"Buttress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cloisterham boy-populace, and sleep off fumes of liquor: he having ready access to the Cathedral, as contractor for rough repairs. Be this as it may, he does know much about it, and, in the demolition of impedimental fragments of wall, buttress, and pavement, has seen strange sights. He often speaks of himself in the third person; perhaps, being a little misty as to his own identity, when he narrates; perhaps impartially adopting the Cloisterham nomenclature in reference to a character of acknowledged distinction. Thus he will say, touching ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... There was a buttress of Notre Dame, a black arch of the Pont Neuf, part of an old courtyard in the Faubourg St. Germain,—all very fresh and striking. Yet, with the recollection of his poverty in her mind, she could not help saying, "But if you copied one of those masterpieces, you ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... she pointed to a sort of flying buttress which sprung sideways, with a wide span, across the angle the tower made with the hall, from an embrasure of the battlement of the hall to the outer corner of the tower, itself more solidly buttressed. I think it must have been made to resist the ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... there as witnesses of a civilization and architecture certainly more primitive than the civilization and architecture of Roman, Saxon, or Norman settlers. We need not look beyond. How long that granite buttress of England has stood there, defying the fury of the Atlantic, the geologist alone, who is not awed by ages, would dare to tell us. But the historian is satisfied with antiquities of a more humble and homely character; ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... from Holborn, near Lincoln's Inn, to the river-side, south of Ludgate Hill. Yet so conservative is even Time in England, that a recent correspondent of Notes and Queries points out a piece of mediaeval walling and the fragment of a buttress, still standing, at the foot of the Times Office, in Printing House Square, which seem to have formed part of the stronghold of the Mountfiquets. This interesting relic is on the left hand of Queen Victoria Street, going up from the bridge, just where ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of centralization was going on, of which they but dimly, stupidly, grasped the purport. That competition which they had so long shouted for as the only sensible, true and moral system, and which they had sought to buttress by enacting law after law, was being ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Malabar coast between 30 and 40 m. from the sea, rising to nearly 5000 ft., and exhibiting fine mountain and forest scenery, and the former skirting the E. of the Deccan, of which tableland it here forms the buttress, and has a much lower mean level; the two ranges converge into one a short ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... another turn of the wheel. Go to that man and tell him the Duc de La Rochefoucauld says he has done splendidly, but that he must not bear so hard on Gaston. Mind that you watch his face closely. I will stay for you yonder in the shadow of the buttress." ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... the scale in favor of law and order; and by and by the haughty barons themselves, who had scrambled for the worldly spoil of the church, found that the spiritual influence had been concentrated in hands as haughty as their own, and connected with no feelings likely to buttress their order any more than the Crown—a new and sterner monkery, under a different name, and essentially plebeian. Presently the Scotch were on the verge of republicanism, in state as well as kirk, and I ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... portcullis, chevaux de frise[Fr]; abatis, abattis[obs3], abbatis[obs3]; vallum[obs3], circumvallation[obs3], battlement, rampart, scarp; escarp[obs3], counter-scarp; glacis, casemate[obs3]; vallation[obs3], vanfos[obs3]. buttress, abutment; shore &c. (support) 215. breastwork, banquette, curtain, mantlet[obs3], bastion, redan[obs3], ravelin[obs3]; vauntmure[obs3]; advance work, horn work, outwork; barbacan[obs3], barbican; redoubt; fort-elage[Fr], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a narrow, thread-like road, which has barely room to draw itself along between the rocky bank of the River Inn, and the base of a frowning buttress of the Solstein, which towers many hundred feet perpendicularly above you. You throw your head far back and look up; and there you have a vision of a plumed hunter, lofty and chivalrous in his bearing, who is bounding heedlessly on after a chamois ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... pinnet high, Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair; So still they blaze when Fate is nigh The lordly line of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... tribe living in the vicinity of Compostela. On one occasion I had made arrangements to meet a Maggugan warrior chief at an appointed trysting place in the forest. Upon arriving at the spot, one of my companions beat the buttress of a tree as a signal that we had arrived, but it was more than an hour before our Maggugan friends made their appearance. Upon being questioned as to the delay, they informed us that they had circled around at a considerable distance, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... most daring thinkers of the world have felt this pitiful longing to be at one with those who love them, at whatever cost, before the last farewell. And the simpler Christian faith has still to create around it those venerable associations and habits which buttress individual feebleness and diminish ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... infinitely finer than our own, is more remarkable for its verdure, and for a general appearance of civilisation, than for its natural beauties. The chalky cliffs may seem bold and noble to the American, though compared to the granite piles that buttress the Mediterranean they are but mole-hills; and the travelled eye seeks beauties instead, in the retiring vales, the leafy hedges, and the clustering towns that dot the teeming island. Neither is Portsmouth a very favourable specimen of a British port, considered solely in reference ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... before the door, burnished pigeons cooed, and trod their stately minuet, their iridescent plumage showing every opaline splendor as the sunlight smote them; and on a buttress of the clock tower, a lonely hedge-sparrow poured his heart out in that peculiarly pathetic threnody which no other feathered throat contributes to the varied volume of bird lays. Poised on the point of an iron spike in the line that bristled ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... offer upon this question? He rather offered a defence of it; he did not go into any argument, but still, at the same time, he rather defied anybody to make an assault upon it; he believed that it would not succeed, and that it was very wrong; but what does he really propose? Only this: to add another buttress in the shape of another bribe. He says that he will make an offer to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and people of Ireland— some say that the people do not want it, and that the hierarchy do want it, but I say nothing about that, because I hope the Catholic ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... large ancient building was found standing upon the wall or buttress. At this place the wall appears to be about seventy-nine feet wide, or thick. The site of this building, upon an elevation, together with its solid structure, leave no doubt that it was the grandest building in Troy; nay, that it must have been the Palace of Priam. This ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry: it admits of rhetoric, which goes into argument and explanation, but it presents no immediate or distinct images to the mind, 'no jutting frieze, buttress, or coigne of vantage' for poetry 'to make its pendant bed and procreant cradle in'. The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Maco, who had been some way ahead, returned; and having spoken a few words to Uncle Paul, he led us to the side of the stream, where we found the buttress roots, as I have before described, of a large tree projecting into the water. We all climbed on it; and Arthur and I assisted Marian to a spot where she could rest with comparative comfort. We sat down by her side, but prudence prevented us from speaking ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... is the choir, with a clerestory of four lofty Perpendicular windows of four lights each, with a bold flying buttress between the windows. ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... such as he on the bier. Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!"—And then, the glad 55 chaunt Of the marriage—first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.—And then, the great march Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch Naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends?—Then, the chorus intoned As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. 60 But I stopped here; for here in ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... times presents a dreary picture. At a period when the intellectual activity of Europe is at its height, she still groans under the unrestricted despotism of an autocrat. Here the effects of progress that obtain elsewhere seem inverted. Such advance as is made in civilization and knowledge is used to buttress imperial tyranny and the knout is wielded more cruelly than ever before. We behold liberal institutions overthrown and a whole people held in bondage worse than slavery. We hear of families torn asunder, of innocent men condemned to life-long exile in Siberia, simply because they have ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... is a very fine house you've got over you;" throwing his eye again towards a wooden buttress which supported one of ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... against the walls; Now shake the ramparts, now a buttress falls, But, still no breach—"Once more one mighty swing "Of all your beams, together thundering!" There—the wall shakes—the shouting troops exult, "Quick, quick discharge your weightiest catapult "Right on that spot and NEKSHEB is our own!" 'Tis done—the battlements come crashing down, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Notre Dame they waited awhile. Here there were still people about, for it was a rendezvous both for roistering young gallants, thieves, and others starting on midnight adventures. After walking backwards and forwards two or three times Guy said, "You had best stand here in the shadow of this buttress while I go and place myself beneath that hanging lamp; seeing that we are together, and he, looking perhaps only for one, may not ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... lay lost, is unmasked by the vapors that gather behind it and reveal its low-lying outlines. Every little dimple of the hills has its chalice of mountain wine. The mist stretches above the ridge, a long, low, level causeway, solid as the mountains themselves, which buttress its farther side, a via triumpha, meet highway for the returning chariot of an emperor. It rears itself from the valleys, a dragon rampant and with horrid jaws. It flings itself with smothering caresses about the burly mountains, and stifles them in its close embrace. It trails along the hills, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... pile, where the moon dimly flashes O'er gray roof, tall window, sloped buttress, and base, O'erarches the ashes, the now silent ashes, Of the noblest, the bravest, of Scotia's race. How hallow'd yon spot where a hero is lying, Embalm'd in the holiness worship bedews, The lamb watching over the sleep of the lion, Religion ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... several times in the Berlin Papyrus, No. ii. For instance, the peasant who is the hero of the story, says of the lord Miruitensi, that he is "the rudder of heaven, the guide of the earth, the balance which carries the offerings, the buttress of tottering walls, the support of that which falls, the great master who takes whoever is without a master to lavish on him the goods of his house, a jug of beer and three loaves" ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... working face first, a broad surface is secured to which the others may be made true. By planing the ends before the width is planed, the danger of splitting off fragments can be avoided by chiseling the corner of the unfinished edges, C, a, and D, b, Fig. 103, into a buttress. By planing the ends and the width before the thickness is planed, a dressed face is secured all around for gaging the thickness. In following this order all measurements and markings are made on ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... take away from the height looking upward. But when these are left beneath, the perpendicular Walls of granite, rising sheer and straight up to the bold sky-line, and the rugged, massive strength of the buttress-like cliffs, begin to gain something of their true value to the stranger's eye. The most beautiful part of the road, however, to my taste, is the descent, when the shining expanse of Camp's Bay lies shimmering in the warm afternoon haze with a thousand lights ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... pushed on past many hiding-places well known to him, till the two reached the point where the mountain face sweeps backward in the curve of which the Downfall makes the centre. At the outward edge of the curve a great buttress of ragged and jutting rocks descends perpendicularly towards the valley, like a ruined staircase with displaced and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... obstacles occur, although the road is always high up on the hill-sides. I crossed a miserable suspension bridge of two spans. The southern span is about thirty feet, the northern span eighty feet; the center is supported by a buttress of splendid blocks of squared stone, resting on the rock in the bed of the river, one side being considerably worn away by the action of the water. The longer span was hung very slack, the woodwork forming the pathway ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... gravel (his own colouring to a shade) appealed to an eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... hollows, grotesque projections, and unimaginable shapes. Here, also, the knives of passers-by had carved numerous autographs, marring the majestic cliff with their ludicrous incongruity. Are we not all sinners in this way? "John Jones," cut into a fantastic buttress which would fittingly adorn a wizard's temple, may be a poor exhibit of human vanity; but, after all, the real John Jones is more imperishable than the rock, which seems scaling, anyway, from the top, and may, by and by, carry the inscriptions with it. It was hard ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... sahib doubtless remembers, between that coffee shop and the next house is a stone buttress jutting out into the street, forming on its side farthest from the coffee-shop a dark corner, for whose filth and stink the street cleaners ought to be punished. Therein I lurked, while those who pursued ran past me up the street, I counting them; ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... commanded the army to be drawn out before the gates. No one appeared on the walls; the very portals, though locked and barred, seemed unguarded; above, the many domes and glittering crescents pierced heaven; while the old walls, survivors of ages, with ivy-crowned tower and weed-tangled buttress, stood as rocks in an uninhabited waste. From within the city neither shout nor cry, nor aught except the casual howling of a dog, broke the noon-day stillness. Even our soldiers were awed to silence; the music paused; the clang of arms was hushed. Each man asked his fellow in whispers, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from the mountain summit and by half-past one all ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of new ideas in regard to caste is furnished by the Hindu revivalists who, under the leading of Mrs. Annie Besant and the Theosophists, have established the Hindu College, Benares, as a buttress of Hinduism. From the Text-book of Hindu Religion prepared for the College, we learn that these representatives and champions of orthodoxy defend caste only to the extent of the ancient fourfold division of society into brahmans, rulers, merchants ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coigne of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle: Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, The air is delicate. Macbeth, Act ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... beneath them in the garden by a walk shaded with chestnut trees was filled in the yard by a row of outbuildings. An old rust-devoured iron gate in the garden wall balanced the yard gateway, a huge, double-leaved carriage entrance with a buttress on either side, and a mighty shell on the top. The same shell was repeated over ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... fissure in the cliff, contrived in a projecting wall and forming a sort of observatory. In front of them, at a distance of fifty yards, the impressive mass of the Needle loomed from the waves. On the right, quite close, was the arched buttress of the Porte d'Aval and, on the left, very far away, closing the graceful curve of a large inlet, another rocky gateway, more imposing still, was cut out of the cliff; the Manneporte,[10] which was so wide and tall that ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... Hindu and of Aryan scoring deep-graven. For instance, the Hawaiian, word pali, cliff or precipice, is the very word that Young-husband—following, no doubt, the native speech of the region, the Pamirs—applies to the mountain-walls that buttress off Tibet and the central plateaus of Asia from northern India. Again the Hawaiian word mele, which we have used so often in these chapters as to make it seem almost like a household word, corresponds in form, in sound, and in meaning ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... a religious people in this birth country of the Flamma race: the strong poetic reverence of their forefathers, which had symbolised itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel or buttress in their streets, and the fashion of every spire on which a weather-vane could gleam against the sun, was still in their blood; the poetry had departed, but the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... back to the house in a happy silence; but Maud slipped out again, and went to the little churchyard. There behind the chancel, in a corner of the buttress, was a little mound. Maud laid a single white flower upon it. "No," she said softly, as if speaking in the ear of a child, "no, my darling, I am not making any mistake. I don't think of you as sleeping here, though I love the place where the little limbs are laid. You are ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at Muna, on the way back to Meccah, the ceremony of stoning the Shaytan el Kabir, or Great Devil, who is represented by a dwarf buttress placed against a rough wall of stones. The buttress was surrounded by a swarm of pilgrims, mounted and on foot, eager to get as near to the Great Devil as possible. I found myself under the stomach of a fallen dromedary, and had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... said of the qualities which Lincoln exhibited in the White House: "Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind; it is not aggressive so much as passive; and among passive things, it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that, to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end.... Slow and careful in coming to resolutions, willing to talk with every person who has anything ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... vice-president of Hooligan Gulch and Red Water, secretary of Horse's Neck, Holy Jo, Gargoyle Extension, Cowhide Number Five, Consolidated Bimetallic, Nevada Mastodon, Leaping Frog, Orelady Mine, Why Marry and Sol's Cliff Buttress, ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... the shore, a plot of ground Clips a ruin'd chapel round, Buttress'd with a grassy mound; Where Day and Night and Day go by, And bring no ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... pointed out as the shortest and most convenient course to their destination. Soon the east end of the priory chapel was visible, basking in the broad light of the harvest moon, then riding up full and unclouded towards her zenith. Buttress and oriel were weltering in her beam, and the feathery pinnacles sprang out sharp and clear into the blue sky. The shadows were thrown back in masses deep and unbroken, more huge in proportion to the unknown depths through which the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... in boots (gum, high) and a goat's skin, flung himself on the east wing, and became an animated buttress. Albert Edward climbed aloft and sat on the tin lid, which was opening and shutting at every pore. Mactavish put his shoulder to the south wall to keep it from working round to the north. I clung to the pantry, which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... rocks and the lichen shone in rings of soft and varied color. Blue shadows filled the dale, which, from the side of the Buttress, looked profoundly deep. A row of young men and women followed a ledge that crossed the face of the steep crag; Mortimer Hyslop leading, a girl and Vernon a few yards behind, Lister ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... into the cloister. It is a little library or charter-house. The arrangement is almost too clever for gravity, as is the case with more than one arrangement in the Merveille. From the outside one can see that at this corner the architect had to provide a heavy buttress against a double strain, and he built up from the rock below a square corner tower as support, into which he worked a spiral staircase leading from the cellar up to the cloisters. Just above the level of the great hall he managed ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... water, the eyes of both peered intently forward, in an endeavour to pierce the obscurity, and, if possible, discover some low limb of a tree, or projecting buttress, on which they might find a foothold. They had good hope of success, for they had seen many such since starting from the shore. Had rest been necessary, they might have obtained it more than once by grasping a branch above, or clinging ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... with that peculiar gravity age brings to equine hoofs, about a mile, when the buttress of a thick wall came into view abutting on the lane, and perched thereon what at first I deemed a coloured figment of the mist that festooned the branches and clung along the turf. But when I drew near I saw it was indeed a child, pink and gold and palest blue. And she raised changeling ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... flag-stones or pavement in the interior of this large building, have long ago been removed. Besides the sepulchral monuments and inscriptions already mentioned we shall note the epitaphs of Erwin of Steinbach, of Husa his wife, and of his son John, at the lower part of the buttress in the little yard behind Saint John's chapel[1]; also the inscription to the memory of Conrad Guertler, who bequeathed to the chapter of the Cathedral his house, a large building in the rue du Dome; this inscription is opposite that of Geiler of Kaysersberg; ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... collectively a tremendous bump. "Hey, look out! Out of the way!" cries a man, by way of apology, who is being assisted by several others to push a cart towards the wagons. The work is hard, for the ground slopes up, and so soon as they cease to buttress themselves against the cart and adhere to the wheels, it slips back. The sullen men crush themselves against it in the depth of the gloom, grinding their teeth and growling, as though they fell upon ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... smooth as the flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as a Greek statue. It curves out toward the base as if planted there to resist the pressure of worlds—probably the most majestic single granite column or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is over three thousand feet above you. Across the valley, nearly opposite, rise the Cathedral Rocks to nearly the same height, while farther along, beyond El Capitan, the Three Brothers ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... he fancied that he might, perhaps, find her there. When, at the turn of the gallery which opens on the roof of the side aisles, he perceived the tiny cell with its little window and its little door crouching beneath a great flying buttress like a bird's nest under a branch, the poor man's heart failed him, and he leaned against a pillar to keep from falling. He imagined that she might have returned thither, that some good genius had, no doubt, brought her back, that this chamber was too tranquil, too safe, too charming for her ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... and slowly rose, creeping close to the wooden buttress of the bridge and staying well in its shadow. The footsteps grew plainer, and now, into the well-lighted road, a figure swung with long, wavering strides. It was not tall, but very spare, and was crowned with a bullet head set between high shoulders. But the face, as it flashed into and out ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... need not debase himself, nor do violence to his convictions, in order to achieve success therein, since he can live and thrive in another (if you choose, humbler) vocation, if driven from that of his choice. This buttress to integrity, this assurance of self-respect, is to be found in a universal training to efficiency ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to laws which, in the remotest degree, could be used or manipulated to swell profits or to buttress property, Astor and his class were untiring and vociferous in demanding their strict enforcement. Successfully ignoring or circumventing laws objectionable to them, they, at the same time, insisted upon the passage ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... echoed in the cave under the castle rock. It seemed, as we stood there and looked up, that not a foot further could we go. The great angry cliff beetled over our heads, and on its very edge, far above, we might discern against the gloomy sky the dim corner of a buttress. ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... devil, clawed with one hand at the sticky mass that masked him as he ran blind, wild with pain. He tripped, clutched, and lost his hold, slid on a plane of icy lava, smooth as glass, struck a buttress that sent him off at a tangent down the face of the cliff, bounding from impact with an outthrust elbow of the rock, whirling into space, into the icy turmoil of the waves, flooding ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... beauty, softened in the light of skies, to which the moon, just risen, added deeper and fuller radiance. The ladies were in evening dress, but Kenelm could not distinguish their faces hidden behind the minstrel. He moved softly across the street, and took his stand behind a buttress in the low wall of the garden, from which he could have full view of the balcony, unseen himself. In this watch he had no other object than that of a vague pleasure. The whole grouping had in it a kind of scenic romance, and he stopped as one stops ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... watch the other that neither noted the four men who approached stealthily from rock to rock and finally crouched behind an irregular buttress of rock only a short pistol shot away. Their vantage point did not permit any view of the man who had been knocked down by the galloping horse nor of the contestants themselves, but the exchange of shots could be ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... miles along the shore the line had to be protected against the assault of the high tides that periodically sweep Cardigan Bay, and it was soon only too evident that ordinary ramparts were no sure buttress against Atlantic rollers. More than once the permanent way was washed by the waves and engineer and contractor, viewing the dismal wreckage, must have felt that noble references to the moral of Canute, however pungent, were not ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... road where the car boomed ever on like some relentless monster rushing from its lair. But the Cheddar gorge, though majestic and awe-inspiring, is not of great extent. Soon the valley widened, the road took longer sweeps to round each frowning buttress, and at last emerged, with a quality of inanimate breathlessness, on to the bleak and desolate tableland ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... wished two things, both of which his heritors flatly refused: (a) a new manse, and (b) a site with a wide prospect. Finding them intractable, he professed humility, and craved merely a species of scaffolding to buttress up one of the walls of the old manse. The heritors marvelled a little at the strange request, but, glad of being saved from the cost of a new building, authorised the buying of some sturdy joists to prop up ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... transept have been traced. In 1872, when the south end of the present transept was underpinned, parts of the foundations of its predecessor's east and south walls were uncovered, and the footings of the clasping pilaster buttress of its south-west angle exposed. These showed that the transept occupied the position which we have assigned to it, and that its entire length was 120 feet, while it was only 14 feet wide. This width being so small, it is probable that the arcading of the nave was continued right up to the choir ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... things cannot hold the ground on which they have been placed. They have to be given up by force at last, when they ought to have been given up long before. And when given up they too often tear away with them part of the strength of that faith of which they had previously been not only the buttress outside but a part of the living framework. It is distinctly the fault of religious, not of scientific men, that there was once a great contest between the Bible and Astronomy, that there has since been a great contest between the Bible and ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... ready for building up the weak place—well enough known to the goblins. Although there was not room for more than two to be actually building at once, they managed, by setting all the rest to work in preparing the cement and passing the stones, to finish in the course of the day a huge buttress filling the whole gang, and supported everywhere by the live rock. Before the hour when they usually dropped work, they were satisfied ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town. Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other places. These two had leaped out from ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... for the rest of our watery journey we were conscious only of that lighting. Behind the Mont, lay a vast sea of saffron. But it was in the sky; against it the great rock was as black as if the night were upon it. Here and there, through the curve of a flying buttress, or the apertures of a pierced parapet, gay bits of this yellow world were caught and framed. The sea lay beneath like a quiet carpet; and over this carpet ships and sloops swam with easy gliding motion, with ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... decoration has been made. It seems a shapeless pile of towers and machicolated and battlemented curtains, falling into almost complete ruin. But on passing through the single entrance, one finds oneself in a well-proportioned church of nave and side aisles, a south chapel, and an apse. Each buttress of the apse is battlemented outside and forms a turret, and two strong towers are adapted internally to serve as ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... troop of cavalry was pushing westward across the desert. The young May moon was sinking to rest, its pure pallid light shining faintly in contrast with the ruddy glow of some distant beacon in the mountains beneath. Ever since nightfall the rock buttress at the pass had been reflecting the lurid glare of the leaping flames as, time and again, unseen but busy hands heaped on fresh fuel and sent the sparks whirling in fiery eddies to the sky. Languid and depressed ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... the buttress, built against the tower in the north, can be seen some panels of Perpendicular date. These have suggested the idea that it was in contemplation to rebuild what had fallen ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... gives exit to the city on the northern side. It had been sunny since morning, and the snow had melted from the roads, but the hills across the plain were still white and great drifts were piled against the ramparts, forming a natural buttress from the summit of the steep river bank almost to the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... the tower, and its own height above the eye. The first stage is panelled so as not to present too great a contrast to the octagon, and the next is also panelled and has narrow canopied slits on alternate sides, with four thin buttress-like projections on each face. These provide the slight entasis to the outline which is found in so many spires, as it is in classic columns, and is designed to correct the appearance of hollowness which would occur in so long a straight line. The upper two-thirds of the spire has triple ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... plain, without string course or buttress to mitigate its severity. Half-way up on the west side is a small window with a battlemented balcony in front projecting out on three great corbels; higher up are plain belfry windows. At the top, square balconies or bartizans project diagonally from the corners; the ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... as he obviously could not cut himself off from his supplies, leaving a hostile province between himself and his kingdom. Nevertheless he could not stir, he said, without the consent and active support of the States, on whom he relied as his principal buttress ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... black sinuous line which denotes the fringe of trees bordering the Indus. Such is the scene which Solomon is said to have invited his Indian bride to gaze upon for the last time, as they rested on the crags of the southern buttress of the Takht—where his shrine exists to this day. To that shrine thousands of pilgrims, Mahommedans and Hindus alike, resort on their yearly pilgrimages, in spite of its dangerous approach. All this country, so far, is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle; Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... unnecessary to say that I returned by the way I had come. I had had enough of the road to Argeles. My one idea was to rejoin Adele and Berry and to sit down in the car. Mentally and physically I was weary to death. I craved to set my back against the buttress of company in this misfortune, and I was mad to sit down. Compared with standing any longer upon my feet, the contingency of dislocation ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the open no sign remained of the dome-roofed settlement of the Sleepers. The huts had served to buttress the snow for the blizzard. They were buried deep under the great white ridges which the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... elder name—were once a refuge for the Picts; and Caerketton—probably Caer-etin, the giant's strong-hold—is one of them. Darkly its cliffs frown down upon you, while all else is flashing white in the winter sunlight. For once, in this last buttress thrown out into the plain of Lothian towards the royal city, the outer folds of the Pentlands loses its boldly-rounded curves, and drops an almost sheer descent of black rock to the little glen below. In a wrinkle of the foothills Swanston farm and hamlet ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... talk, but with, a speed winged by fear got to the school, sprang on the buttress beneath the window, effected their entrance, and vanished after replacing the bar—Eric to his study, and ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... inscription upon an old headstone, for I thought everybody was gone; when I heard a door open, and shut again before I could turn. I saw at once that it must have been a little door in the tower, almost concealed from where I stood by a deep buttress. I had never seen the door open, and I had never inquired anything about it, supposing it led merely into ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Passeggiata Aretusa, a promenade that runs under shady trees between the Great Harbour and the cliff on which the city is built. It leads south to a garden, and further progress appears to be blocked by a buttress of the cliff; but the buttress is pierced by a tunnel, through which a path leads to another garden lying in an enclosure protected from the harbour by a wall which encircles it; the wall slopes down and on the top of it runs ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, buttress, Nor coin of vantage, but this bird hath made His pendent bed, and procreant cradle: where they Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... part of the bluff that hemmed in the valley. It was a sort of promontory, however, that jutted out from the general line, so as to be a conspicuous object from the plain below. Its brow was of equal height with the rest of the precipice, of which it was a part—a sort of buttress—and the grassy turf that appeared along its edge was but the continuation of the upper plateau. Its front to the valley was vertical, without terrace or ledge, although horizontal seams traversing its face showed a stratification of ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... in architecture, spent whole days in shaping and reshaping a phrase, like some sublime mason who—by a prodigy—had built a cathedral single-handed and whose heart bled upon discovering a neglected carving in the shadow of some buttress and expended infinite pains to perfect it, although it was almost invisible amidst the vastness and the beauty of ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... top of a large one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite columnar entourage of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of Pisa. The result of this arrangement is an aerial, yet massive beauty, without parallel in the architecture of the world. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... the Cistercians had settled in Vale Leston, and of every defacement that the alternate neglect and good-will of the Underwoods could perpetrate. The grand tower at the west end was, however, past their power to spoil, and they had not done much damage to the exterior, except in a window or buttress here and there. But within! The brothers, used to the heavy correctness of the St. Oswald's restoration, stood aghast when Abednego admitted them by the door of excommunication, straight into the chancel, magnificently deep, but with the meanest of rails, a reredos where Moses ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the roofs filled with flowers, warbling, and sunlight, with the same pleasure; but to-day it stops at the end of a buttress which separates our house from ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... overcome her emotion, as to give relief to his own. Though now well on the wrong side of sixty, John Knott was hale and vigorous as ever. His rough-hewn countenance bore even closer resemblance, perhaps, to that of some stone gargoyle carved on cathedral buttress or spout. But his hand was no less skilful, his tongue no less ready in denunciation of all he reckoned humbug, his heart no less deeply touched, for all his superficial irascibility, by the pains, and sins, and grinding miseries, of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... word; but his wall-eyes flashed white firelight and his long jaws snapped like a spring trap as Jan rebounded from the bump against his buttress of a shoulder. When those same steel jaws parted again, as they did a moment later, an appreciable piece of Jan's left ear fell from them to the ground. Jan let out a cry, an exclamation of mingled anger, pain, bewilderment, and wrath. He turned, leaning forward, as ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... Krames), a number of little booths, or shops, after the fashion of cobblers' stalls, are plastered, as it were, against the Gothic projections and abutments, so that it seemed as if the traders had occupied with nests, bearing the same proportion to the building, every buttress and coign of vantage, as the martlett did in Macbeth's Castle. Of later years these booths have degenerated into mere toy-shops, where the little loiterers chiefly interested in such wares are tempted to linger, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... stand the climate. They died like flies. Of one detachment of 250, half were dead in three months, 100 of the others were invalided, and only 25 remained fit for duty. From a further body of 150 men sent as a reinforcement, half were reported on the sick list the day after their arrival. The main buttress of the Khedive's authority in this region was therefore hollow and erected on an insecure foundation. The Egyptian soldiers possessed firearms, and the natives, in their ignorance that they could not shoot straight, were afraid ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Fred, rising slowly from where he had lounged upon the mossy, buttress-like roots. "Who came and helped himself to my ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... from echo to echo. It was not loud but immensely prevalent. Those wayfarers who had fled came back to the brink of the hill and those who had stood their ground walked out into the grass to look back. Around the curve of a buttress of rock that stood out at the line of the road, the head of a column of Roman cavalry appeared. The superb color-bearer bore on his hip the staff supporting the ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face showed a sunburn whitening. It had passed ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... unbroken the ascent from this, the simplest architecture, to the loftiest. The placing of the timbers in a ship's stem, and the laying of the stones in a bridge buttress, are similar in art to the construction of the ploughshare, differing in no essential point, either in that they deal with other materials, or because, of the three things produced, one has to divide earth by advancing through it, another to divide water by advancing ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... him with a little spring, and turned to the stone buttress against which he had found her. He followed her closely, half afraid of losing her again, but she did not ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... [Footnote 167: Buttress roots are not peculiar to any one species, but common to most of the large trees in the crowded forest, where the lateral growth of the roots is made difficult by the multitude of rivals. The Paxiuba, or big-bellied palm, is ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... support of the Maharaja of the Punjaub, should attempt the recovery of his throne without any stiffening of British bayonets at his back. Then it was urged, and the representation was indeed accepted, that the Shah would need the buttress afforded by English troops, and that a couple of regiments only would suffice to afford this prestige. But Sir Harry Fane, the Commander-in-Chief, judiciously interposed his veto on the despatch of a handful of British soldiers ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... a pair of thick moccasins, with soles of parfleche; but here I put on a light thin pair, which I had brought for the purpose, as now the use of our toes became necessary to a further advance. I availed myself of a sort of comb of the mountain, which stood against the wall like a buttress, and which the wind and the solar radiation, joined to the steepness of the smooth rock, had kept almost entirely free from snow. Up this I made my way rapidly. Our cautious method of advancing in the outset had spared my strength; and, with the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... "comet," Count John had nevertheless accepted the office of Governor of Gelderland, to which he had been elected by the estates of that province on the 11th of March. That important bulwark of Holland, Zealand, and Utrecht on the one side, and of Groningen and Friesland on the other—the main buttress, in short, of the nascent republic, was now in hands which would ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Athena Nike, tho outside the Propylaea—thrust out as it were on a sort of great buttress high on the right—must still be called a part, and a very striking part, of the Acropolis. It is only of late years that it has been cleared of rubbish and modern stone-work, thus destroying, no doubt, some precious traces of Turkish occupation which the fastidious historian ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... name of the mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as these are upon the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of CAPE YORK. A little to the eastward of Cape Fellfoot, we observed six stripes of snow near the top of the cliff, being very conspicuous at a great distance, when viewed from the southward. These stripes, which are formed by the drift of snow between the buttress-like projections before described, and which remained equally conspicuous on our return the following year, have probably at all times much the same appearance, at least about this season of the year, and may, on this account, perhaps, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... them revolt against Farnese once he has been created their duke and when thus the State shall have been alienated from the Holy See, and then you may count upon the Emperor to step in as your liberator and to buttress ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... mentioned in this provision was an official appointed by the Bakufu for that special purpose. The whole arrangement as to communication with the Throne constituted a powerful buttress of Bakufu influence. Generally, the latter could contrive, as has been shown above, to control the appointment and continuance in office of a regent or a minister, while as for the administrators (bugyo), they were nominees of Yedo. It thus resulted ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... throughout the neighbourhood were ruthlessly destroyed. However, after a short period of comparative peace, far worse had yet to come. Under James I. and during the early part of the reign of Charles I., little happened to the building beyond the institution of Curle's passage through the buttress at the southern end of the cathedral, with its quaint inscription on the western wall. The Great Rebellion, as was only to be expected, brought Winchester into the utmost peril. The important situation of the town in the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... might have drifted over to that side, and be there rubbing shoulders with one another. So I went round, and was glad to get out of the cold shade into the sun on the south. But here was a surprise; for when I came round a great buttress which juts out from the wall, what should I see but two men, and these two were Ratsey and Elzevir Block. I came upon them unawares, and, lo and behold, there was Master Ratsey lying also on the ground with his ear to the wall, while Elzevir sat back against the inside ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... Berlin and Constantinople: in 1899 a German company obtained a concession for the Bagdad railway from Konieh to the head of the Persian Gulf. In a word, Germany began to stand in the way of the Russian traditions of ousting the Turk and ruling in Constantinople: she began to buttress the Turk, to train his army, to exploit his country, and to seek to oust Russia generally ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... Indian agreed, and dropped back to his respectful position in his master's rear. As they topped the ridge that formed the northern buttress of the San Gregorio, Pablo rode to the left and started down the hill through a draw covered with a thick growth of laurel, purple lilac, a few madone trees and an occasional oak. He knew that a big, five-point buck had its ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne |
