighing six or eight pounds; finally, a huge bundle of some kind of greens. This cumbrous and heavy load the Indian had lashed together with strong thongs, and the squaw carried it on her back, suspended by a strap which ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... matters. But the peculiar position of those others—perpendicularly overhead at a vast distance—necessitates a troublesome code of verbal signals, unintelligible to common folk, for the expression of mutual desires. You cannot have any god of this kind without some such cumbrous contrivance to bridge over the gulf and make communication possible. It is called theology. It complicates life very considerably. Yes," he pursued, "the vertical-god system is not only vulgar; it is perplexing and expensive. Think of the wastage, of the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... wars. And because I knew Waldron's word is ever less than his deed, and, belike, that I grow weary of sieges (seven have I withstood within these latter years) I, at dead of night, by devious and secret ways, stole forth of Thrasfordham—dight in this armour new-fashioned (the which, mark me! is more cumbrous than fair link-mail) howbeit, I got me clear, and my lord Beltane, here stand I to aid and abet thee in all thy desperate affrays, henceforth. Aha! methinks shall be great doings within the ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... all sides when required, but were otherwise open to the weather, and much encumbered with lading; but all things being in readiness, on the 3rd of June we took to the water, and, a photograph of the scene having been taken, shoved off from the Landing. The boats were furnished with long, cumbrous sweeps, yet not a whit too heavy, since numbers of them snapped with the vigorous strokes of the rowers during the trip. A small sweep, passed through a ring at the stern, served as a rudder, by far the best steering gear for the "sturgeons," ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... completely replaced the wet cell in this country, and as a result, the general type of wall set as shown in Figs. 142 and 143, has gradually replaced the old wet-cell type, which was more cumbrous and unsightly. It is usual on wall sets to provide some sort of a shelf, as indicated in Fig. 142, for the convenience of the user in ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... engines stopped. The mass of water that swayed the junk like a cork lifted the great ship high by the stern. The propeller began to revolve in air—for the third officer had corrected his signal to "full speed ahead" again—and the cumbrous Chinese vessel struck the Sirdar a terrible blow in the counter, smashing off the screw close to the thrust-block and wrenching ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... upon a wooden frame supported by four pairs of wheels, which had been constructed for its reception. A barrel of water, placed on another frame upon wheels, was attached to it as a tender. After a great deal of labour, the cumbrous machine was got upon the road. At first it would not move an inch. Its maker, Tommy Waters, became impatient, and at length enraged, and taking hold of the lever of the safety valve, declared in his desperation, that "either ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... best traditions both of Roman and barbarian government, could not have obtained general recognition, as part of the natural order of things, unless it had grown up by degrees, unless it had been the outcome of older usages and institutions. A form of social organisation so cumbrous and so dangerous could hardly have survived for centuries unless it had solved difficulties of unusual urgency and magnitude. Let us then consider, in their historical order, the antecedents of feudalism and the reasons of state by ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... (1887) the Fort Scott management made careful selection of essential parts of the processes already used, omitted non-essential and cumbrous processes, availed themselves of all the experience of the past in this country, and secured a fresh infusion of experience from the beet sugar factories of Germany, and attained the success which finally places sorghum ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... insignificant in the sphere of the ideal and of the beautiful. In Art and Literature the influence of Germany has been purely superficial, although the beautiful Russian language has often been spoiled by the influence of a cumbrous German syntax. With the exception of Nietzsche, no German writer has left his mark on Russian literature. The literary influence of Great Britain has been much more extensive, and has grown enormously during the last generation. But it is the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... abnormal, which is the main factor; it is the isolation in a homogeneous field, not the intrinsic value of the thing, which determines the marvelous phenomenon. Perhaps within countless thousands of chaotic perceptions the gem had existed, stored up amidst a multitude of useless and cumbrous objects, and had never succeeded in arresting attention; meanwhile inertia continued to allow new objects to penetrate continually within the distended and impotent walls. After a discovery, many will perceive that ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... past work and his future wife. Its orthography was impeccable, though its method was somewhat todious, for the Author had to run through the alphabet to provoke the sprite into tapping at any particular letter. But one soon grew reconciled to its cumbrous methods, as though holding converse with a foreigner; and its remarks made up in emphasis what they lacked in brevity, and were given with exemplary promptitude. Interrogated as to its own personality, it declared it was an unborn spirit, destined to be born ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... darkest periods of our republic to show the superiority of the English Constitution. If we have a Prime Minister who does not suit Parliament and the people, he argued, we remove him by a simple vote of the House of Commons. The United States can only get rid of its undesirable executive by a cumbrous and tedious process which can only be brought to bear during a period of revolutionary excitement; and even this failed because a legal case was not made against the President. The criticism was pregnant, but the remedy was not Cabinet responsibility. Whatever may be the ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Queensland Premier, that the marking of preferences should be made compulsory. As explained in the course of the New Zealand debates, part of the alleged failure of the Queensland system was due to the unnecessarily cumbrous nature of the regulations. The Queensland Electoral Acts still retain the old method of voting—that of striking out from the ballot paper the names of such candidates as the elector does not intend ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... conditions would not obtain which have effected so singular an interference with the general laws of survival. Yet I admit that there may very well be places where an expert human climber may reach the summit, and yet a cumbrous and heavy animal be unable to descend. It is certain that there is a point where an ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... springless wagon over the rough roads seemingly very severe. But the inmates seem used to their discomforts, and sit placidly and contentedly on their uneasy seats, apparently proud of their turn-out and the effect they are producing. These cumbrous vehicles are much affected by the elder ladies of the sultan's court, who constitute the Faubourg-Saint-Germain portion of society. True old-school Turks these, who look down with scorn on the new fashions, both in costume and carriage, stolen or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... villain to his lord. Villanage, in the reign of Henry VIII., had practically ceased. The name of it last appears upon the statute book in the early years of the reign of Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form. Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were allowed to live in ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... fast to Whitburn, but one summer's day a tall, gallant, fair-faced esquire, in full armour of the cumbrous plate fashion, rode up to the gate, and blew the family ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be produced. There were meetings, and an engagement, which would finally secure the girl's affections from turning towards anyone else. But the deception could not be kept up forever. These pretended journeys to France were rather cumbrous. The thing to do was clearly to bring the business to an end in such a dramatic manner that it would leave a permanent impression upon the young lady's mind and prevent her from looking upon any other ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... spirit of his age, in so far as he did not, like young David, decline Saul's armor and enter into combat with Philistinism, wielding his sling and stone of native force alone. Yet that native force was so vigorous that, in spite of the panoply of prejudice he wore, in spite of the cumbrous armor lent him by authority, he moved at times with superb freedom. In those rare intervals of personal inspiration he dictated the love-tales of Erminia and Armida, the death-scene of Clorinda, the pastoral of Aminta and Silvia—episodes ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... common sense, can be preserved, I would rigidly adhere to it, if it were only for antiquity's sake; but, surely, it would be far more rational for judges to wear false beards, because formerly Bacon and Coke did not shave their chins, than it is for a magistrate to appear on the bench with a cumbrous, hot, and inconvenient cloud of powdered flax, or whatever may be the material on his poll, because our ancestors, a century or two since, were so silly as to violate nature in ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... spot, as a protection against pirates, which was repeatedly demolished, rebuilt, altered, and enlarged, till it was levelled to the ground in 1732, and a new palace erected, but was destroyed by fire in 1784. It was rebuilt, in its present cumbrous proportions, in 1828. The visitors entered the large court-yard, passed through the picture gallery, the "Hall of the Knights," the throne-room, looked into the riding-school,—which is a large, oblong room, with an earth floor, where the royal family may practise ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... Napoleon had been at Compiegne, denouncing the cumbrous machinery of etiquette which was retarding the happy moment when he should at last see his new wife and enfold her in his arms. He had had the castle repaired and richly furnished, that it might be worthy to receive a daughter of the Caesars. The grand ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... eyes, discoloured by the damp of the walls, suggested a sad omen of ill-fated youth. But besides ambition and cunning, Paul had his full share of courage; and raising with difficulty his head and its cumbrous wrapping of bandages, he asked in a voice broken and weak, though fleeting still, 'Wound or scratch, doctor?' Gomes, who was rolling up his medicated wool, waved to him to keep quiet, as he answered, 'Scratch, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... although in rather cumbrous fashion, be broken up by law suits. Great business combinations, however, cannot possibly be made useful instead of noxious industrial agencies merely by law suits, and especially by law suits supposed to be carried on for their destruction and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... or boats are hollowed out of one single trunk, and are so shallow that the gunwale is not a span above water when they are loaded. Besides they must be tolerably large to perform that long passage, the small ones being more dangerous, and the largest too heavy and cumbrous for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... the vine, But freely let the woodbine twine, And leave untrimm'd the eglantine: Nay, my friend, nay,—since oft thy praise Hath given fresh vigour to my lays; Since oft thy judgment could refine My flatten'd thought or cumbrous line, Still kind, as is thy wont, attend, And in ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... being inhabited by smiths cunning in the working of those metals; they are upon the whole very magnificent; the houses are huge and as high as castles; immense pillars defend the causeway at intervals, producing, however, rather a cumbrous effect. These streets are quite level, and are well paved, in which respect they differ from all the others in Lisbon. The most singular street, however, of all is that of the Alemcrin, or Rosemary, which debouches on the Caesodre. It is very ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... situation, but Mr. Magnus by the fireplace showed great emotion, the colour mounting into his high bony cheeks and his nostrils twitching like a horse's. Maggie had been always very observant, and she was detached enough now to notice that the drawing-room was filled with ugly and cumbrous things and yet seemed unfurnished. Although everything was old and had been there obviously for years, the place yet reminded one of a bare chamber into which, furniture had just been piled without order or arrangement. Opposite the door was a large and very ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... form assume; so soft And uncompounded is their essence pure; Not tied or manacled with joint or limb, Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose, Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, Can execute their airy purposes, And works of love or ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... of the norman breed, small, stout, short, and full of spirit, and to the honour of those who have the care of them, in excellent condition. I was surprised to see these little animals running away with our cumbrous machine, at the rate of six or ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... moment deviated from the forma of his imposed situation. All, the gossips of Paris were presently amused with the story, which, of coarse, reached the Court, with every droll particular of the pulling up and clapping down the cumbrous ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... vanished from the premises in Curzon Street together with Mademoiselle Fifine, and all the silver laid on the table for the little festin which Rawdon interrupted. The plated ware Mademoiselle left behind her was too cumbrous, probably for which reason, no doubt, she also left the fire irons, the chimney-glasses, and the rosewood ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fain would linger, but alas, These are the periods we must pass. So gentle reader do not grin At sight of cumbrous crinoline. Victoria Since Queen Victoria's palmy days 1837-1901 Woman has altered all her ways. In those days she was meek and mild And treated almost like a child; Was brought up in a narrow zone; And couldn't call her soul her own. She vegetated, ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... simple arithmetical examples and several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order to make progress in his knowledge of the science, but simply for purely practical everyday work; as long as his knowledge enabled him to obtain results which he knew from experience were substantially ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... the consultation began. After long deliberation, a petition embodying the general sense was written by the Archbishop with his own hand. It was not drawn up with much felicity of style. Indeed, the cumbrous and inelegant structure of the sentences brought on Sancroft some raillery, which he bore with less patience than he showed under much heavier trials. But in substance nothing could be more skilfully framed than this memorable document. All disloyalty, all intolerance, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... testify to the heroism, religious zeal, and literary industry of the women who helped to build up the early civilization of New England. Their writings, for some presumed on authorship, are quaint and cumbrous; but in those days, when few men published books, it required marked courage for women to appear in print at all. They imitated the style popular among men, and received much attention for their literary ability. Charles T. Congdon, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... absurd use of Law-Latin in records, writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4 George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and inexact, and would have been utterly unintelligible to a Roman gentleman of the Augustan period, did not become law without much opposition from some of ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Sir Robert, and it would be much better so. The first shine is not off our armour at present, and it would be cumbrous to carry a second suit with us, therefore we would much rather that you postponed ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... deserted air, but about the middle stood a cab, on which a rheumatic driver, assisted by a small boy, was placing a cumbrous box. As Katherine approached she found that the house before which it stood bore the number she sought, and on reaching it she found the door held open by a little smutty girl, the very lowest type of slavey, with unkempt hair, and a rough holland apron of the grimiest aspect. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... statement. Some have not scrupled to argue that it covers the entire cost of the war; for, they point out, the entire cost of the war has to be met by taxation, and such taxation is "damaging to the civilian population." They admit that the phrase is cumbrous, and that it would have been simpler to have said "all loss and expenditure of whatever description"; and they allow that the apparent emphasis of damage to the persons and property of civilians is unfortunate; but errors ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... immediately following the downfall of Napoleon; and it set the precedent for those periodical meetings of the representatives of the powers, for the discussion and settlement of questions of international importance, which, though cumbrous and inefficient for constructive work, have contributed much to the preservation of the general peace (see EUROPE: History.) (W. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... surface. She was exercised for several weeks in this way; and then the important step was taken of teaching her how to represent the different letters by the position of her fingers, instead of the cumbrous apparatus of the board and types. This was the period, about three months after she had commenced, that the first report of her case was made, in which it is stated "that she has just learned the manual alphabet as used by the deaf mutes; and it is a subject of delight ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... later days of William III., and the reign of Anne. Then, too, the heavy ships, like land armies, went into winter quarters. It was by distinguished admirals considered professionally criminal to expose those huge yet cumbrous engines of the nation's power to the buffetings of winter gales, which might unfit them next year to meet the enemy, snugly nursed and restored to vigor in home ports during the same time. The need of periodical refitting and cleaning ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... The somewhat cumbrous wage the Kruboy gets at the end of his term of service, minus those things he has had on account and plus those things he has "found," is certainly a source of great worry to our friend. He obtains a box from the carpenter of the factory, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Pope began to close his cumbrous net the following day Jackson had disappeared again. Orders and counter-orders thereupon succeeded each other in bewildering confusion. McClellan could be left out: and a very good thing too, thought Pope, who wanted the victory all to himself, and whose own army greatly outnumbered Lee's ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... sometimes had a nearer observation of them in the study or the parlour. She appeared to me to take great care of the Doctor, and to like him very much, though I never thought her vitally interested in the Dictionary: some cumbrous fragments of which work the Doctor always carried in his pockets, and in the lining of his hat, and generally seemed to be expounding to her as ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... book is admirable. At the commencement of each chapter we have the titles of the various sections, and each successive section is introduced by a statement of the contents of each clause. This facilitates search, though it necessitates the cumbrous mode of reference adopted in the foot-notes to chapter, section, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... who live mostly upon seals, think it sufficient to catch and bring them on shore; and would rather submit to starve than assist their women in skinning, dressing, or dragging home the cumbrous animals to their huts. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... its beauty to the sun,"—there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldly masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... suggesting the kind encouragement which a great doctor will vouchsafe to a timid patient. The old Frenchman's manner, indeed, aroused in me that which I must be allowed to call my conscience—a cumbrous machine, I admit, hard to set going and soon running down. The sport of this adventure, entered into in a spirit of devilry, seemed suddenly to have shrunk to the dimensions of a somewhat sorry jest. It was, I now reflected, but a poor game to deceive an innocent ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the Bishop of Durham where the Earl was then sojourning. Simon bade Henry take shelter with him and have no fear of the storm. The king refused with petulant wit. "If I fear the thunder, I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world." But Simon had probably small faith in the cumbrous system of government which the Barons devised, and it was with reluctance that he was brought to swear to the Provisions of Oxford which embodied it. With their home government he had little to do, for from the autumn of 1258 to that of 1259 he was chiefly ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... is still more cumbrous. It consists of the days of the week written in succession from 1 to 13, underneath these the 20 signs of days, and underneath these again another series of 9 signs; so that each day was distinguished by a combination of a number and two signs, which combination ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... air that belonged to Scarba," she said, and then she sang, simply and pathetically enough, the somewhat stiff and cumbrous English translation of the Gaelic words. It was the song of the exiled Mary Macleod, who, sitting on the shores of "sea-worn Mull," looks abroad on the lonely islands of Scarba, and Islay, and Jura, and laments that she is far ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... of retreat and solitude hung about the rooms and about their inhabitant. He was much worn, and so were they. Their sloping ceilings, cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a prisoner. Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had a penthouse to itself thrust out among the tiles; and on the cracked ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... in ecstatic devotion, he matured his treacherous plan. The single sentry he could suborn, or else—if bribery failed—poniard. He realised that single-handed he might not lower the cumbrous drawbridge, nor would it be wise, even if possible, for the noise of it might give the alarm. But there was the postern. Gian Maria must construct him a light, portable bridge, and have it in readiness to span the moat ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... produce the lime light, with persevering skill Holmes continued to improve the apparatus and to augment its power, until it was finally able to yield a magneto-electric light comparable to that of the voltaic battery. Judged by later knowledge, this first machine would be considered cumbrous and defective in the extreme; but judged by the light of antecedent events, it marked a great ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... stately thoroughfare had given place to a meaner street, its princely shops had degenerated into blank walls or grimy yards, on either hand rose tall chimney stacks belching smoke; instead of dashing motor cars, heavy wains and cumbrous wagons jogged by; in place of the well-dressed throng were figures rough-clad and grimy that hurried along the narrow sidewalks—but these rough-clad people walked fast and purposefully. So we hummed along streets wide or narrow but always grimy, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... fold on fold, And cumbrous gorgeousness of gold; White casements o'er embroidered seats, Looking on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which legislative proposals of various kinds are referred, and this is one of the most hopeful features of recent development. But there is still one important sphere of legislation in which drastic reform is necessary: the costly and cumbrous methods of dealing with private bills promoted by municipalities or by railways and other public companies. It is surely necessary that the bulk of this work should be devolved ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... landscapes and animals; graceless in form and fashion, but still picturesque, and winning admiration, when more closely observed, from the patient defiance of all rules of taste which had formed its cumbrous parts into one profusely ornamented and eccentric whole. It was the more noticeable from its total want of harmony with the other appurtenances of the room, which bespoke the tastes of the plain English squire. Prints of horses and hunts, fishing-rods and fowling-pieces, carefully ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to the use of their fists. It is worth asking: What is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy? Is it surviving physical excellence which reveals itself in this way, or is it a cumbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove? We see, for instance, enormous crowds gathering at the football matches where professional players show their prowess, and muscles trained and hardened for the fray. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of Euphues and the Arcadia, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare—especially from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools—a capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the house, which was approached by a steep descent of a few odd steps, diverging from the main staircase nearly opposite to Mrs Clennam's door. It could scarcely be said to be within call, the walls, doors, and panelling of the old place were so cumbrous; but it was within easy reach, in any undress, at any hour of the night, in any temperature. At the head of the bed and within a foot of Mrs Flintwinch's ear, was a bell, the line of which hung ready to Mrs ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... to the kingdom, attended only by some select courtiers, and without the cumbrous appendages of royalty, he left his capital upon a hunting excursion. In the course of the sport, passing over a desert plain, he came to a spot where was the opening of a cave, into which he entered, and observed domestic utensils and other marks of its being inhabited; but ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... who, on these warm spring days, sat and smoked together, and told of the things they had done and seen long ago. Some remembered a white-faced people who, nearly twenty years before, had come to Roanoke Island from no one knew where,—men with yellow hair, dressed from head to foot in cumbrous garments, and bearing wonderful weapons which spat out fire, with much noise. Many believed them gods, while others thought they were devils. And Pocahontas listened in wonder, ever curious to hear of this strange ...
— The Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith • E. Boyd Smith
... could remember, or morbidly want to remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Caesar to Noyon, when he had besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that cumbrous label impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital. "Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "But I'm ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of making preparation, and leaving Richard to divest himself of such garments as he might deem cumbrous, Vallancey went forward to consult with Trenchard upon the choice of ground. At that same moment Mr. Wilding lounged forward, flicking the grass with his ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... can appreciate, the pleasures of the hardy sportsman. To bear wet, cold, and discomfort; to exercise patience, skill, and endurance; and to undergo the extreme point of fatigue, was the sum of nearly every day's experience of the members of the party; but when their heavy guns and cumbrous clothing were laid aside, the rough chair and cushionless settle afforded luxurious rest, the craving appetite made their coarse fare a delightsome feast, and when, warm, full-fed, and refreshed, they invoked the ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... beginning the change went on until the style of dress and the system of tactics for the whole imperial army was reformed by the introduction of the compact and scientific system of western Europe, in the place of the old-fashioned and cumbrous ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... disappear before methods upon a much larger scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving great economies. It is alleged by modern writers that the permanent residence of the cultivator in close relation to his ground is a legacy from the days of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great proportion of farm work is seasonal, and that a migration to and fro between rural and urban conditions would be entirely practicable in a largely planned community. The agricultural ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... breastplate; "the shield" covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." [Footnote: Classical ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... does, "your servant and bedeswoman." Some months later, a few weeks after marriage, she addresses her husband in the correct manner of the time as "Right reverent and worshipful husband," asking him to buy her a gown as she is weary of wearing her present one, it is so cumbrous. Five years later she refers to "all" the babies, and writes in haste: "Right reverent and worshipful Sir, in my most humble wise I recommend me unto you as lowly as I can," etc., though she adds in a postscript: ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... preposition which has been already noticed; the second is the phrase "standing before the eyes of a country," which is the real meaning of "patria coram"; it is akin to "looking a matter in the face," which is met with,—(and which I almost deem elegant,)— in the cumbrous oratory of Lord Castlereagh, but which I should be very much astonished to discover had originated from the lips of another statesman, the very opposite in speech of the renowned Foreign Secretary,—the ornate and correct rhetorician, so ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... white with snow, rolled down in long sweeps to the salt water: and under the last sloping oak of the park there was a gorse-bushed lane, green in Summer, but now bearing cumbrous blossom—like burdens of the crisp snow-fall. Mrs. Lovell sat on horseback here, and alone, with her gauntleted hand at her waist, charmingly habited in tone with the landscape. She expected a cavalier, and did not perceive the approach of a pedestrian, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... claimed that the alert and inventive spirit of the American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements, has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which might be expected from a community where every mechanic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... from the Spaniards (see p. 100 of the Rudimentos del rabe vulgar que se habla en el imperio de Marruccos por El P. Fr. Jos de Lerchundi, Madrid 1872): This lack of the higher numerals, the reverse of the Hindu languages, makes Arabic "arithmology" very primitive and almost as cumbrous as the Chinese. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... journeyed onward and onward till, one May, she joined a band of Acadian exiles who were sailing in a cumbrous boat down the broad river Mississippi. They were seeking for their kinsmen who, it was rumored, had settled down as farmers in that fertile district. Day after day the exiles glided down the river, ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... enchanted ground all her life. Secretly she carried on experiments upon water works, gas fixtures, and plate-glass mirrors, using the inductive method of reasoning, as all intelligent people have from the beginning, without any of the cumbrous and pedantic machinery provided for ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... farce has neither truth, nor art, To please the fancy or to touch the heart. Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean, With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene, Presents no objects tender or profound, But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the two men picketed their steeds in the hollow, fastened their guns to the saddles, as being too cumbrous for a creeping advance, and, armed only with their long knives and pistols, reascended the prairie wave. With feet clothed in soft moccasin, and practised by that time in the art of stealthy tread, they moved towards the summit noiseless ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... restrained her complaints, sooner than annoy him. And she had her reward. Betty would offer Molly all sorts of small temptations to neglect Miss Eyre's wishes; Molly steadily resisted, and plodded away at her task of sewing or her difficult sum. Betty made cumbrous jokes at Miss Eyre's expense. Molly looked up with the utmost gravity, as if requesting the explanation of an unintelligible speech; and there is nothing so quenching to a wag as to be asked to translate his jest into plain matter-of-fact English, and to show wherein the point lies. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... suffer in consequence. No doubt it would, and so it suffers from every commercial change. But these changes have now gone so far, that—especially if you abolish this protective duty upon corn—we are entitled to demand a return from the present cumbrous, perplexing, and expensive mode of taxation, to the natural cheap and simple one of poll or property-tax. At present no man knows what he is paying towards the expense of government. He is reached in every ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... had stolen the belt of Wampum From the neck of Mishe-mokwa, From the Great Bear of the mountains, From the terror of the nations, As he lay asleep and cumbrous, On the summit of the mountains, Like a rock with mosses on it, Spotted brown and ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... laid the cloth there with admirable precision and neatness; ranged the plate on the sideboard with graceful accuracy, but objected to that old thing in the centre, as he called Mrs. Gashleigh's silver basket, as cumbrous and useless for the table, where they would want all the ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... eyelids too wide open and the dilated pupils seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst these mummy cases and these coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the human figure, there are some that seem to have been made for giants; the head especially, beneath its cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed as it were between the hunchback shoulders, looks enormous, out of all proportion to the body which, towards the feet, narrows ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... horses alone had protected the favorites of Caesar from sequestration by the contending forces in their neighborhood. With a heavy heart, the black, assisted by a few of the dragoons, proceeded to prepare it for the reception of the ladies. It was a cumbrous vehicle, whose faded linings and tarnished hammer-cloth, together with its panels of changing color, denoted the want of that art which had once given it luster and beauty. The "lion couchant" of the Wharton arms was reposing on the reviving splendor of a blazonry that told the armorial bearings ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... dangled from his fob, whilst his pantaloons were short and tight at the knees; and a spacious waistcoat, with a voluminous muslin cravat and a frilled shirt, completed the toilette. The dress of the British military, in its stiff and formal ugliness, was equally cumbrous and ludicrous. ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... thou bid to shun the coming fight? Me wouldst thou move to base, inglorious flight? Know, 'tis not honest in my soul to fear, Nor was Tydides born to tremble here. I hate the cumbrous chariot's slow advance, And the long distance of the flying lance; But while my nerves are strong, my force entire, Thus front the foe, and emulate my sire. Nor shall yon steeds, that fierce to fight convey Those threatening heroes, bear them both away; One chief at least ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... awhile, And saw the treacherous goddess smile; But as he climb'd to grasp the crown, She knock'd him with the sceptre down! He tumbled in the gulf profound; There doom'd to whirl an endless round. Possession's load was grown so great, He sunk beneath the cumbrous weight; And, as he now expiring lay, Flocks every ominous bird of prey; The raven, vulture, owl, and kite, At once upon his carcass light, And strip his hide, and pick his bones, Regardless of his ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that betides a cumbrous load snatched up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... as you know, that there seems to me far too cumbrous and expensive and talkative a method employed in England, for raising supplies for that Mission and Columbia, Honolulu, &c. I never think of all that fuss of the four Universities, and all the meetings and speeches, without some shame. But united action will come in ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... used at the School of Mines for making large blue prints a similar device has been in use for several years. Instead, however, of the heavy and cumbrous back used by Mr. Parsons, a light, somewhat flexible back of one-quarter inch pine is employed, covered with heavy Canton flannel and several thicknesses of newspaper. The pressure is applied by light pressure strips of ash somewhat thicker at the middle than at the ends, which give ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... Then the happy landing at Stornoway—her father and Duncan and Mairi all on the quay—the rapid drive over to Loch Roag, and the first glimpse of the rocky bays and clear water and white sand about Borva and Borvabost! And Sheila would once more—having cast aside this cumbrous attire that she had to change so often, and having got out that neat and simple costume that was so good for walking or driving or sailing—be proud to wait upon her guests, and help Mairi in her household ways, and have a pretty ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... And then he began to understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove the Prime Minister into a corner. But in the meantime many weeks had passed. On ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... of state, the autos were performed; the giants made sport for the multitude, and the entertainment concluded with music and dancing. Sometimes the procession was headed by the figure of a monster called the Tarasca, half serpent in form, borne by men concealed in its cumbrous bulk, and surmounted by another figure representing the woman of Babylon, —all so managed as to fill with wonder and terror the country people who crowded round it, and whose hats and caps were generally snatched away by the grinning beast, and became the lawful prize of his conductors. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... a room one is haunted by the two gentlemen, in getting furniture and provisions one is afterward haunted by the "family" relation. It is a result of the youthfulness of our civilization, that as yet it is cumbrous and unwieldy. We do not yet master it, but are mastered by it; and nowhere in America will one find the charming arrangements for single living which have filled the Old World with delightful haunts for the students of every land. As yet we provide for people, not persons; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... spring of 1607, numbering a bare hundred men and no women, were moved by the spirit of adventure. With a cumbrous and oppressive government over them, and with no private ownership of land nor other encouragement for steadygoing thrift, the only chance for personal gain was through a stroke of discovery. No wonder the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... and cumbrous. High-backed chairs curiously carved, and wrought in needlework; a massive clothes-press of dark oak, well polished, and inlaid with landscapes of various tinted woods; a bed of state, ample and lofty, so as only to be ascended by a movable ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... surplusage on the back of the book, before seizing it for immediate use. Books in several volumes should have the number of each volume plainly marked in Arabic (not Roman) numerals on the back. The old-fashioned method of expressing numerals by letters, instead of figures, is too cumbrous and time-consuming to be tolerated. You want to letter, we will say, vol. 88 of Blackwood's Magazine. If you follow the title-page of that book, as printed, you ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... repeating the cumbrous phrase "international auxiliary language," the word auxiliary is usually omitted. It must be clearly understood that when "international" or "universal" language is spoken of, auxiliary is ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... that followed was very short. In a single round Montagu had utterly thrashed, and stricken to the earth, and forced to beg for mercy, his cumbrous and brutal opponent. He seemed to tower above him with a magnificent superiority, and there was a self-controlled passion about him which gave tremendous energy to every blow. Brigson was utterly dashed, confounded, and cowed, and took without a word the parting kick ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... machines—Hargreave's jennies and Arkwright's water-frames—were generally worked by women and children, the women who had been engaged in the use of the older instruments—the distaff, spindle, hand-wheel—coming into the mills. But the growing complexity and size of the mule made it too cumbrous for women and children, and spinning for a while became a male occupation in England. In the United States the difficulty of procuring male labour stimulated the invention of the ring spinning-frame, some sixty years ago, which could be worked by woman's labour. The limitations and imperfections ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... ne'er waste your time On bad biography or bitter rhyme: For what I am, this cumbrous clay insures, And what I was, is no ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... them is a great sea. The people who dwell on the border of that sea have ships almost as big as yours, with sails and oars as yours have. The streams in their country are full of gold. The King eats from golden dishes, for gold is as common there as iron is among you,"—he glanced at the cumbrous armor and weapons of his guests. Indeed the panoply of the Spaniards, made necessary by the constant possibility of attack, and the weight of their cross-bows and other weapons, was a source of continual wonder to the light and nimble Indians, ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and appropriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching charity-sermons on occasions of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... inwrought with precious stones; and beside this—a singular contrast—on a plain Gothic table lay the helmet, the gauntlets, and the battle-axe of the master. Warwick himself, seated before a large, cumbrous desk, was writing,—but slowly and with pain,—and he lifted his finger as the Nevile approached, in token of his wish to conclude a task probably little congenial to his tastes. But Marmaduke was grateful for the moments ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... less risk if remained at Gaza for two or three days more, and he wanted me to become his guest. I persuaded him, however, that it would be better for him to let me depart at once. He wanted to add to my baggage a roast lamb and a quantity of other cumbrous viands, but I escaped with half a horse-load of leaven bread, which was very good of its kind, and proved a most useful present. The air with which the Governor’s slaves affected to be almost breaking ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... remarkable how entirely mistaken, also, those croaking prophets were, who formerly supposed that much addition to the old United States would make a cumbrous and impracticable political aggregate. Since the principle that only honest men shall be placed in public offices has been adopted throughout the nation, local administration of local affairs harmonizes so well with a central national government controlling general interests, ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... difficulty of moving field pieces was extreme. When, a few years later, William marched from Devonshire to London, the apparatus which he brought with him, though such as had long been in constant use on the Continent, and such as would now be regarded at Woolwich as rude and cumbrous, excited in our ancestors an admiration resembling that which the Indians of America felt for the Castilian harquebusses. The stock of gunpowder kept in the English forts and arsenals was boastfully mentioned ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... door of my room open on purpose, so that he should know I was back there, and ready for him. I took down a long straight blade, like a rapier, with a basket hilt. It was a cumbrous weapon, and with a blunt edge; still, it had a point, and I was ready to thrust and parry against the world. I called upon my foes. No enemy appeared, and by the light of two candles, with a sword in my hand, I lost myself in the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Salute,—the mighty Doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of their Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... see who she is," replied that practical young lady, as she placed the heavy key in the cumbrous lock, "and I shall also take leave to inform her that this bit of ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... scenes grow dim; When evening's shadows veil the sky; And pleasure's siren hymn Grows fainter on the tuneless ear, Like echoes from another sphere, Or dreams of seraphim— It were not sad to cast away This dull and cumbrous load ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope, belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless, Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for flight. Salmagundi undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, Irving and his brother began the History of New York, which was originally ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... books. From three to six he attended a "dame" school; and from six till nine (when his father died and left the family destitute) he was in his father's school, learning the classics, reading an enormous quantity of English books, avoiding novels, and delighting in cumbrous theological and metaphysical treatises. At ten he was sent to the Charity School of Christ's Hospital, London, where he met Charles Lamb, who records his impression of the place and of Coleridge in one of his famous essays.[224] Coleridge seems to have remained ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields. On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose, A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows; Where clust'ring sloes in glossy order rise, He crops the loaded branch, a cumbrous prize; And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests, Placing green sods to seat the coming guests; His guests by promise; playmates young and gay; But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away! He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain, Till feeling Disappointment's cruel pain ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... easy, that he who runs may read. The contrast is drawn graphically, and with a light and lively pen, between the state of things fifty years ago and that which now prevails: the exchange of slow and cumbrous means of conveyance for those which enable you in these days to perform the journey of weeks in, you might say, as many hours; and the not less marked advance in education and intelligence. The retrospect, material as well as moral, social, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... had, on one occasion during that campaign, fallen in such a manner as effectually to block up the way; and so narrow is the path, and so steep the banks on each side, that the army was absolutely delayed some time until this cumbrous ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... command of the Commander-in-Chief, the Prince of Orange. The English volunteers being the next to the Prince's regiment of Guards, followed close upon the main body of the army, and behind them trailed the long, cumbrous baggage train. The rear-guard, together with some details of various kinds and nations, consisted of the Spanish division, which was commanded by Prince Vaudemont. As they came to higher ground Claverhouse began to see the lie of the country, and to ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... at home, revered abroad; Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man's the noblest work of God:"[30] And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp! a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the divine amateur; and Mr. Stevenson, who is the humane artist; and Mr. Ruskin, whose rhythm and colour and fine rhetoric and marvellous music of words are entirely unattainable. But the general prose that one reads in magazines and in newspapers is terribly dull and cumbrous, heavy in movement and uncouth or exaggerated in expression. Possibly some day our women of letters will apply themselves more definitely ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... York to one eighth; in North Carolina to one tenth. It was partly for this reason that in devising a national coinage the more uniform dollar was adopted as the unit. At the same time the decimal system of division was adopted instead of the cumbrous English system, and the result was our present admirably simple currency, which we owe to Gouverneur Morris, aided as to some points by Thomas Jefferson. During the period of the Confederation, the chaotic state of the currency ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... order to purify the air in the neighbourhood of an operation. At first he used a small spray worked by hand, but this was, for practical reasons, changed into a foot-spray and afterwards into one worked by steam. One objection to this was that the steam-engine was a cumbrous bit of apparatus to carry about with him to operations; and Lister all his life loved simplicity in his methods. Another was that the carbolic solution, falling on the hands of the operator, might chill them and impair his skill in handling his instruments. ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... with equal fire. Man, bear thy brow aloft, view every grace In God's great offspring, beauteous nature's face: See spring's gay bloom; see golden autumn's store; See how earth smiles, and hear old ocean roar. Leviathans but heave their cumbrous mail, It makes a tide, and wind-bound navies sail. Here, forests rise, the mountains awful pride; Here, rivers measure climes, and worlds divide; There, valleys fraught with gold's resplendent seeds, Hold kings, and kingdoms' ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... his features by the cap, was in some degree hidden by the forward drooping of his head upon his chest. Hitherto he had moved almost mechanically along, tottering and embarrassing himself at every step under the cumbrous drum that was suspended from a belt round his neck over the left thigh; but now there was a certain indescribable drawing up of the frame, and tension of the whole person, denoting a concentration of all the moral and ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... such a collection is nearly valueless. We must have it for reference, of course; nobody grudges the guineas he has spent for the best part of the last twenty years on Professor Child's stately, if rather cumbrous, volumes. But who can read a dozen versions, say, of 'The Queen's Marie' with any pleasure? What is exquisite in one is watered, messed, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... that it was never printed during his lifetime. In 1664 he wrote the Mariage Force, a one-act piece with eight entrees de ballet, specially designed for court representation, in which the King himself was pleased to dance, and, a month or two later, the Princesse d'Elide, a cumbrous and comparatively inferior production, done in great haste at the command of Louis XIV, who had determined upon an eight-days' festival in honor of Louise ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... whistled softly. The signal was heard and answered, and very soon I became aware of several dusky figures, including both men and horses. No time was wasted in talk; a man brought me a horse, and a loose cloak with a hood in which to muffle my head. I mounted, the others sprang to their cumbrous saddles, and at a word from the guide we ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... himself upon an English tailor. We Americans are great travelers, and few people travel, I fancy, with more real enjoyment than we; our domestic establishments, as compared with those of the Old World, are less cumbrous and stately, and so our money is commonly in hand as pocket-money, to be spent freely and gayly in our ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is— Though cumbrous, gray and grim,— (With hi! hilloo! And honey-dew And odors musty-rare!) He bends him o'er that page of his As o'er the rose's rim. (With hi! and ho! And pinks aglow And roses everywhere!) Ay, he's the featest humming-bird, ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... observed by the crew of the Catamaran upon the distant verge of the horizon, was no longer a mere streak of shadowed water. It had developed during the continuance of the chase, and now covered both sea and sky,—the latter with black cumbrous clouds, the former with quick curling waves, that lashed the water-casks supporting both rafts, and proclaimed the approach, if not of a storm, at least a fresh breeze,—likely to change the character of the chase ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... this country maintain to any great extent large retinues of servants. Even with ample fortunes, they are forbidden by the general character of society here, which makes them cumbrous and difficult to manage. Every mistress of a family knows that her cares increase with every additional servant. Two keep the peace with each other and their employer; three begin a possible discord, which ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... rushed off on horseback or bicycle to remote telegraph offices. These adventurers were too late. Every railway station and post-office within twenty miles was already held by troops. Revolts are conducted scientifically in that region. Their stage management is perfect, and the cumbrous methods of effete civilizations might well take note of the speed, thoroughness, and efficiency with which a ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... having one, and several of the smaller being united in the choice of one. The army of the Confederation was fixed, in 1830, at 303,484 men, to be furnished by the States in a fixed proportion. The inconveniences of this cumbrous organization are apparent. One member might be at war with any power, while the others were at peace: thus the Confederation took no part in the Italian and Hungarian warfare against Austria, for it guaranteed to her ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... voices and footsteps of a number of people drew nearer, became each moment more distinct. Orders were being given on the stairs, men were straining and drawing breath, there were all the signs of the approach of some cumbrous burden, carried as ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... tied firmly over her glossy brown hair with a silk motor veil, and the stout boots which she had surveyed so ruefully when Bower brought them to her on the previous evening after interviewing the village shoemaker, were by no means so cumbrous in use as her unaccustomed eyes had deemed them. Even the phlegmatic guide was stirred to gruff appreciation when he saw her vault on to a large flat boulder in order to examine an iron cross that ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... abandoned herself to the luxury of the dream. It was her first complete escape from the world of intellectual routine, her first taste of life. All the pedantry of her daily toil slipped away like a cumbrous garment; she was clad only in her womanhood. Once or twice a shudder of strange self-consciousness went through her, and she felt guilty, immodest; but upon that sensation followed a surge of passionate ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... sighed to see my hairs fall; At dusk I sighed to see my hairs fall. For I dreaded the time when the last lock should go ... They are all gone and I do not mind at all! I have done with that cumbrous washing and getting dry; My tiresome comb for ever is laid aside. Best of all, when the weather is hot and wet, To have no top-knot weighing down on one's head! I put aside my dusty conical cap; ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... crockery, the neat book-case, the racks for charts and telescopes, the sofa at one end, and the fireplace, all showing an attention to the comfort of any passengers who might be on board. Everything valuable had, however, been carried away, the more cumbrous articles alone remaining. Mr Vernon looked round with deep anxiety depicted on his countenance. "Yes, D'Arcy, this is indeed the Ariadne. I know her well," he whispered. "I myself put up that book-case, and screwed in those hooks for a cot ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... tables, or even provided with fireplaces;'[887] and cases might be quoted where the tedium of a long service, or the appetite engendered by it, were relieved by the entry, between prayers and sermon, of a livery servant with sherry and light refreshments.[888] Even into cathedrals cumbrous ladies' pews were often introduced. Horace Walpole tells an extraordinary story of Gloucester Cathedral in 1753. A certain Mrs. Cotton, who had largely contributed to whitewashing and otherwise ornamenting the church, had taken it into her head that the soul of a favourite daughter ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... our architectural proportions. With respect to personal ornaments also, ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life. Beauty, it has been said, should learn to suffer; and there are, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
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