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More "Ponderous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Of his mental condition we learn something from these words: "In the enormous machine of the universe, amid the incessant whirl and hiss of its jagged iron wheels, amid the deafening crash of its ponderous stamps and hammers—in the midst of this whole terrific commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless creature, finds himself placed, not secure for a moment, that on an imprudent motion a wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer crush him to a powder. This sense of abandonment is at first ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... produced a library of treatises on the right of Catholics to choose, to control, and to cashier their magistrates. They were on the losing side. Most of them were bloodthirsty, and were soon forgotten. But the greater part of the political ideas of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau, may be found in the ponderous Latin of Jesuits who were subjects of the Spanish Crown, of ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a sermon, and then a chapter was read, and a long impromptu prayer followed, till some instinct told Mr Peters that supper-time had come, and we rose from our knees with hunger for our predominant feeling. Over supper the minister did unbend a little into one or two ponderous jokes, as if to show me that ministers were men, after all. And then at ten o'clock I went home, and enjoyed my long-repressed yawns in the three-cornered room before going to bed. Dinah and Hannah ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... intellectual ability of its author—so great as to extort our profoundest, though it may be reluctant admiration—there are nevertheless moments in which it appears that his movement is becoming wavering and unsteady—that he is failing to handle his ponderous weapon with self-balanced power. This is particularly the case in that point at which he is passing from the consideration of pure force to the unavoidable consideration of visible nature, the actual existence of which he seems to be obliged to deny. But then I am not sure ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... first the seeds terrene, since ponderous most And most perplext, in close embraces clung, And towards the centre conglobating sunk. And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth Pressed they the fluid essences that reared Sun, moon, and stars, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... upon my knee, the earth, the ponderous earth, pulls you down hard and heavy upon it." So saying, he put his hands upon Rollo's shoulders, and crowded them down, by way of showing him how the earth acted upon him. "It pulls," he continued, "with a strong and steady pull, all the time; and so makes you ...
— Rollo's Philosophy. [Air] • Jacob Abbott
... ponderous Dr. Mowry, fortunately or unfortunately, that he is called upon to listen to; but a younger man, of ripe age, indeed, but full of fervor and earnestness, and with a piercing magnetic quality of voice that electrifies from the beginning. And Reuben ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... mind, that the elder Curtis might be ponderous in body and speech but he certainly revealed horse sense ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... portraits of grim men and severe-eyed women, arrayed in orderly procession along the walls, and scowling a contemptuous enmity against the degenerate invader of their gloomy bowers and venerable halls; from the vast, dusky, ponderous, and complicated draperies that concealed the windows, and hung with the gloomy grandeur of funereal trappings about the hearse-like piece of furniture that was destined for his bed,—Lord L., on entering his apartment, might be conscious of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... they came upon a singular party travelling in the opposite direction. Their singularity consisted chiefly in this, that instead of mules they had a train of bullock-waggons, which were laden with ponderous mill-machinery. At their head rode a fine-looking man of middle age, who addressed Will in Spanish. Bunco's services as interpreter being called into requisition, the traveller told them that the pass was pretty clear, but advised them to make haste, as the storm ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... straight sword, would have made short work of one of the brawny giants who now attacked him, for he could have leapt out of reach of the tremendous blow, and have run his opponent through ere he could again lift his ponderous axe. But there was no guarding such swinging blows as these with a light sword; and even the advantage of the height of the stairs ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her." Here is the weight of wisdom in itself. See how ponderous it is of itself; so heavy that it may weigh down all that come within the compass of desire, and certainly its compass is infinite. But, he adds, "Length of days are in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour. Her ways ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... occasional single trees, such as may be seen throughout the country, but rather more frequently toward the coast. In these isolated trees their imposing character can be best appreciated, the great trunk carrying the massive head perfectly poised, an interesting example of ponderous weight gracefully balanced. The solid, weighty appearance of the head of the tree is increased by its even and generally symmetrical outline, this especially in the examples near the coast, the mass of foliage ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... encircled his head. His long robe was of dark cloth, cinctured round the waist with his rich sword-belt, from which was suspended a gold-hilted scimitar, encased in a scabbard also enriched with gold: His legs and feet were bare, and had a ponderous look about them, since he suffered from that strange curse of Zanzibar—elephantiasis. His feet were slipped into a pair of watta (Arabic for slippers), with thick soles and a strong leathern band over the instep. His light ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... cannot by any mental process feel that the aggressive bulk of Sir Gilbert Scott's ill-conceived edifice is anything but a crude invasion. More than half a century has passed since this great chapel replaced the Tudor building which had unluckily come to be regarded as inadequate, but the ponderous Early Decorated tower is scarcely less of an intrusion than when its masonry stood forth in all its garish whiteness against the time-worn brick of Lady Margaret Beaufort's court. A Perpendicular tower would have added a culminating and satisfying feature to the whole cluster of courts, ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... while the mother spoke, wanted to say something to the daughter, who stood there so near him, but he could think of nothing that would do; certain words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases, seemed patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to assent to what she had said; he wished simply to tell her she was delightful, and it was difficult to mark that difference. So he only smiled at her in silence, and she smiled back at him—a smile that seemed to him quite ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... cylinders of his engine, and worked the pistons by the expansive force of the gases generated by the explosion. There was no weight but the engine itself and the cylinders containing the liquefied gases. Furnaces, boilers, condensers, accumulators, dynamos—all the ponderous apparatus of steam and electricity—were done away with, and he had a power at command greater than ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... sound. As the distance between the contending ships decreased one began to realise the terrific character of the forces employed by man for the destruction of his fellow-man, for now it could be seen that the Tsarevich, ponderous as was her bulk, literally and visibly heeled and swayed under the tremendous impact of the enemy's projectiles. But we were by no means getting things all our own way, for when the fight had been raging for about half an hour, the Mikasa was ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... reloading. The barrels were not very long, measuring only three feet from breech to muzzle, but they were of one- and-a-half-inch bore and fired a conical shell four and a half inches in length. Notwithstanding their somewhat ponderous appearance they were very light, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... bending trees—whither, on four red-marked occasions, he had watched her disappear—towards the castle, which faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions, rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... is ceilinged with baskets of Mexican orchid, as close as they will fit. Upon the left hand lie a series of glass structures; upon the right, below the level of the corridor, the workshops; at the end—why, to be frank, the end is blocked by a ponderous screen of matting just now. But this dingy barrier is significant of a work in hand which will not be the least curious nor the least charming of the strange sights here. The farmer has already a "siding" of course, for the removal of his produce; he ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... Unto the thousandth parcel of the truth, My song might shadow forth that saintly smile, flow merely in her saintly looks it wrought. And with such figuring of Paradise The sacred strain must leap, like one, that meets A sudden interruption to his road. But he, who thinks how ponderous the theme, And that 't is lain upon a mortal shoulder, May pardon, if it tremble with the burden. The track, our ventrous keel must furrow, brooks No unribb'd pinnace, no self-sparing pilot. "Why doth my face," said Beatrice, "thus ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the first visited, His pipe was shrilly sounding as ponderous yards and coils of rope and casks and guns and gun-carriages and other innumerable fittings and gear of a ship were being hoisted up and lowered into lighters alongside, to convey them to the dockyard. His delight at seeing True Blue as he stepped on deck ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... the right one," rejoined my host with ponderous sarcasm. "But, as I have yet to meet any one who can read your writing, I don't ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... indebted to actors for perfecting them in oratory. Roscius, the actor of Rome, is immortalized by Cicero, and Garrick by lord Chatham and Edmund Burke. If then the stage has been felt to produce such weighty effects in the more arduous part of human improvement, how ponderous in its operation must it not of necessity be, on the other hand, in the promotion of evil, if it exhibit to the growing generation corrupt examples and defective models, not only unrestrained and uncensured, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... mountain peaks, which stretched for many leagues around him. It seemed as if this vague brightness arose from the snow itself, in order to spread itself into space. By degrees the highest and most distant summits assumed a delicate, fleshlike rose color, and the red sun appeared behind the ponderous giants of the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... by the wrists tiring him, weighing on the pit of his stomach, numbing the back of his brain, making his limbs as heavy as ponderous lead. It seemed to the wearied engineer that there was nothing in this world to be desired but a good sound sleep; he fought against it desperately, but after a long struggle he suddenly succumbed; his head dropped, and he lay prone in the grass, apparently as lifeless, as the unfortunate ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... was so delightfully whole-hearted that even Roberta forgave her everything, down to her absurd enthusiasm over a ponderous psychology lecture and the very dull reception that followed it. At the latter, to be sure, Mary acted exactly like her old self, for she sat in a corner and monopolized Dr. Hinsdale for half an hour by the clock, while her little friends, to quote Katherine Kittredge, "champed their ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... obedience to the enchanter's orders, lifted up their ponderous clubs of ebony, and struck against the four hundred gates, which jarred so much with the blows of the slaves that Ahubal was forced to stop his ears, and was ready to sink into the earth ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... with sandy hair and prominent brown eyes. Being an old bachelor when he married Aunt Agatha, he had very precise, formal ways, and was methodical and punctual to a fault. Next to Uncle Keith, I hated that white-faced watch of his. I hated the slow, ponderous way in which he drew it from his pocket, and produced it for my ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... by means of the protruding shrubs, over the steep precipices. A sudden thought enabled him to baffle for a while the grim pursuer. His foot, applied to a loose rock, launched it in a tone of thunder upon the fiend, who was borne backward half the distance of an arrow's flight by the ponderous mass. During the time he was struggling to disengage himself from the weight that pinned him to the earth, the lover had nearly won the farthest bound of the Manitou's kingdom. And see, the purple ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... streets clear, scattering the crowd to right and left—came the virgin priestess, white-robed and veiled, riding upon a horse, and followed by several mounted priests in white garments and high black caps of ceremony. Behind them advanced the ponderous shrine, swaying above: the heads of its bearers like a junk in a storm. Scores of brawny arms were pushing it to the right; other scores were pushing it to the left: behind and before, also, there was furious pulling and pushing; and the roar ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... natives to live without the constant dread of pestilence; they compelled, for example the Portuguese to wash their clothes, and the Spaniards to wash their hands. They proved to the German that his ponderous fortifications only brought bombardments on his cities, and thus induced him to throw down his crumbling walls, fill up his muddy ditches, turn his barren glacis into a public walk, and open his wretched streets to the light and air ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the cross remained victorious over warring Turks, Greeks, and pirates. Then at the end of this period came the memorable siege of Rhodes. For six months the steel-clad cavaliers withstood the assaults of the Ottoman hosts, and their ponderous battle axes swept down the infidel assailers by scores. Personal strength, however, could not endure the continual strain. The besieged, utterly worn out, were compelled to capitulate and leave Rhodes; but as a compliment to their valor, they were permitted ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... sportsman. He wore invariably an old shooting coat and a cap that had seen younger, but perhaps not better, days. His vehicle was a battered but serviceable two-wheeled cart drawn by a placid though adequate horse. His weapon for all purposes was a rather ponderous twelve-gauge. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... ditches, and see that the hollow-sounding wooden bridges which formed the sole communication by which the hay wagons could pass to and from the distant meadows, were in proper order to sustain their ponderous annual load. Daniel Thorpe was the only accredited unfeathered biped who figured in the parish books as occupant of The Moors; nevertheless that swampy district could boast of one other irregular and forbidden but most pertinacious inhabitant—and ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... about thirty feet they stopped, and found themselves facing a ponderous door, studded and barred with iron. Caspar took from his pocket a key about the size of a goose quill, felt about for a moment, and then with a slight movement of finger and thumb threw back a dozen ponderous bolts with a great echoing clang; the door slowly opened, and they entered ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... exact duplication of the first part and emphasizes the main tonality of G major. That Haydn was not forced to this literal repetition through any lack of fancy is shown by the skilful amplification of the first theme, in measures 177-184. The whole movement sparkles with sunshine; and those ponderous "heavy-weights" who criticise it because it is not deep or "soulful" are looking for qualities which the music does not pretend to contain. It is the work of a wholesome, cheerful-hearted man expressing through his favorite language his joy in ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and quiet, One day, when he went it blind, And followed his singular fancy, And slighted his logical mind, And married a ponderous widow that wasn't of ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... Predicate. De Morgan was exquisitely witty, and though his jokes were always appreciated by his correspondent, yet Hamilton seldom ventured on anything of the same kind in reply; indeed his rare attempts at humour only produced results of the most ponderous description. But never were two scientific correspondents more perfectly in sympathy with each other. Hamilton's work on Quaternions, his labours in Dynamics, his literary tastes, his metaphysics, and his poetry, were all heartily welcomed by his friend, whose letters in reply invariably ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... admitted to the corridor of the Holland Agency by a sharp-nosed individual who regarded him with suspicion. The operatives were undoubtedly expecting trouble from all quarters, for three other large men of the "bull" type, heavy-jowled, ponderous men, surrounded him ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... that hour, a close carriage drove up to the palace. It contained no less a personage than the Prime Minister, the Marquis de Lutera,—a dark, heavy man, with small furtive eyes, a ponderous jaw, and a curious air of seeming for ever on an irritable watch for offences. His aspect was intellectual, yet always threatening; and his frigid manner was profoundly discouraging to all who sought to win his ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... brother became their spiritual teacher, and, ere long, had the great satisfaction of seeing them "clothed, in their right mind, and sitting at the feet of Jesus." His influence has been almost boundless. A man of magnificent physical proportions,—tall, a straight body mounted by a ponderous head, shapely, with a kind eye, benevolent face, a rich cadence in his voice,—the "black Bishop" Crowther is a princely looking man, who would attract the attention of cultivated people anywhere. He is a man of eminent piety, broad scholarship, and good works. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... by the motor stopped before a house with balconies and ponderous pillars, and she and her companions went up the ample stairway and into several uncomfortably crowded, flower-bedecked rooms. Ida, however, was getting used to the lights and the music, the gleam of gems, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... cause was soon perceived. A large stone that had been heaved up with the clay that adhered to the roots and fibres, had been loosened, and had fallen on the ground, close to the spot where Catharine lay. So ponderous was the mass, that had it struck her, death must have been the consequence of the blow; and Hector and Louis beheld it with fear and amazement, while Catharine regarded it as a proof of Divine mercy and protection from Him in whose ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... flights of stone steps, Henry wandered under the September moon. All day he had, with the help of Charles Wilbraham's unwitting secretary, tracked Charles Wilbraham. He knew how Charles had begun the morning by dictating proud and ponderous documents in his proud and ponderous voice, and talking to people who came in and out of his room; how he had then gone to the Assembly Hall and chatted in the lobby to every one of sufficient importance to be worth his while, including ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... other things, very correctly and with a ponderous manliness that masked a real suffering. Loving him not at all she grew sorry for him and kissed him sentimentally one night because he was so charming, a relic of a vanishing generation which lived a priggish and graceful illusion and was being replaced by less gallant fools. Afterward ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... every-day boys, not only in appearance, but in habits and moral qualities. Never did I hear a coarse or profane word pass his lips; the purity of his soul was radiant in his beautiful modest countenance; while his slender, boyish figure, with the ponderous white head poised upon his long, slim neck, always reminded me of a ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... the front door and rang the ponderous iron bell which hung from a chain by the side of a Gothic column, and a man-servant in livery, with powdered hair, appeared in reply to ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Crusades, which followed, filled Germany with religious and martial excitement, and chivalry was soon in the height of its splendor. The grand specimens of Gothic architecture produced during this period, the cathedrals of Ulm, Strasbourg, and Cologne, in which ponderous piles of matter were reduced to forms of beauty, speak of the great ideas and the great powers called into exercise to fulfill them. The commercial wealth of Germany was rapidly developed; thousands of serfs became freemen; large cities arose, mines were discovered, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... frozen Ross Sea, lying flat, white and peaceful as though such things as blizzards were unknown. To the north and north-east the Knoll. Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague, ponderous, a breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness. God! ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... was left alone in the gloomy solitude of the prison-room, and the ponderous doors were shut upon me, and the harsh bolts driven with a horrid grating noise, that caused my very bones to dinle. But even in that dreadful hour an unspeakable consolation came with the freshness of a breathing of the airs of paradise to my soul. Methought a wonderful ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... mist, and mirk, and dropping rain, it streamed out into the darkness, and was seen by many wakeful eyes. To the poor Student Hieronymus it was a wonderful Aladdin's Lamp; for in its flame a Divinity revealed herself unto him, and showed him treasures. Whenever he opened a ponderous, antiquatedtome, it seemed as if some angel opened for him the gates of Paradise; and already he was known in the ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... blazing from the gilded roof, are seen Bright lamps, and torches turn the night to day. Now for the ponderous goblet called the Queen, Of jewelled gold, which Belus used and they Of Belus' line, and poured the wine straightway, And prayed, while silence filled the crowded hall: "Great Jove, the host's lawgiver, bless this day To these my ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... out in the moonlight and took me into his arms and danced me along that deck with a grace that it would not be possible for either the one from Philadelphia or the one from Saint Louis to imitate. That nice but very ponderous lady from the State of Cincinnati who regarded us from her steamer chair, enjoyed it as much as did I, and she clapped her large hands as Monsieur le Capitaine swung me around into the quietness beyond one of the tall chimneys ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... slender elance beauty a perfect match for her, so that the eighteenth century might have painted them as two young deities from the Court of Olympus, come down to earth to show mortals a vision of the ideal! And General Ratoneau, the ponderous bully in uniform, the incarnation ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... none offered any likelihood for Sterling. From the Church his notions of the "black dragoon," had there been no other obstacle, were sufficient to exclude him. Law he had just renounced, his own Radical philosophies disheartening him, in face of the ponderous impediments, continual up-hill struggles and formidable toils inherent in such a pursuit: with Medicine he had never been in any contiguity, that he should dream of it as a course for him. Clearly enough the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... apartment; and Front-de-Boeuf could hear the crash of the ponderous key, as she locked and ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... the gloom a giant hunter flies: A ponderous brazen mace, with direful sway, Aloft he whirls to crush the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived with dignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy, ponderous dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to his timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list and the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of his table, he let other men talk and listened. They ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lodgings, and therefore she talked over the matter with Alaric. It was at last decided that he, Alaric, should move instead of driving Norman away. His final movement would soon take place; that movement which would rob him of the freedom of lodginghood, and invest him with all the ponderous responsibility and close restraint of a householder. He and Gertrude were to be married in February, and after spending a cold honeymoon in Paris and Brussels, were to begin their married life amidst the sharp winds of a London March. But ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... piece of wood, which easily turned round upon the top of a post. At the other end of the wood was a heavy bag of sand, which, when the rider struck the shield with his lance, swung round and struck him with great force on the back if he did not ride fast and so escape his ponderous foe. There were other forms of this sport, which is so ancient that its origin has been lost in antiquity. Queen Elizabeth was very much amused at Kenilworth Castle by the hard knocks which the inexpert riders received from the rotating sand-bag when they charged "a comely quintane" in her royal ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the spectacle of Jake Rogers bent like hickory in the manfulness of his pulling, and the heavy cart was moving slowly towards the doors. Four men joined him at the time, and as they swung with the cart out into the street, dark figures sped towards them from the ponderous shadows back of the electric lamps. Some set up the inevitable question, ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... of the gravel-bank the water was only three inches deep, so I lay down on my back and, once again elevating my ponderous legs in the air, allowed a cataract of water to flow over me. Somewhat lightened, I advanced into the hole. It was deeper than I thought. I was up to the middle in a moment, and sighed as I thought of the boots— full again. Before I reached the line the water was up ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... that sceptre. He was driven to the water by sheer necessity, but he never took to it kindly. He was at best a sea-soldier, a marine, not brought up from the start in the merchant-service and then polished into the complete blue-jacket and able seaman of the navy. Nobody can think of those ponderous old Romans, whose comedies were all borrowed from Attica, whose poems were feeble echoes of the Greek, and whose architecture, art, and domestic culture were at best the work of foreign artists,—nobody can think of them at sea ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... detective appeared at the doorway. He stopped and looked questioningly at the broken lock. He was alert as a weasel despite his ponderous physique: he fingered it, and studied the evidence of fresh splinters. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... and shook with every stroke of the ponderous piston. The laughter of the crowd, the exchange of gossip and news, the banquet at the long table, the newspapers and books in the reading-room, even the luxurious couches in the staterooms, were ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... hurrying market-wards. And what a lively scene the market presents now, full of cattle and sheep and pigs and crowds of people standing round the shouting auctioneers! And horses, too, the beribboned hacks, and ponderous draught horses with manes and tails decorated with golden straw, thundering over the stone pavement as they are trotted up and down! And what a profusion of fruit and vegetables, fish and meat, and all ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... his well-shaped hand with a gesture which might have been admired in the stately John Kemble; and the servant, understanding the gesture, brought forward a ponderous ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... he could not speak at first, and Simmons lifting his head, looked at him, fiercely; then he swallowed several times, and said, with ponderous dignity: "Certainly, father. Certainly." And Simmons ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... Greek, who had attained his present ponderous dimensions through many years of rest: "I will hasten to fetch the keys." And as he went, puffing and panting, he re-arranged with his short, fat fingers the still abundant hair on the right side of his head. Pontius looked ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... world was then so light, 80 I scarcely felt the weight; Joy ruled the day, and Love the night. But, since the queen of pleasure left the ground, I faint, I lag, And feebly drag The ponderous orb around. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... at the door—for there was really no bell, but a ponderous, old-fashioned, wrought-iron knocker. So deliciously mediaeval! The late Graf von Lebenstein had recently died, we knew; and his son, the present Count, a young man of means, having inherited from his mother's family a still more ancient and splendid schloss ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... contribution; better than the excuse. There are, I may remind you, many kinds of sheep, and the outward difference is often marked. Since, you're from the old country, you can take the little Cheviot and the ponderous Shropshire as examples. You ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... this could be applied to them. The least diameter of the Coliseum is nearly equal in length to the Menai bridge; and if the labor of stretching cords over the one seems small in comparison with that of raising the ponderous chains of the other, we may take into consideration the weight of cloth which those cords supported, and the increase of difficulties arising from the action of the wind on so extensive ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... bookseller's hack or an 'occasional correspondent.' He liked his ready speech, and his fun, but he would not consent to see in either evidences of anything beyond the amusing qualities of a very light intelligence. On the whole, he looked down upon him, as very properly the slow and ponderous people in life do look down upon their more volatile brethren, and vote them triflers. Long may it be so! There would be more sunstrokes in the world, if it were not that the shadows of dull men made such nice cool places for ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... mortal blades, bracelets of wondrous and cunning finish and singular properties—all here is miraculous, the workman, the process, and the work. The vividness with which Homer presents to us the one-eyed Polyphemus, with his tree-staff and his ponderous body, is exchanged by the Scandinavian for smallness, indistinctness of form and of power. The grand in the South is obtained by giving enlarged pictures of man as he is; in the North, by investing him with strange, magic, mysterious qualities. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... his desk hung a tinted map of the metropolis. Upon a table at his elbow were piled ponderous tomes depicting the Bronx in all its beauty, and giving details of suburban sewers. Other volumes contained maps of the fashionable residential district, showing every consecrated block and the exact location as well as the linear dimensions of every awesome residence ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test. Had The Task been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it is, he is merely ponderous—a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence. In the fragment called Yardley Oak he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ungrammatical, vague, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... had known how difficult it was to write a History of the World, I should never have undertaken the task. Of course, any one possessed of enough industry to lose himself for half a dozen years in the musty stacks of a library, can compile a ponderous tome which gives an account of the events in every land during every century. But that was not the purpose of the present book. The publishers wanted to print a history that should have rhythm—a story which galloped rather than walked. And now that ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... the mill without another word; without even a grin from the broad-faced Ole, who sat in ponderous thought in the wagon ahead. To a nature such as his the infrequency of a new idea gives it the force of a cataclysm; during its ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... great event. The village school gave a half holiday. Every able-bodied man and boy from the whole country-side received an invitation—all being needed to "heave up," at the boss carpenter's pompous word of command, the ponderous timbers seemingly meant to last forever. A feast followed, with contests of strength and agility worthy of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... to hunt in couples, you are a deadly pair. I once knew a St. Bernard dog—you will perceive the analogy by-and-by—who lived on terms of friendship with a Skye terrier. By himself Rufus was a mild and inoffensive giant. He adored the house-cat, and used to help her, in a ponderous way, with the care of her numerous family. Many a time have I seen him placidly extended before a fire, while puss used his shaggy body as a sleeping box, and once he was observed to help that anxious tabby-mother with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... to have been disturbed, when they suddenly perceived that both forelegs were missing. On further examination they found that the ponderous tail, seven feet in diameter, was cut through in two places, the thicker portion having disappeared, and that the heavy bones in this extremity of the vertebral column had been severed like straws. The cut surfaces were but little cooler than the interior of the body, showing ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Courant is another typical Dutch newspaper, but appealing to quite other instincts than the Nieuws. In their quiet way the Dutch are rather proud of their Nieuwe Kotterdammer, which inspires something like awe for its undeniable, but slightly ponderous, virtues. The Nieuwe Rotterdammer is absolutely Liberal, and stands no Radical or Social Democratic nonsense; its leading articles are lucid, cool, logical, and to the point; it has correspondents ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... the ladies and gentlemen who sit cater- cornered, and who will not move up; and equally familiar is that large and ponderous person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practically sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by having your knee under him. He implies by this brutal conduct that you are taking up more space than belongs to you, and that you are justly made ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... them there was surely a tragic bond, as they stood there islanded among the swelling tides of civilization which had already engulfed their kindreds. "Last Bull" they had called him, as he answered their gaze with little, sullen, melancholy eyes from under his ponderous and shaggy front. "Last Bull"—and the passing of his race was ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Mardykes Hall is an oblong room wainscoted. From the door you look its full length to the wide stone-shafted Tudor window at the other end. At your left is the ponderous mantelpiece, supported by two spiral stone pillars; and close to the door at the right was the bed in which the two crones had just stretched poor Philip Feltram, who lay as still as an uncoloured wax-work, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... university. I have seen him hold a roomful of otherwise restless youths spellbound for an hour, while he discoursed about the respective inhabitants of the earth and sea at a time when nothing walked on fewer than four legs. And I have seen this scholar, his ponderous tomes shelved for a space, turning over and over with cherishing hands a letter-box that he had made out of card-board and paste, and exhibiting it proudly to his friends. For the hand was the first instrument ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... throng surged thickest. Jew and gentile, greaser and dude, tin-horn gamblers and tenderfeet, hayseeds and merchants, jostled each other good humouredly. In the pool box were two men. One —the auctioneer—a perfect specimen of the "sport"; a ponderous individual, brazen of face and voice, who presented to the crowd an amazing front of mottled face, diamond stud, bulging shirt sleeves, and a bull-neck encircled by a soiled eighteen-and-a-half inch paper collar. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... a strange inconsistency, for why should the Edinburgh Review, if the work be really what he asserts it to be, "light and trifling," etcetera, waste so much powder and shot upon a tomtit? Why has he dedicated twenty-seven pages of ponderous verbosity to so light and trifling a work? How seldom is it that the pages of the Quarterly or Edinburgh condescend to notice even the very best of light literature! Do they not, in their majesty, consider it infra ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact did they appear; until, as it grew ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... rolls his dusky floods Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods, The Nymph, GOSSYPIA, treads the velvet sod, And warms with rosy smiles the watery God; His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns, 90 And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns; With playful charms her hoary lover wins, And wields his trident,—while the Monarch spins. —First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull From ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... rolls of flesh which covered the last vertebrae and pressed upon the giant's cerebellum, and, above all, hearing the shrill, sharp voice which contrasted so absurdly with his huge body, would have understood why this ponderous, coarse being adored his only son, and why he had so long expected him,—a fact proved by the name, Desire, which was ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... undoubtedly due the material which the document embodies and the argument it contains, but it was almost certainly not written by him, but by his chaplain, Pierre L'Oyseleur, Seigneur de Villiers, to whom it owes its rather ponderous prolixity and redundant verbiage. Historically it is of very considerable value, though the facts are not always to be relied upon as strictly accurate. The Apology was translated into several languages and distributed to the leading personages in every neighbouring ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... with Protestants in offering aid to the queen: it was a united rather than a divided nation which Philip faced. The English fleet, composed of comparatively small and easily maneuvered vessels, worked great havoc upon the ponderous and slow-moving Spanish galleons, and the wreck of the Armada was completed by a furious gale which tossed ship after ship upon the rocks of northern Scotland. Less than a third of the original expedition ever returned ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Christian principles? Intemperance, social impurity, wide, dreary tracts of ignorance, degradation, bestiality, the awful condition of the lowest layer in our great cities, crushed like some crumbling bricks beneath the ponderous weight of the splendid superstructure, the bitter partisan spirit of politics, where the followers of each chief think themselves bound to believe that he is immaculate and that the other side has no honour or truth belonging to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... His Artemisia about to drink her husband's ashes from a costly cup reveals a ponderous hand. It is but indifferent Rembrandt, despite several jewelled passages. Van Dyck shows at least one great picture, the Betrayal of Christ. The Brazen Serpent only ranks second to it; both are masterpieces, and Antwerp must envy the Prado. The Crown of Thorns, and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... however, had not been done; and Lord Nelson, with his friends, put up at an inn in Woodstock; from whence they went to Blenheim, as strangers, for the purpose of viewing the internal attractions of art, in that grand but ponderous national pile. The family never made their appearance; but sent a servant with refreshments, which Lord Nelson proudly refused. As the duke was at home, his lordship thought, no doubt, that he ought, at ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... winter's-morning in order to be at Bradford with the great waggon-load of goods manufactured by his father; this load was packed over-night, but in the morning there was a great gathering around it, and flashing of lanterns, and examination of horses' feet, before the ponderous waggon got under way; and then some one had to go groping here and there, on hands and knees, and always sounding with a staff down the long, steep, slippery brow, to find where the horses might tread safely, until ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the very essence of those systems. But Darwin's observations were precisely calculated to render such an hypothesis futile. At first people may have failed to see this; and we call to mind the ponderous sarcasms of Flourens when he objected to the theory of Natural Selection that it attributed to nature a power of free choice. "Nature endowed with will! That was the final error of last century; but the nineteenth no longer deals in personifications."[246] In fact Darwin himself put his readers ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... belly till his back was dry, then turned on his broad back and squirmed about in a ponderous way till the broiling sun had wholly dried him. He realized that he was really feeling very well now. He did not say to himself, "I am troubled with that unpleasant disease called rheumatism, and sulphur-bath treatment is the thing to cure it." But what he did know ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and as he swings the weight a ponderous sound ensues, a hollow clamor that is loud enough to arouse the whole street, ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... boat, nearing the Staten Island landing, slowed its ponderous screws. The chauffeur flung away his cigarette, drew on his gauntlets and accelerated his engine. Forward the human drove began to press, under the long slave-driven habit of haste, of eagerness to do the ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... his attention: a bowl of hammered brass, inverted beneath a ponderous book, upon the desk. Why? In a twinkling he had removed both and was studying the impression of a woman's hand in the dust, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... of letting you get drowned, you know," remarked Mr. Robbins with ponderous humor. "A girl who can speechify the way you can, might get to be president some day, if the women's rights folks should win out. I don't say," concluded Mr. Robbins, with the air of making a great concession, "that I mightn't ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... creeping back on the simple-minded old man; insomuch that, if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had disturbed him, his remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr. Dolliver and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which seemed quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the two extremities of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset, illuminating his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a homogeneous shimmer ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... posterity. Till a few years ago, they were the decoration of his tomb near Gazneh, which is built of white marble with a cupola, and where Moollas are still maintained to read prayers over his grave.[38] There too once hung the ponderous mace, which few but himself could wield; but the mace has disappeared, and the sandal gates, if genuine, were carried off about twelve years since by the British Governor-General of India, and restored to their old place, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... man's mind is but one whole; be it palace or hovel, feudal stronghold or Italian villa, it is all of a piece: a duly subordinated spirit bears no superstructure of the Radical, and the friable soil of discontented Liberalism, is too sandy a foundation for ponderous fanes of the religious. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and carried no sound but the soft tinkle of the sap as it dript swiftly into the birchen cups. The faint, sweet smell of the sap seemed to cling upon the darkness. The candle flared up for an instant, revealing black, mysterious aisles among the ponderous tree-trunks, then guttered down and almost went out, the darkness seeming to swoop in upon its defeat. The woman examined it, found that it was all but done, and glanced nervously over her shoulder. Then she made anxious haste to empty and replace the last of the birchen cups ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... three francs: if a drove of hogs, nine francs per whole hog: but upon these subjects Mr. Bulwer, Mrs. Trollope, and other writers, have already enlightened the public. In the present instance, after a momentary pause, one of the men in green mounts by the side of the conductor, and the ponderous vehicle pursues ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... magnitude of the mass relatively with the magnitude of the deflecting pressure, and the rapidity with which that pressure is applied and removed. Thus if a force or weight be very suddenly applied to the middle of a ponderous beam, and be as suddenly withdrawn, the inertia of the beam will, as in the case of the collision of bodies, tend to resist the force, and thus obviate deflection to a considerable extent; but if the pressure be so long continued as to produce ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... for my family, so that I might have more time for the improvement of my mind. For novels and light reading I never had much taste; the ladies' department in the periodicals of the day had no attraction for me. "She would lay a copy of William Penn's ponderous volumes open at the foot of her bed, and drawing her chair close to it, with her baby on her lap, would study the book diligently. A woman of less energy and less will-power than young Mrs. Mott would have given up all hope of being a scholar. She read the best books in philosophy and science. ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... consider the buying of a new hat. From the first he has a terrifying way of dealing familiarly with vast things. Somehow he reminds one of those jugglers who, for a time, toss heavy balls about, and then suddenly astonish the audience by introducing a handkerchief, which flies lightly among its ponderous companions. So Mr. Wells began to juggle with worlds. He has latterly introduced that delicate thing, the human soul and conscience, into the play, and you see it precariously fluttering among the immensities of leaping planets. He persuades himself that ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... nothing for it but to open each door in order. It was of course likely that the two had been thrust into nearby cells, but had these been filled she might have been carried to the very end of the passageway. He fitted the ponderous brass thing into the first lock. It took a man's strength to turn the rusty and clumsy bolt, but it finally yielded. Again it took a man's strength to throw open the door upon its rusted hinges. A half savage thing staggered to the threshold and faced him with strange jabbering. Its face and hands ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... scaffold on which the great bell hung, and from the still taller erection that had been put up as an outlook for "the ship" in summer. At the present time it commanded a bleak view of the frozen sea. Snow covered every housetop, and hung in ponderous masses from their edges, as if it were about to fall; but it never fell—it hung there in the same position day after day, unmelted, unchanged. Snow covered the whole land, and the frozen river, the swamps, the sea-beach, and the sea itself, as ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... portraits) in massive and, for the most part, tarnished frames, and furnished in the solidest of British styles—mahogany chairs and table, an immense sideboard, a white marble fireplace, and a chandelier hanging with ponderous menace above the gleaming expanse of table-cloth. Here were seated eleven persons: Mr. Liversedge and his wife, their seven children (four girls and three boys), Miss Pope the governess, and Mr. Denzil Quarrier; waited upon by two maid-servants, with ruddy cheeks, ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... This ponderous door, in elaborate carpentry, opened upon a flight of steps and on a flower-yard surrounded by elms, firs, and Paulownia trees, the latter of a beany odor and nature. A lower servants' part of the dwelling, in two stories, stretched ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... also a charming ditto daughter of fifteen or sixteen, with ditto eyes. Sitting among old armour and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables, and old canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they made a most romantic show and looked like a chapter out of one of his ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... now threatened the other. But after all she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades, like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo's sorrow could not at any rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand—it was coming slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Ulysses then Arose, and with him rose the king of men. On either side a sacred herald stands, The wine they mix, and on each monarch's hands Pour the full urn; then draws the Grecian lord His cutlass sheathed beside his ponderous sword; From the sign'd victims crops the curling hair;(121) The heralds part it, and the princes share; Then loudly thus before the attentive bands He calls the gods, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... and he would have rather had the trial all alone, but he was too eager and excited to mind much, and soon after the boat was drawn up to the side of the staging, at the end of the dam, the ponderous affair lifted from the cart, and the miller came out to form one of the ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... anywhere, they would wager that it could not escape the young Consul's eye. The general conviction was, that if every creditor of the firm, or even the devil himself, should some day take it into his head to come into the office, there would not be found even the slightest error in one of the ponderous and ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... Travers yet," boomed Royce, in his ponderous basso,—"not personal hopes, Foster; you needn't feel for your pistol,—but I believe that her heart is with the army, like the soldier's daughter she is." And, audacious as was the speech and deserving ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... machinery, it chattered much more than was agreeable to either philosopher. Various remedies were tried to cure it of its garrulity, but in vain; and one day, Thomas Aquinas was so enraged at the noise it made when he was in the midst of a mathematical problem, that he seized a ponderous hammer and smashed it to pieces.[31] He was sorry afterwards for what he had done, and was reproved by his master for giving way to his anger, so unbecoming in a philosopher. They made no ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... substantial supper was provided for us, to which was added some excellent wine, made in the valley below. Conversation was pretty general in French, and somewhat exclusive in Latin; two of our party understanding the dead language, but ignorant of the living, framed with great difficulty ponderous but by no means Ciceronian sentences, which they launched at our host, who replied with great fluency, showing that for conversational purposes, at least, his command of the language was much better than theirs. Being anxious to attend the early mass in the morning, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Cloth of Gold, was afforded a more thrilling spectacle than when these two paladins rushed to the onset and met in mid-career. Each gave a yell and dug his heels into his charger, and whacked her with the butt end of his lance, and forced her into a ponderous gallop for the meeting. It matters not now what was the precise intent of either jouster, which of them aimed at gorget or head-piece, or at shield, for—either because the flour bags made the lances difficult to manage or of some unevenness in the ground—each missed ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... in the bar of candle-light which one of the shop sconces extended across the room, and lifted the violin to his neck. He was so large that all his gestures had a ponderous quality. His dress was disarranged by riding, and his blond skin was pricked through by the untidy growth of a three-days' beard, ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... man was not an Indian. The former might have stolen the range and valley and mountain, even the desert, but his possessions would ever remain mysteries. Gale had scarcely faced the great gray ponderous wall of cliff before the old strange interest in the Yaqui seized him again. It recalled the tie that existed between them, a tie almost as close as blood. Then he was eager and curious to see how the Indian ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... all present, till Queen Charlotte, annoyed at such weakness, turned her back upon the stage and loudly declared that such a lifelike exhibition was "too disagreeable to look at." Off the stage, however, the personality of Mrs Siddons was transformed. A handsome woman, though of ponderous build, her conversation was singularly dull, and she spoke in a slow, sententious manner as though declaiming a set speech, which peculiarity gave rise to many ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... very dusty room. The air in it was stifling, it oppressed her breast. The walls were covered with bookcases filled with books. The tables were also covered with books—all new, slender, with bright covers. The title-pages were for some reason ponderous, terrible to look at. A tall, gaunt, long-haired student entered; his hair was very straight, his face morose and grey, he wore spectacles. ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... region, after some difficulty and delay, the parlour-maid produced the W-Z volume of an Encyclopaedia and, in deference to the fact that the demand for it had come from Miss Van Vluyck, laid the ponderous tome ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... him!" was the cry, and the ponderous iron gates swung together with a clang. But just one second before they closed, the narrow bicycle, with its terror-stricken burden, slipped through into the street beyond and turned sharply to the west, gaining speed every instant. Droop had escaped for the moment, ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... eye, without winking or wavering, the distant proposition which is to be proven; of advancing to it by steady steps on the shortest route; and bearing up, with the strength of Atlas, the most extended and ponderous chain of logical deductions. Such was the habitual steadiness and strength of his mind, that, unlike his fellow-students, I never saw him lose sight, for an instant, of the point in debate, much less shift that point to something else; in advancing to it, ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... proceed yet further. By the means of this fine herb the invisible substances are visibly stopped, arrested, taken, detained, and prisoner-like committed to their receptive gaols. Heavy and ponderous weights are by it heaved, lifted up, turned, veered, drawn, carried, and every way moved quickly, nimbly, and easily, to the great profit and emolument of humankind. When I perpend with myself these and such-like marvellous effects of this wonderful ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... no tale of treasure, however preposterous. The story ravished him with delight. He was near someone who had possessed this wealth. He saw someone who had seen this pile of gold. He seemed near it; it was there, somewhere close by, under his eyes, under his fingers; it was red, gleaming, ponderous. He gazed about him wildly; nothing, nothing but the sordid junk shop and the rust-corroded tins. What exasperation, what positive misery, to be so near to it and yet to know that it was irrevocably, irretrievably lost! A spasm of anguish passed through him. He gnawed at his bloodless lips, at the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... that our hero was ignorant of the large number of emigrants that was moving over the plains, and it is quite probable that his sagacity was precocious enough to look ahead at the result of attempting to carry forward such ponderous loads, and such a variety of at least dispensable things as the earlier parties started with. A detailed list of the 'amount and variety of goods and wares, useful and superfluous, including many of the appendages of refined and fashionable life, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... obtained the advantage, now the other. His nerves demanded relief from the friction, but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day's holiday. Twice every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational body in his father's bedroom. Maggie helped the body to feed itself at table. But Maggie apparently had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... heroine could not shock a taste which had been formed by the Sorrows of Werther. It is extremely moral, deeply sentimental, and of a deadly earnestness—three characteristics which could not fail to recommend it to a dreary and ponderous generation, the most deficient in taste that ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... when the Argonauts, as these fifty brave adventurers were called, had prepared everything for the voyage, an unforeseen difficulty threatened to end it before it was begun. The vessel, you must understand, was so long and broad and ponderous that the united force of all the fifty was insufficient to shove her into the water. Hercules, I suppose, had not grown to his full strength, else he might have set her afloat as easily as a little boy launches his boat upon ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... rested in Independence Hall. In New York I suppose not less than half a million people passed by to view the body. General Scott came down with the procession to the station, and to him I introduced our Illinois friends. His response was given in a most dignified and ponderous style: "Gentlemen, you do ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... of capacious and old-fashioned dimensions, its ponderous wood-work carefully hidden by the American ensign, the fly of which was to serve as an envelope for the feet and ancles of the ladies, was strongly slung and lowered into the stern sheets of the governor's state barge, a craft containing nearly as much timber ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... which it springs. The acting of Mary Anderson, from the first moment of her career, was of the kind that needs that deep insight and broad judgment,—aiming to recognise and rightly estimate its worth. Yet few performers of the day were so liberally favoured with the monitions of dullness and the ponderous patronage ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... in dealing with ponderous and awful blunders like this that the satiric power of the writer finds its ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... and listened with all politeness to my story. But when I looked at his heavy set features, his slow eyes, and the ponderous study furniture which surrounded him, I could hardly tell him what I had come to say. It was all so substantial, so material. And, besides, what would I myself have said a short month ago if one of my colleagues ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... whole; to which he sometimes added a walk in the evening, to visit children or friends, or transact some necessary business. When the weather was very unpleasant, he availed himself of the Harlem cars. Upon one of these occasions, it chanced that the long, ponderous vehicle was nearly empty. They had not proceeded far, when a very respectable-looking young woman beckoned for the car to stop. It did so; but when she set her foot on the step, the conductor, somewhat ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... to his care. Miss Letitia Mangan was far from considering herself a little girl. She was sixteen and a half, and conceived herself to be of combatant rank, even though her thick, dark hair banged on her back in a ponderous pigtail, and her education at the Cluhir Convent School was still uncompleted. The fat, piebald pony that she was riding would have a sore back before she got home. Christian, perched wren-like on her ancient steed ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... noted, one of the two great contributions of the twelfth-century revival of learning to the field of university studies was scholastic theology. The number of books written on this subject was enormous. The ponderous tomes, loaded with comments, make a long array on the shelves of our great libraries, but they are memorials of a battlefield of the mind now for the most part deserted. The importance of the subject in the scheme of mediaeval education has been much exaggerated; it was ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... moment the ponderous engines paused, panting and quivering like two living, sentient monsters; the next, with heavy, labored breath, as though summoning all their energies for the task before them, they were slowly ascending the steadily increasing grade, moment by moment with accelerated speed plunging ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... The very largeness of the forms about him, whether human, vegetable, or floral, appealed to his bold brush, and I think that critics should take this into consideration before declaring his southern pictures garish. They often seem so, but then the sunset there is glaring, the shadows ponderous and full of harsh complementary reflects, while humanity wears another aspect in this southern island where distance is annihilated by the clarity of the atmosphere. No, Paul Gauguin is certainly not a plagiarist. Clive Bell has written: ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... high-warp looms to work with extraordinary activity. As though he would rival the great Gobelins itself, he reproduced the most ambitious of pieces, the Raphael series, Acts of the Apostles, and a long list of ponderous groups wherein oversized gods disport themselves in a heavy setting of architecture and voluminous draperies. He also produced some contemporary battle scenes which are now in ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Piedmont and Coastplain provinces to the shores of the Atlantic between the Potomac and the Savannah. As shown by Allen, the buffalo, "prior to the year 1800," spread eastward across the Appalachians(34) and into the priscan territory of the Siouan tribes. As suggested by Shaler, the presence of this ponderous and peaceful animal materially affected the vocations of the Indians, tending to discourage agriculture and encourage the chase; and it can hardly be doubted that the bison was the bridge that carried the ancestors of the western tribes from the crest ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... remarked each newcomer who idly joined the onlooking throng. Especially he observed each cab or carriage that hurried up to the wharf's front. He studied each of the alighting occupants as they yielded their effects to the antic, white-jacketed mulatto cabin-boys, behind whom they crossed the ponderous unrailed stage and vanished on their up-stairs way to the boiler deck, the cabin, and their staterooms. Had his mild scrutinizings been a paid service, they could ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... desired as little as themselves. He smiled at my courageous spirit, paid me the first quarter of my income, and gave me the remainder of my personal effects, which had been sent to me, under his care, in a couple of rather ponderous boxes. With these I returned in triumph to my lodgings, more content with my position than I should have thought possible a week before, and fully determined to make the best ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... world knows you—you and your children! It sees you fat of figure, an Adam's apple struggling with your every vowel, ponderous of temperament. It sees you a sullen and varicose mistress, whose draperies hang heavy and ludicrous from a pudgy form. It sees you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine struggling awkwardly from out a cyclopean vat ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... this. That block is a ponderous piece of steel, quite complicated, and it swings on a hinge fastened to one side of the rear of the gun. Once it is swung back into place, it is made fast by means of screw threads, wedges or in whatever way the inventor of the ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... himself out of his chair, and received the visitor with ponderous cordiality. "It is a long time since we have had the pleasure of welcoming you to Elmerton, Mrs. Pryor," he said. "Your family has sustained a great loss, ma'am, a great loss. Miss ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... made, a third trial of her powers was attempted on the eleventh day of September, with the weight of twenty-six of her long and ponderous guns, and a considerable quantity of ammunition and stores on board; her draft of water was short of eleven feet. She changed her course by inverting the motion of the wheel, without the necessity of putting about. She fired salutes as she passed the forts, ...
— Fulton's "Steam Battery": Blockship and Catamaran • Howard I. Chapelle
... for years, your remarkable personal grace and beauty had been a source of pleasure to me; and I had pictured you wedded to Pauline Lister, for instance, in her dazzling whiteness, and soft radiant youth. So my morbid self-consciousness said: 'What! This young Apollo, tied to my ponderous plainness; growing handsomer every year, while I grow older and plainer?' Ah, darling! It sounds so unworthy, now we know what our love is. But it sounded sensible and right that night; and at last, with a bosom that ached, and arms that ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... seemed as if this vague brightness arose from the snow itself, in order to spread itself into space. By degrees the highest and most distant summits assumed a delicate, fleshlike rose color, and the red sun appeared behind the ponderous giants of the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... warrant," said Mr. Clinch with ponderous gallantry; "but methinks 'tis nothing compared with the nectar that grows on those ruby lips. Nay, by St. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... at them across the open with terrific speed. Jack had not the faintest idea that so ponderous a beast could move at such a pace, and he stared with fascinated eyes at the extraordinary sight. The "rogue" was an immense tusker, a big, wild, savage-looking brute, who charged with up-lifted trunk, and now ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... first day's journey brought me at evening to a village, whose name I have forgotten, situated about eight leagues from Orleans. It is a small, obscure hamlet, not mentioned in the guide-book, and stands upon the precipitous banks of a deep ravine, through which a noisy brook leaps to turn the ponderous wheel of a thatch-roofed mill. The village inn stands upon the highway; but the village itself is not visible to the traveler as he passes. It is completely hidden in the lap of a wooded valley, and so embowered in trees ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... he was extremely proud of his strength, and of his hands, which were well-formed, but large, firmly knit and powerful, such hands as rightly belonged to a gentleman whose ancestors had given many a crushing blow with ponderous battle-axe in ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... article, but I did not mean any harm. I saw by an item in the Boston ADVERTISER that a solemn, serious critique on the English edition of my book had appeared in the London SATURDAY REVIEW, and the idea of SUCH a literary breakfast by a stolid, ponderous British ogre of the quill was too much for a naturally weak virtue, and I went home and burlesqued it —reveled in it, I may say. I never saw a copy of the real SATURDAY REVIEW criticism until after my burlesque was written and mailed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who happened to verge somewhat toward a complacent mood upon this occasion, smiled grimly at his wife's commendation, and even unbent so far as to indulge in some ponderous attempts at wit with Laura concerning her "magnificent offer," and asserted that if she had been "like his wife, she would have jumped at the chance of getting hold of such a crude, unreformed specimen of humanity. Indeed," concluded he, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... a ponderous clanging and the rattle of chains, the while Fray Joseph stood reeling in his tracks. Then suddenly from every side burst forth the radiance of many lamps. Torches sprang into flame, braziers of resin wood began to smoke, flambeaux were ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Governor, lifting his head from the hand he had kissed with ponderous gallantry. "What ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... of his fictions he, in truth, did more to remove wrong impressions, dissipate prejudices, and open the eyes of Europe to a knowledge of American life and manners, than could have been accomplished by the longest and most ponderous array ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... carry a pressure of more than two hundred and fifty pounds to each square inch of surface—about four times as great as in the iron boilers formerly used. Locomotives of eighty tons draw the fast passenger trains at a speed of sixty miles an hour. Ponderous compounding engines weighing one hundred and twenty tons haul ninety or more steel freight cars that carry each a load of 100,000 pounds. The iron rails formerly in use weighed about forty pounds per ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... evening, she consented to get up, and make an effort to eat. Therese then saw what a terrible shock her aunt had received. The legs of the old lady had become so ponderous that she required a stick to assist her to drag herself into the dining-room, and there she thought the walls ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... procession of the idol Juggernaut in India, instead of the thousand devotees who used to drag at the ropes to haul his chariot from the temple to the river, hired coolies had to be substituted, and the victims who willingly threw themselves under the ponderous wheels to be crushed ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... becoming ponderous! Do you know it? Suppose I didn't care to see you this particular afternoon. Is there any reason why you should take ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... of expression. Her slight figure seemed hardly large enough to contain the great heart that beat so fervently within, and the soul that expanded more and more as one year gave place to another. It was difficult to believe that such a fairy hand could pen thoughts of such ponderous weight, or that such a "still small voice" could utter them with equal force. But it was Mrs. Browning's face upon which one loved to gaze,—that face and head which almost lost themselves in the thick curls of her dark brown hair. That jealous hair could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... national, rather than religious, and Catholics vied with Protestants in offering aid to the queen: it was a united rather than a divided nation which Philip faced. The English fleet, composed of comparatively small and easily maneuvered vessels, worked great havoc upon the ponderous and slow-moving Spanish galleons, and the wreck of the Armada was completed by a furious gale which tossed ship after ship upon the rocks of northern Scotland. Less than a third of the original expedition ever returned ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... with social usages. We read of the Chinese that they have "ponderous ceremonies transmitted from time immemorial," which make social intercourse a burden. The court forms prescribed by monarchs for their own exaltation, have, in all times and places, ended in consuming ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the man who has been led to believe that he is a brilliant and interesting talker has been led to make himself a rapacious pest. No conversation is possible between others whose ears are within reach of his ponderous voice; anecdotes, long-winded stories, dramatic and pathetic, stock his repertoire; but worst of all are his humorous yarns at which he laughs uproariously though every one else ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... was absolutely stirless, . . it appeared as though it had been thrown, a ponderous weight, into the vault of heaven, and having fallen, there purposed to remain. Ever and anon beamy threads of lightning played through it luridly, veining it with long, arrowy flashes of orange ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the seas, either by the definite will of God so ruling, or the peculiar sway of nature, which also is God's working, Neither can I think that, so reputed and so valued as you are, you would, to the forfeit of your own discerning ability, impose upon me an unfit and over-ponderous argument, but that the satisfaction which you profess to have received from those incidental discourses which we have wandered into hath pressed, and almost constrained, you into a persuasion that what you require from me in this point I neither ought nor can in conscience defer beyond this time, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... immediately given up. "Very well; now take mine, dress yourself in them, and let's be off." While the young man was putting on with decided distaste the garments of the cocher, the latter managed to introduce his ponderous bulk into those of the poet. This done, out they went. "Get up on the box."—"On the box?"—"Yes, idiot," said the coachman, growing more and more familiar; "I am going to get into the cab, now drive me wherever you ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... whole drawn by eight or ten horses, two abreast with a driver riding on a pony with a long whip, which gave him command of the whole team! Average pace about 1 1/2 to 2 miles an hour, including stoppages, as taken from old time tallies, for their journeys! These ponderous wagons, with their teams of eight horses and broad wheels, were actually associated with the idea of "flying," for I find an announcement in the year 1772, that the Stamford, Grantham, Newark and Gainsboro' wagons began "flying" on Tuesday, March 24th, ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... the advancing party the nature of the danger which awaited them. He shouted strenuously, but in vain—and with a feeling almost amounting to agony, he beheld the little troop resolutely advance beneath the ponderous rock, which, held in its place by the slightest purchase, needed but the most moderate effort to upheave and ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... eye. The general conviction was, that if every creditor of the firm, or even the devil himself, should some day take it into his head to come into the office, there would not be found even the slightest error in one of the ponderous and ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... any other political or social question, but the investigation of which need not make us get excited and angry and call one another bad names. I venture to hope that by these means I may manage to compile a not unedifying or uninteresting narrative, though our subject be withal somewhat a ponderous one. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... were demolished and the materials used in constructing walls wherever they were needed, or in strengthening the barricades. Prodigious military engines, made to throw heavy stones, and beams of wood, and other ponderous missiles, were set up within his lines, and openings were made in the walls and other defenses of the citadel, wherever necessary, to facilitate the action of ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... quarter of the town and his own. When he passed from the brightly lit city into his own quarter, the streets were like ugly gutters to drain the darkness, and the "Ark" rose mysteriously into the sky of night like a ponderous mountain. Dark cellar-openings led down into the roots of the mountain, and there, in its dark entrails, moved wan, grimy creatures with smoky lamps; there were all those who lived upon the poverty of ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sculptures and the entablature;—from the portraits of grim men and severe-eyed women, arrayed in orderly procession along the walls, and scowling a contemptuous enmity against the degenerate invader of their gloomy bowers and venerable halls; from the vast, dusky, ponderous, and complicated draperies that concealed the windows, and hung with the gloomy grandeur of funereal trappings about the hearse-like piece of furniture that was destined for his bed,—Lord L., on entering his apartment, might be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... as she listened to Leonard's eager narration; and Ethel glanced towards Harry to see whether he were admiring. No; Harry was bringing in a hall arm-chair in the background, for a vary large, heavy, vulgar-looking old man, who seemed too ponderous and infirm for a place on the benches. Richard made one of a black mass of clergy, and Aubrey and Gertrude had asserted their independence by perching themselves on a window-seat, as far as possible from all relations, whence they nodded a merry ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Father, Royall Dane: Oh, oh, answer me, Let me not burst in Ignorance; but tell Why thy Canoniz'd bones Hearsed in death, Haue burst their cerments, why the Sepulcher Wherein we saw thee quietly enurn'd, Hath op'd his ponderous and Marble iawes, To cast thee vp againe? What may this meane? That thou dead Coarse againe in compleat steele, Reuisits thus the glimpses of the Moone, Making Night hidious? And we fooles of Nature, So horridly to shake our disposition, With thoughts beyond thee; reaches of our Soules, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... night a lofty scaffold had been erected on the bridge of Sant' Angelo, and the plank and block were placed thereon. Above the block was hung, from a large cross beam, a ponderous axe, which, guided by two grooves, fell with its whole weight at the ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and one by the poet. [Footnote: See the Republic X, 596 B ff.] Now the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Stepan Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... together. We found some shell-fish, viz., limpets, periwinkles, and abundance of small oysters growing on the rocks, which were very sweet. In the sea we saw some green turtle, many sharks, and abundance of water-snakes of several sorts and sizes. The stones were all of rusty colour, and ponderous. ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... it," mused Guilder, entering his big touring car and depositing a bundle of blue-prints and linen tracing paper at his own ponderous feet. Quair followed him and spoke briefly ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... came a confusion of voices, but none of them human. A wind was racing to almost gale-like violence and with it came the inrush of warm air to peaks and valleys that had been tight-frozen. Between precipices echoed the crash of ice sliding loose and splintering as it fell in ponderous masses. Men sweating in the glare of collossal bonfires toiled at the work of ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... arm thrust across the sky; it is so high it is scarcely noticed in walking under it; it is so great and ponderous, and ultra in size, that the eye and mind alike fail to estimate it. For it is a common effect of great things to be overlooked. A moderately large rock, a moderately large house, is understood and mentally put down, as it were, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... cold and cheerless, weakly penetrating the ever-present frost veil. The tide, still defying the shackles of the mighty power that had bound all the rest of the world, surged up and down, piling ponderous ice cakes in mountainous heaps along the river banks. Occasionally an Eskimo or two would suddenly appear out of the snow fields, remain for a day perhaps, and then as suddenly disappear into the bleak wastes whence he ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... 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 somewhere so low down beneath material accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might—as may, we will suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chill rain begins at shut of eve, In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. Each one kept shroud, nor to his neighbour gave Or word, or look, or action of despair. 40 Creues was one; his ponderous iron mace Lay by him, and a shatter'd rib of rock Told of his rage, ere he thus sank and pined. Iaepetus another; in his grasp, A serpent's plashy neck; its barbed tongue Squeez'd from the gorge, and all its uncurl'd length Dead; and because the creature could ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... of him as if he saw some expected and unpleasant thing far in the distance. Then with irresistible steps, neither swift nor slow, but ponderous, he strode to the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... cloth cape with a capacious hood, amused us greatly, for on meeting us, lest our bold eyes should pierce their disguise, they would stop and turn their faces to the wall. What these poor creatures suffer from the heat in these ponderous cloaks can only be imagined, and Dulcigno ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... this Spanish woman, I expected the breath of prophecy, wide outlooks, extraordinary visions. Not at all; her book is simply strange and pompous, wearisome and cold. Then the phraseology of her book is intolerable. All the expressions which swarm in those ponderous volumes, 'my divine princess,' 'my great queen,' when she addresses Our Lady, who in her turn speaks to her as 'my dearest,' just as Christ calls her 'my spouse,' 'my well-beloved,' and speaks of her continually as 'the object of my pleasure and delight,' the way in which ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... be bowed With woes far heavier than the ponderous tomb That weighed upon her gentle dust, a cloud Might gather o'er her beauty, and a gloom In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom, Heaven gives ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... and noble bridge to span The icy chasm that sunders man from man. Wherever wrong had fixed its bastions deep, There did his fierce yet gay assault surprise Some fortress girt with lucre or with lies; There his light battery stormed some ponderous keep; There charged he up the steep, A knight on whom no palsying torpor fell, Keen to the last to break a lance with Hell. And still undimmed his conquering weapons shine; On his bright sword no ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... apparently more important than men. This particular horse did not attract with beauty. At first glance he seemed ugly. But he was a giant, black as coal, rough despite the care manifestly bestowed upon him, long of body, ponderous of limb, huge in every way. A bystander remarked that he had a grand head. True, if only his head had been seen he would have been a beautiful horse. Like men, horses show what they are in the shape, the ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... accomplished facts may save yet the precious vestiges of parliamentary institutions. Don Juste's eyes glowed dully; he believed in parliamentary institutions—and the convinced drone of his voice lost itself in the stillness of the house like the deep buzzing of some ponderous insect. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and influence the people. He was absolutely a novel personage to Mary: their conversations are like a quick glancing of polished weapons—his, too heavy for her young brilliancy of speech and nature, crushing with ponderous force the light-flashing darts of question; but she, no way daunted, comprehending him, meeting full in the face the prodigious thrust. A brave young creature of twenty confronting the great Reformer, in single combat so to speak, and retiring from the field, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... head sagely, and said nothing. The immediate result of the experience was that Veronica went to Miss Beasley, and borrowed An Antiquarian Survey of the County of Bedworthshire, including a description of its Castles and Moated Houses, together with a History of its Ancient Families—a ponderous volume dated 1823, which had before been offered for the girls' inspection, but which nobody had hitherto summoned courage to attack. She studied it now with deep attention, and gave a digest of its information for the benefit of weaker minds, ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... barrier to his improvement arose from one defect in his character; and that was the habit in which he constantly indulged, of deploring the past, without making any very strong efforts toward amendment in the future. He was one evening seated in his room; a ponderous volume lay open on his study-table, and for a time he vainly tried to fix his attention thereon, till finally he closed the book, and leaning back in his chair, his brows contracted, and the lines about his mouth grew tense, as if his thoughts were anything but pleasing. ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... to its Cultured Despisers. Translation by Oman. (Ponderous, dogmatic in its philosophy, but profound and sympathetic in its ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... "Left" or "Right turn:" "Formation by squares," and finally the critical "Change front to rear." If this last maneuver is successfully accomplished, the strategos will compliment the drill sergeants; for it is notoriously difficult to turn a ponderous phalanx around and yet make it keep good order. The drilling goes on until the welcome order comes, "Ground arms!" and every perspiring soldier lets his heavy shield slip from his ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... of Johnson's career, one can not but see that the companionship and nimble wit of Garrick saved his ponderous and melancholy mind ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... residuary legatee, whose property they were, he endeavoured to extract the substance. In this he has not been very successful, as I have found upon a perusal of those papers, which have been since transferred to me. Sir John Hawkins's ponderous labours, I must acknowledge, exhibit a farrago, of which a considerable portion is not devoid of entertainment to the lovers of literary gossiping; but besides its being swelled out with long unnecessary extracts from various ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... centripetal and centrifugal; otherwise, I might burst by the natural pressure of too highly confined interior forces! I confess that, though not subject to such infliction, I very nearly fainted over these ponderous polysyllables! He also informed me that the beautifully paved highway to popularity in the coal mines was to excavate large quantities of the carboniferous substance contained in the subterranean ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... sat in silence for some little time after listening to this extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock Holmes pulled down from the shelf one of the ponderous commonplace books in which ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... rejoined my host with ponderous sarcasm. "But, as I have yet to meet any one who can read your writing, I don't suppose ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... and somewhat three-cornered appearance, are very clever over bad ground. The ladies whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Shanghai, like those in India, were all devoted to riding, and I had many merry scampers across country with them. In the country round Tientsin, we had often to jump over ponderous coffins, for John Chinaman has a provoking way of omitting to bury his relations, after he has stowed them ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... current of the Sensibility novelists, who impressed their curious morals or manners on all men and women in civilised Europe, was French in unbroken succession, from the day when Madame de la Fayette first broke ground against the ponderous romances of Madeleine de Scudery, to the day when Benjamin Constant forged, in Adolphe, the link between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century romance, between the novel of sentiment and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... cemetery of the Medici, the Sagrestia Nuova, is a ponderous and dismal toy. It is a huge mass of expensive, solemn, and insipid magnificence, erected over the carcasses of as contemptible a family as ever rioted above the earth, or rotted under it. The only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... mannerism was introduced by the pseudo-philosophers of the Universities and may be discerned everywhere, even among the first literary notabilities of the age. It is the mother of that forced and vague style which seems to have two, nay, many meanings, as well as of that prolix and ponderous style, le stile empese; and of that no less useless bombastic style, and finally of that mode of concealing the most awful poverty of thought under a babble of inexhaustible chatter that resembles a clacking mill and is just as stupefying: one may read for hours together ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... aware of his purpose, halted also, and awaited the moment of his rush; when once more he darted forward, and the combatants met with a skill which called forth a cry of involuntary applause from the Christians themselves. Muza received on the small surface of his shield the ponderous spear of Alonzo, while his own light lance struck upon the helmet of the Christian, and by the exactness of the aim rather than the weight of the blow, made Alonzo ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... rational purposes, viz., giving a useful function to a word, which at present has none, and also providing an intelligible expression for an idea which otherwise is left without means of uttering itself except through a ponderous circumlocution. Precisely in the same circumstances of idle and absurd sequestration stands the term polemic. At present, according to the popular usage, this word has some fantastic inalienable connection ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Luckett would never let her touch the salt, which will ruin the hands. Cicely, however, who would do something, turned the cheeses in the cheese-room alone. Taking one corner of the clean cloth in her teeth, in a second, by some dexterous sleight-of-hand, the heavy cheese was over, though ponderous enough to puzzle many a man, especially as it had to come over gently that the shape might ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... Though the ponderous wheels of Juggernaut no longer go crushing over the bodies of prostrate victims, the assembled crowd rush to the car with almost appalling fury and excitement. Pilgrims, however, come in vast numbers ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... much contrast between the lightness of his book, "Songs for the Children," and his ponderous setting of Kipling's "Recessional." The treatment of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Southern Lullaby" is unusual, and the songs, "My Ladye" and "The Ideal," both in ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... regimental bands played continuously and it seemed to me that they all played the tune of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." And the rain drizzled down, while every fifteen minutes one of the big navy guns roared and sent a ponderous shell shrieking up the ravine above in the direction of the enemy. To this day, whenever I hear an instrumental band playing "The Girl I Left Behind Me," there come to me the memories of that gloomy Sunday night at Pittsburg ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... God! what superhuman Peal was that? Not man, nor woman, Nor twenty madmen, crush'd, could wreak Their soul in such a ponderous shriek. Dumbly, for an instant, stares The field; ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... before Jane could swallow her sobs, her sister ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed by the ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign old gentleman, whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him a ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... them in the dim candle-light of the night before, and he realized now, what had escaped him then, that there was neither dressing-table, wardrobe, nor chest of drawers, that the entire space of the small apartment was filled by the clumsy bed, a folding wash-stand, and two ponderous arm-chairs covered in shabby red velvet. These, with a dingy gold-framed mirror hanging above the tiny corner fireplace, and a gilt clock under a glass shade, formed the ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... many of the most delightful and daring NUANCES of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans—pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a portion of that learned oration, and Mom Wallis, not quite understanding, pinned up and used as a sort of shrine the portion about doubting the devil; but as a sermon the parts were never assembled on this earth, nor could be, for some of it was ground to powder under eight pairs of ponderous heels. But the minister at that trying moment was too much otherwise engaged to notice that the child of his brain lay ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... and rang the ponderous iron bell which hung from a chain by the side of a Gothic column, and a man-servant in livery, with powdered hair, appeared in reply ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Lausitz, are a good deal disturbed by Austrian Tolpatcheries; and do feats, heroic in the small way, in smiting down that rabble. A valuable Officer or two is lost in such poor service, poor but indispensable; [Funeral Discourses (of a very curious, ponderous and serious tone), in Gesammelte Nachrichten, ii. 458, 464, &c.] and the troops have not always the repose which is intended them. Lieutenant-Colonel Loudon (Scotch by kindred, and famous enough before long) is the soul of these Croat enterprises,—and gets his Colonelcy ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... replies: "Norma, an opera piece." Since the parson's exit he has been executing "Norma" with great spirit, and, so far as I am able to judge, with wonderful skill. I doubt not his thoughts are a thousand miles hence, among brown-skinned wenches, dressed in crimson robes, and decorated with ponderous ear-drops. In fact, "Norma" is good, and goes far to carry one out of ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... is largely a matter of fancy, and there is no rule to the effect that a slender player should use a light club and one of powerful build a heavy one; indeed, one constantly finds the slim men employing the most ponderous drivers, as if, as it were, to make up for their own lightness, while heavy men will often prefer clubs that are like pen-holders to them. Once more I suggest the adoption of the medium as being generally the most satisfactory. I have a strong dislike to drivers that are unusually ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... his den, The Douglas in his hall? And hop'st thou hence unscathed to go? No, by Saint Bride of Bothwell, no! Up drawbridge, grooms,—what, warder, ho! Let the portcullis fall." Lord Marmion turned,—well was his need,— And dashed the rowels in his steed, Like arrow through the archway sprung; The ponderous gate behind him rung: To pass there was such scanty room, The bars, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... girl." He produced this confidence with ponderous solemnity. "She lives across the square ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... giant in pain; the sharp jerk, and then the steady pull at the carriage in which I was sitting; the "pant, pant! puff, puff!" of the iron horse, as he buckled to his work with a will; and then, finally, the preliminary oscillation of the ponderous train, the trembling and rumbling of creaking wheels along the rails—as we glided and bumped, slowly but steadily, out of the terminus—the distance signal showing "all clear" to us, and blocking the up line with the ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... gates were opened wide, and, file after file, the weary soldiers marched into the city; and dashing homeward after his brilliant assault, Conde and his squadron galloped in the last: but when the ponderous bars were once more drawn across the portals, it was felt that the combatants indeed were saved, but that the Fronde ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when those four letters, "son b." were written under the date of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... husband, the table linen had been woven for her in Ireland, the cut glass blown for her in England; the fragile china came from Sevres, and the massive silver had travelled from England to Virginia in the reign of Elizabeth. The room may have been ugly, nay, ponderous, but it had ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... exterior, the hand of decay is perceptible on every side; the rooms are ruined, the windows broken, the floors unsafe (excepting, by the way, a small portion of the building which is habitable). A ponderous broad oak staircase leads to a dismantled state-room, shorn of the principal part of its panelling, carving, and chimney-pieces.[1] Other desolate apartments retain their names as if in mockery; "the drawing-room," "the chapel," "Lady ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... this plan, he ordered the men to plant several ponderous logs in the same position as the first beam, over which other logs were thrown crosswise, and the whole ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... they thrust the ponderous cheese, And the loaves of wheat and rye; None stinteth him for lack of ease— For each a stintless welcome sees In the Baron's ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... farmer would be, and much like the other farm-houses of the region. But Diana's room, a little one it was, had one side filled with bookshelves; and on the bookshelves was a dark array of solid and ponderous volumes. A table under the front window held one or two that were apparently in present use; the rest of the room displayed the more usual fittings and surroundings of a maiden's life. Only in their essentials, however; ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... laid impenetrable brass, and tin, And precious gold and silver; on its block Placed the huge anvil, took the ponderous sledge, And held the pincers in the ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... master Duncan; I am but the ghost of poor China," and the ponderous bundle dropped first to the horse's nose and then at his forefeet, while her face fell into her trembling hands, her tears flowing down through her fingers, the first ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... the electric current that the heart itself generates," pursued Kennedy, hammering home the new and startling idea. "That current is one of the feeblest known to science, for the dynamo that generates it is no ponderous thing of copper wire and steel castings. It is just the heart itself. The heart sends over the wire its own telltale record to the machine which registers it. The thing takes us all the way back to Galvani, who was the first to observe ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... that?" Lord Groome inquired, with that ponderous affectation of playfulness which he believed to be acceptable ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... was really doing a little work, a more ponderous step broke the silence of his landing, a heavy footfall full of friendship. Certainly that was not Angel, nor even the more weighty Esther, though when the knock came it was little and ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... intrigues begun on the promenade or in the gambling-rooms were helped along by the ample opportunities of meeting, with the passions stimulated by the music and the wine. At 4 o'clock many took an afternoon nap. Then came the chief event of the day, the ponderous table d'hote. At 9 p.m. every one flocked to the Casino, and the game went merrily on until midnight. Then to bed, each and all with more or less ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton's great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... and wondering if it could possibly right itself, and if my father could escape. Was this the end of our struggles and adventures? Was this death? All these questions flashed through my mind in the fraction of a second, and a moment later I was engaged in a life and death struggle. The ponderous monolith of ice sank below the surface, and the frigid waters gurgled around me in frenzied anger. I was in a saucer, with the waters pouring in on every side. A moment more and I ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... leaving the mopping-up parties to complete their work. The Tanks bravely waddled up after them, in a vain effort to keep up, for the attacking infantry went so fast, in the first stages, that they easily outstripped those ponderous giants and left them ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... of our heroine, Zelma Burleigh, and of her Cousin Bessie. The morning before, a fragrant May morning, scores of summers ago, Roger Burleigh, a stout Northumbrian Squire, had rolled himself, in his ponderous way, into the snug family-parlor at the Grange, and addressed his worthy dame with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... intact. One should read them again and again, line by line. Ponderous eloquence, fustian bombast, and mouldy pathos combine with the display of pomp, to excite world-wide admiration. This play of well-rehearsed parts is given before an audience of generals, high officials and politicians, and the scene ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... where she was; for so many mornings she had wakened up in strange places that it took her several minutes before she could make out the geographical whereabouts of the heavy blue moreen curtains, the print of the lord-lieutenant of the county on the wall, and all the handsome ponderous mahogany furniture that stuffed up the room. As soon as full memory came into her mind, she started up; nor did she go to bed again, although she saw by her watch on the dressing-table that it was not ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Condition of the Principalities of New Netherland, or New Sweden, for the Use of the Lord's High Proprietors thereof" (for of such precious dead dust this library is full); but I found, instead, wrapped in weighty sentences and backed by the gravest and most ponderous testimony, the story of a baby, "a Sucking Child six Months old." It was like a live seed in the hand of a mummy. The story of a baby and a boy and an aged man, in "the devouring Waves of the Sea; and also among the ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... in some respects even preferable to sole-leather. The principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing. One's hepar, or, in vulgar language, liver,—a ponderous organ, weighing some three or four pounds,—goes up and down like the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements, at every step of a trotting horse. The brains also are shaken up like coppers in a money-box. Riding is good, for those that are born ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... already produced a total departure from the original intention of the Government; a scheme, probably, that was radically defective when adopted, and which contained the seeds of its own ruin. Recourse to electors has become an idle form, ponderous and awkward, and in some of its features uselessly hazardous. We are in the habit of comparing the cost of government in this country with that of other nations in the Old World. Beyond a question, the Americans enjoy great advantages in this important particular, ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... duplication of the first part and emphasizes the main tonality of G major. That Haydn was not forced to this literal repetition through any lack of fancy is shown by the skilful amplification of the first theme, in measures 177-184. The whole movement sparkles with sunshine; and those ponderous "heavy-weights" who criticise it because it is not deep or "soulful" are looking for qualities which the music does not pretend to contain. It is the work of a wholesome, cheerful-hearted man expressing through his favorite language his joy ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... full view of that grand old building—a castle of the olden times—kept, so far as possible to elegance or comfort, in its ponderous mediaeval grandeur. But Madam Art had softened all its ruder features. Plate-glass was sunk into those thick walls; circular rooms in those twin towers, commanded a splendid view of the valley, over which the castle was built. The broad stone terrace connecting the ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... my time; I rushed—but no— Fate ever mocks an ardent man; Even as I rushed, unwieldy, slow, Bore down a ponderous Pickford-Van, And under two broad wheels crushed flat My ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... obstruct the. vision the Alpha and Omega of the whole spectacle are plainly observable. The gradual mustering of the forces is near the Rockies to the westward, then the skirmish-line of fleecy cloudlets comes rolling and tumbling in advance, bringing a current of air that causes the ponderous wind-mill at the railway tank to "about face" sharply, and sets its giant arms to whirling vigorously around. Behind comes the compact, inky veil that spreads itself over the whole blue canopy above, seemingly banishing ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic from the incomprehensible unseen. On looking out of the window, I saw by some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; we, I say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train, striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went. Of course there was nothing unusual in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... convenience, of the principles of the popular faith, which were recognized as irrational. One of the most prominent men of the Scipionic circle, the Greek Polybius, candidly declares that the strange and ponderous ceremonial of Roman religion was invented solely on account of the multitude, which, as reason had no power over it, required to be ruled by signs and wonders, while people of intelligence had certainly no need of religion. Beyond doubt the Roman friends of Polybius substantially ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... his other boys succeeded in reaching their castle, and barricading the ponderous door. And then commenced the battle. The besieged were well armed, and all behaved with admirable bravery; but none more bravely than Shell's wife, who loaded the pieces as her husband and sons ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... suited to the growth of the plantain is found in the virgin land most recently taken in from the forest, having a formation of clay and decomposed vegetable substances. A large portion of organic matter is required, as well as clay or other ponderous strata, to afford the greatest production of fruit. I have known good plantains produced in the West Indies, upon land considerably exhausted by the culture of cotton, but which was enriched by the application of a quantity of the decomposed ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Brasher—I must own that his manner is a little ponderous—"is of a scientific, I may say also, and at the same time, of a judicial nature. Our object is the Pursuit of Truth and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... that rough walk in the ponderous suits across the broken terrain of the asteroid was a short one, measured by the beating of his own heart, Dane thought it much too long. There was no sign of life by the air lock of the bubble—no move on the part of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... and clear, is doubtless a question upon which some difference exists. But even here our island Church has been less vexed by controversy than have most other portions of the Christian realm. No Cummins or Colenso has arisen among its bishops. Only once has the ponderous machinery of its canon on "discipline" been put in motion against a presbyter. That instance occurred in 1877, when the Rev. H. E. Carlyon of Kaiapoi, a very earnest and devoted man, was found guilty by the Bench of Bishops of erroneous teaching and unlawful practice in regard to auricular ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... which even she, the strangest of her sex, was not exempted. Go? Not I, Olalla—O, not I, Olalla, my Olalla! A bird sang near by; and in that season, birds were rare. It bade me be of good cheer. And once more the whole countenance of nature, from the ponderous and stable mountains down to the lightest leaf and the smallest darting fly in the shadow of the groves, began to stir before me and to put on the lineaments of life and wear a face of awful joy. The sunshine struck upon the hills, strong ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the vers de societe order, albeit the lightness is of a somewhat ponderous variety. It, however, has much interest as a character sketch from the life, and is said by those who had the opportunity of knowing to be ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the upper part of his ponderous figure arrayed in a frock-coat. He did not take kindly to what he termed "those skittish sparrow-tailed affairs". Frock-coats suited him, but I am not partial to them on every one. They look well enough on a podgy, fat, or broad man, but on a skinny ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... father, royal Dane; O, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn'd, Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again! What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... floundered out through the last row of saplings and bushes, his beard embellished with a broken twig, his big face red and perspiring. He was a fine, a mighty man, ponderous of shoulder, monumental of height, stupendous of girth; there was cloth enough in the hot-looking black frock-coat he wore for the canopy of a small pavilion. Half a dozen books were under his arm, and in his hand he carried a hat which evidently belonged to "that other monsieur," ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... grudge for absconding in summer. Schwarz glared coldly at him, as if unsure to what Maurice alluded; and when the latter had recalled the details of the case to his mind, he said rudely: "You went your way, Herr Guest. Now I go mine." He commenced to turn the leaves of his ponderous note-book, and after Maurice had stood for some few minutes, listening to Beyerlein trip and stumble through Mozart, he felt that, for this day at least, he could put up with no more, and left ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to the Hemlock Farm at stated periods during the summer. He had, to be plain, sat down before Jane's heart to besiege it with the same ponderous benign calm with which he ate an egg or talked of death. There was a bronze image of Buddha in the hall at the Farm, the gaze of the god fixed with ineffable content, as it had been for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Egypt, was the leading art. The Egyptians were the first people who learned to raise buildings with vast halls supported by ponderous columns. Their wealth and skill, however, were not lavished in the erection of fine private mansions or splendid public buildings. The characteristic works of Egyptian architecture are the tombs of the kings and the temples of the gods. The picture of the great structure ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... on among the secondary planets of our solar system; and we may conjecture that probably most of the satellites are governed by the same law; especially if it be founded on such a construction of their figure as makes them more ponderous towards their ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... sympathy, understanding, and admiration between the two men, but it was still heavily veiled by self-interest. To Mr. McKenty Cowperwood was interesting because he was one of the few business men he had met who were not ponderous, pharasaical, even hypocritical when they were dealing ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the divinity professor, crossed the square rapidly. He was a middle-aged man, stout, almost ponderous, in figure; but he held himself rigidly upright, and walked fast across the square. The extreme neatness of his clothes contrasted with the prevailing shabbiness of the students and the assistant lecturers who followed him. Yet he did not seem to be a man who gave to externals more than ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... horses, impelled by some mysterious home yearning, hit the back trail in a black night of downpour, and they trudged half a day through wet grass and dripping scrub to overtake the truants. Thunderstorms drove up, shattering the hush of the land with ponderous detonations, assaulting them with fierce bursts of rain. Haps and mishaps alike they accepted with an equable spirit and the true philosophy of the trail—to take things as they come. When rain deluged them, there was always shelter to be found ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... is full strange to him who hears and feels, When wandering there in some deserted street, The booming and the jar of ponderous wheels, The trampling clash of heavy ironshod feet: Who in this Venice of the Black Sea rideth? 5 Who in this city of the stars abideth To buy or sell as those in ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... readily do," replied Leonard; "but I must first procure a light." With this, he groped his way among the close ranks of ponderous pillars, but though he proceeded with the utmost caution, he could not avoid coming in contact with the beds of some of the other patients, and disturbing them. At length he descried a glimmer of light issuing from ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bolts, on which iron shackles slid, with a padlock at the end; used to confine the legs of prisoners in a manner similar to the punishment of the stocks. The offender was condemned to irons, more or less ponderous according to the nature of the offence of which he was guilty. Several of them are yet to be seen in the Tower of London, taken in the Spanish Armada. Shakspeare mentions Hamlet thinking of a kind ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... asunder by wedges of ice; and glaciers, welded, half of ice seven times frozen, and half of gold seven times frozen, hang down from them, and fall in thunder, cleaving into deadly splinters, like the Cretan arrowheads; and into a mixed dust of snow and gold, ponderous, yet which the mountain whirlwinds are able to lift and drive in wreaths and pillars, hiding the paths with a burial cloud, fatal at once with wintry chill, and weight of golden ashes. So the wanderers in the labyrinth fall, one by one, and are buried there:—yet, over the drifted graves, those ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... and Doctor Thurlow had many gracious words to say of the boys in the army, and spent much time reading letters from those at the front who belonged to the church and Sunday school, and spoke of the "supreme sacrifice" in the light of a saving grace; but the sermon was a gentle ponderous thing that got nowhere, spiced toward its close with thrilling scenes from battle news. John Cameron as he listened did not feel that he had found God. He did not feel a bit enlightened by it. He laid it to his own ignorance and stupidity, though, and determined not to give up the ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
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